But Russians Question The Bill
"Everything is fine, even excellent, I would say." Those words
from a spokeswoman at Russian Mission Control, after an unmanned
Progress M-48 cargo vessel docked this morning with the
International Space Station. "The Progress cargo rocket docked with
the station five minutes ahead of schedule, at 7:40 Moscow time
(3:40 a.m. GMT), but there is nothing extraordinary in this," said
the spokeswoman with typical Russian aplomb.
But even if the Progress docking was as routine as a haircut
(see photo, right), there are still grumblings in Moscow about
bearing the brunt of costs associated with the ISS project while
American shuttles are still grounded. As ANN reported Friday, (ANN:
"Russia Fires Off A Progress
Rocket"), Russian space officials are talking with the
Bush and Putin administrations about how to defuse the cash crunch
made all the worse by Russia's stumbling economy.
Returning the space shuttles to flight by March, as NASA wants
to do, may be unrealistic. The Russian cash-crunch may continue
and, according to officials at the space agency in Moscow, could
even jeopardize hopes that the station will continue to be
perpetually manned. A lot of what happens to the station hinges on
how readily and completely NASA can fix its culture clash.
Huge Changes On The Way?
Management gurus and
psychologists are making the talk show circuit these days, telling
anyone who will listen (or pay) that NASA's safety culture needs a
big kick in the pants. They suggest, on top of the 29
recommendations already put forth by the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board (CAIB), that NASA blow out top management,
bring back the people who ran the Apollo program, and perhaps even
change the space agency's name.
"It's a bad enough problem that you start to wonder if they
almost don't need to have their name changed, like WorldCom and
MCI," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean for executive
programs at the Yale School of Management, in an interview with the
Associated Press.
Deborah Lipman Slobodnik, co-founder and managing partner of
Options for Change in Reading (MA) thinks NASA Administrator Sean
O'Keefe is part of the problem. She tells AP she would immediately
replace him and at least half his lieutenants with people "who
really get it and who really also are modeling by
example."
He's not part of a new moving-forward vision of safety and how
things are going to operate, he's really looking at cost cutting,
and cost cutting was part of the old regime," Slobodnik said. "Can
people change 180 degrees? Sure, I guess I believe that, but I
think it's going way against any sort of odds."
Other "experts" wouldn't go so far as to boot O'Keefe, who came
to NASA from the Office of Management and Budget two years ago with
a mandate to "rein in" space station spending.
Boston College
sociologist Diane Vaughan, who wrote the 1996 book The
Challenger Launch Decision, believes ousting O'Keefe
at this point would be the wrong thing to do. "If you replace the
leader, it gives the idea that you change the cast of characters,
you've fixed the system, and it obscures all the problems in the
system and you don't really want to go there this time," Vaughan
said. "You really want the system to be fixed."
Christina Williams, managing director of RHR International's
Dallas office, said NASA's failures in both the Challenger
and Columbia disasters involved a series of uninformed
decisions and miscommunication, not just technical breakdowns.
"It's saying, at what level is, quote, good enough and what does
good look like," said Williams, who once taught NASA executives on
leadership development.