Prescription for disaster.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

LOST IN SPACE

"Here is policy made tangible," MalcolmMcConnell writes on viewing the wreckage of the space shuttle Challenger, laid out on the floor of a giant hangar at Cape Canaveral. "Actually touching the cool, twisted shards of aluminum, the skeins of shredded computer cable, the chalky surface of Challenger's shattered tiles, is a powerfully evocative experience. Here among the debris one is forced to recognize that political compromise, bureaucratic deception, and corporate duplicity all have consequences."

So too does journalistic complaisance. In mostrespects the "power of the press" is exaggerated. But as regards NASA it is quite real. The press, especially television, is a primary constituent of the space program--a player whose wishes and whims are taken into account and one which, like any other vested interest group, has an incentive to refuse to see what is going wrong under its nose.

How else can it be that in this age of over-staffednews rooms, two uncelebrated writers have come up with page after page of material missed by the networks and major newspapers about the most conspicuous story of the year? That's what McConnell, with Challenger: A Major Malfunction, and Joseph Trento, with Prescription for Disaster, have accomplished. These two fascinating books are significant not only for what they disclose but for what those disclosures demonstrate--how poorly the big-deal media have covered NASA's institutional decline. The Challenger tragedy didn't come out of nowhere--there were repeated danger signs clear to any reporter willing to look beneath the PR gloss.

Screams of agony

Here's a shuttle scorecard. The shuttle has beenturned on 27 times. Those 27 ignitions resulted in 24 completed missions, two aborts on the pad, and one destruction. Both ground aborts came within a few seconds of solid-rocket booster (SRB) ignition, which, had it occurred, would also have destroyed the shuttles: one ground abort set fire to the pad. There has been one main engine failure in flight; on that occasion only a brilliant bit of quick thinking by a NASA control room operator prevented a second engine from shutting down, which probably would have resulted in the loss of that crew. On other completed missions there has been one near burn-through of an SRB motor nozzle, one failure of an O-ring (the backup held), one fuel leak in the main engines, and about ten cases total of O-ring damage.

In other words something has gone seriouslywrong on more than half the shuttles' ignitions. And in addition to Challenger, calamity has struck almost six times.

Trento reminds us of Thomas Baron, the NorthAmerican Rockwell safety inspector who in 1967 went public with his warning that the pure-oxygen interior of the Apollo command module was unsafe. Baron was fired; 20 days later three astronauts died when the interior of their Apollo command module caught fire, deaths that were, until Challenger, the U.S. space program's only direct fatalities. I watched in vain for mention of Baron when Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineers who tried to block the Challenger launch, were screwed as their reward: an event depicted in a surprising number of new accounts as an isolated incident.

Trento further reminds us that following theApollo fire, NASA declared the astronauts had died instantly, when in fact their bodies were found pressed up against the hatch and "hundreds of people heard the screams of agony over an open circuit that was preserved on tape." Only after extensive prodding did NASA admit that the Challenger crew had not perished instantly either, as initially claimed, but survived the explosion and probably lived until their cabin hit the ocean. Such grisly particulars have no bearing on policy, but do tell a great deal about NASA's institutional character, and its willingness to deceive the public.

Of the two, A Major Malfunction is thesuperior book. McConnell, who has spent the past three years covering space for Reader's Digest, writes well; his chapters on the days leading up to the doomed launch flow like a novel, yet do not sacrifice substance. Trento, a correspondent with CNN, is the more dogged reporter, having interviewed many former top NASA officials. But in the manner of a bad New Yorker article, Trento's book piles on paragraph after paragraph of seemingly irrelevant facts and quotations, which the reader slogs through assuming he will eventually be shown why all the extrania are there--only to realize after the book concludes that, nope, they were just superfluous nits and unedited verbosity.

Readers must sift Prescription for Disaster tofind the telling nuggets of information. For instance, we learn that in 1983, when Sally Ride became the first American woman in orbit, Nancy Reagan flipped out because Jane Fonda was present for the launch. Michael Deaver, then at the White House, called NASA Administrator James Beggs on the carpet. When Beggs explained that civilian launches are open to the public, Deaver demanded that the NASA "flak" man who had invited Fonda to sit in the VIP section be fired.

Beggs, NASA administrator from the beginningof the Reagan administration until two months before the Challenger disaster, has been all but forgotten in most accounts of the tragedy, because he was not in charge on the day the explosion occurred. Neither McConnell nor Trento make this superficial mistake, for the agency which sent Challenger to its fate is a perfect reflection of Beggs's persona--rigid, remote, concerned first and foremost with budget politics.

Prescription for Disaster explains that untilBeggs, managers of NASA's research and operation centers such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Johnson Space Center in Texas, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, reported directly to the adminstrator in Washington. Beggs changed the system so that the center directors reported to his deputy, who then reported to Beggs. Experience has shown that this formula is 100 percent guaranteed to prevent disagreeable news from reaching the desk of the boss--which it did in the case of growing concern over the reliability of the shuttle's solid-rocket boosters.

This procedural change became a double fiascoin 1985 when that warm, wonderful human...