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.

FMI: www.nasa.gov