WASHINGTON — The federal space agency's three failed missions to Mars last year were doomed by severe underfunding and management breakdowns that led overworked engineers to make preventable errors, according to a scathing independent review released Tuesday.
Responding to the criticism, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration immediately announced that its quest to find traces of life on Mars will be reorganized. The agency said that it will create a reserve fund to cover unexpected program costs. It delayed for two years, until at least 2003, one of two scheduled Mars missions. And it named one official to oversee the entire effort to explore the Red Planet.
The report by an 18-member board of government, aerospace industry and academic experts tracked the findings of other outside investigations, released earlier this month. But it went into greater detail and carried more clout. It was commissioned by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin.
Thomas Young, a retired aerospace engineer whose career included senior management jobs with NASA and Lockheed Martin, headed the panel. Its report said that the embarrassing technical failures have a common cultural denominator: an intense drive to meet budgets and timetables that pushed managers and engineers to take on escalating levels of risk.
Although it did not repudiate NASA's new philosophy of "faster, better, cheaper" space missions, it added a critical corollary: "If not ready, do not launch."
"Space missions are a 'one strike and you are out' activity," the board's report concluded. "Thousands of functions can be correctly performed, and one mistake can be mission catastrophic. Mistakes are prevented by oversight, test[ing] and independent analysis, which were deficient."
NASA Acknowledges Its Mistakes
NASA embraced the panel's findings as a guide for getting its troubled Mars program back on track.
"We found the boundary, and we are stepping back from that boundary," Edward Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science, said at a news conference at the agency's headquarters. "We could have probably pulled these missions off if we were a little less cheap," he ruefully acknowledged.
Edward Stone, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which managed the Mars missions, acknowledged that better "checks and balances" are needed. But Stone said that he had no inkling of a problem. "We had reviews throughout the program, and the reviews basically supported that we were meeting the challenge."
