NASA has to fight the forgetting

How to fight the forgetting
Fighting this “forgetting process,” this all-too-human gradual decline in the intensity of meticulous and thorough hardware development and mission preparation that comes with repeated mission successes, is the ultimate challenge to the new projects. NASA is trying to do this with lectures, with posters, with occasional ceremonies — but I’m not persuaded that’s enough.

The deaths of astronauts did, indeed, drive lessons home, but at hideous cost. The emotional impact of funerals, of images of weeping mourners and stunned onlookers, so overpowers any occupational habits or intellectual exercises that it is a challenge to develop less ghastly “consciousness-raising methods” — but it is a challenge NASA must respond to.

To drive home the necessary lessons, space workers need to actually touch (and be touched by) the terror of past tragedies more viscerally and less cerebrally. There are tricks here that NASA, as yet, hasn’t tried.

I remember discussing this with my boss Gene Kranz in the early 1990s, as we chatted about facing the safety challenges of building and operating the space station. He gazed out his window and mentioned his longstanding intention to build a real memorial to the Challenger astronauts, and for Apollo-204 as well, in Mission Control, to serve as a constant reminder of the death-defying duties each person there carried. One candidate location we discussed was a landing on the stairway in the control center building. It was an alcove that workers passed by on a daily basis, an appropriate place for a reminder.

We never got to build it. Instead, Kranz (along with his own boss, center director Aaron Cohen, a no-nonsense engineer) was soon retired, victim of political forces that had elevated diplomacy and public image over traditional NASA safety standards. Officials still proclaimed that safety was the first concern, but all their actions belied their words. And as the bumper sticker tells us, God may forgive, and man may forgive, but nature — never.

After the 73 seconds
Instead, we got make-believe “official remembrances” that glossed over, rather than got into, the emotional heart of the then-recent Challenger disaster. I recall the Challenger ceremonies at Johnson Space Center in which people assembled on the mall in front of the administration building to observe 73 seconds of silence — the time from liftoff to disintegration. But then the loudspeakers dismissed the crowds to meander aimlessly for a while during the next two and a half minutes when in 1986 the crew — still alive — plunged to the ocean and met their deaths.

That segment, the most emotionally horrifying part of the Challenger astronauts' ordeal, was edited out of the official remembrances and out of the minds of the workers — or at least, most of them. I remember that a small handful of us did remember, and remained standing still, in silence, our eyes on our watches and our minds on what had actually been going on in the skies off the Florida coast, for this period. Our colleagues, passing us on their way back to their offices, threw us puzzling glances.

The lessons of Apollo-204, and Challenger, and Columbia, tell us that intellect alone will not long keep us true to the traditions of “least dangerous” (never safe, but perhaps “safe enough”) space mission management. We need more primitive motivations — we need to touch and to feel, to sweat and to fear, to relive and to imagine dying — in order to resist the creeping complacency that repeated success carries with it.

Touching the tragedy
Space workers need to touch the wreckage of Apollo-204 and the lost shuttles, not have the fragments stashed away underground, out of sight and mind. They need pieces on display — and more, open to physical contact — where they do their death-defying work. They need images, not of the astronauts, but of their parents, spouses and children left behind. They need high-fidelity replays of the horrifying deaths of their friends and colleagues, and no-holds-barred confrontations with the decisions made by individuals that paved the path to ultimate catastrophe.

They need the consequent inescapable ache of fear and the gnawing of doubt that keeps asking, over and over, if they’ve covered all angles and done all they can. And if their stomachs do not knot up, and mouths go dry, as they confront such decisions — perhaps they need new jobs.

They do not need comforting myths about “valuable sacrifices” and “space-is-very-very-hard” rationalizations for the failures of individuals and teams. And most of all, they do not need more human sacrifices to remind them of things they knew, but somehow allowed themselves to forget.

An earlier version of this report incorrectly implied that the "Apollo 1" designation was not in use until months after the 1967 fire.

James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.

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