Putting Schedule over Safety

The hellish orange-and-white fireball that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean two years ago this week, killing seven crew members and shutting down the U.S. manned space program. Pressures to launch had led to what the Rogers commission later called NASA's "silent safety program," in which defects were overlooked and engineering cautions brushed aside. Yet as NASA and its many contractors now rush to correct the ! shuttle's potentially fatal weaknesses and resume launches by July, there are signs that the lesson of the Challenger tragedy has not been wholly heeded.

A blue-ribbon committee of eight experts commissioned by NASA to review the agency's safety procedures has warned that the "concern for safety that peaked after the Challenger accident appears to be waning." The investigators stated that when NASA rated its program managers, safety was "conspicuous by its absence" in the evaluation. There was also "disturbing" evidence that schedules were given priority over safety. The highly critical report was submitted to NASA, its contractors and key members of Congress last August, but was kept under wraps until this month.

The report also charges that those in NASA's contractor network who spoke up about lax safety practices sometimes ran into a "shoot-the-messen ger syndrome" in which their complaints were ignored and they were harshly criticized. Several such whistle-blowers have told TIME that when they pointed out glaring violations of safety procedures, nothing was done to correct the problems. Instead, they contend, they were harassed, demoted or fired. Some say they were even threatened by unidentified letter writers and telephone callers.

Sylvia Robins is a former systems engineer for Unisys, a subcontractor that develops much of the computer software in Houston used to control virtually every switch and nozzle on the complex space vehicle. Two years ago, she was a highly rated section supervisor in charge of managing the software that had been updated to reflect changes in the shuttle's mission and design. In March 1986, two months after the Challenger tragedy, she was approached for help by software experts at Rockwell International, the shuttle's prime contractor. They asked her to find out whether Unisys had an adequate system for testing the shuttle's backup software, which would be vital if the basic computer programming failed.

Robins claims she discovered a self-defeating Unisys procedure: instead of halting other operations while both the main and backup software were tested, the contractor permitted NASA to make additional changes in payload and other shuttle flight plans as the testing proceeded. While this saved a three-week hold for each test, she insists that it rendered the results meaningless, since the software could not be adjusted and tested simultaneously.

When Robins informed her Unisys supervisors about this in June 1986, she + maintains she was told to drop the matter and not tell Rockwell about it. Her bosses considered her a trouble maker, she says, because she had complained earlier that Unisys did not have the proper facilities for protecting the software for secret Defense Department missions assigned to shuttle flights.