Discovery flight deemed success

HOUSTON – To some, the choice to launch the shuttle Discovery over the objections of the safety director and chief engineer was an anxiety-provoking, audacious gamble.

To the man who made that choice, NASA chief Michael Griffin, it was an emotion-free logical decision based on hard numbers.

Either way, it paid off Monday.

Safely home at Cape Canaveral, Fla., Discovery had flown with the fewest problems in NASA managers’ recent memory. The heat shield had no problems after seven inspections. All of Discovery’s tasks were completed, and some extra work was done, too.

“It’s an enormously successful flight,” Griffin said at a post-landing news conference. “We’re back on track.”

Then Griffin, ever the engineer, added a caveat to his pronouncements. He wants to see if the data from Discovery’s flight are as good as expected. He says he will draw his conclusions carefully, rather than jump to them, when it comes to evaluating success.

Griffin was appointed to lead NASA 15 months ago, and his style and background are strikingly different from his predecessor Sean O’Keefe, a former budget office official. Griffin has five master’s degrees, a doctorate and is a certified flight instructor.

More engineer than manager, he looks for data – numbers, flight history, models – when he makes a decision.

And he’s so cool under pressure that when asked about his feelings after Discovery’s successful July 4 launch, he said: “I’ll have time for feelings after I’m dead.”

The highly publicized debate about whether to launch Discovery came to a head with two NASA management meetings in June. The issue: the potential of foam falling from the shuttle’s external fuel tank, causing a crack in Discovery’s heat shield, as happened to Columbia in 2003 when seven astronauts died.

NASA fixed several foam areas, but had not come up with a fix for one crucial section. NASA’s safety chief and chief engineer said NASA didn’t know enough about the physics of the problem and should wait until a fix was designed.

Griffin, who went to all-day technical meetings that NASA’s top boss normally wouldn’t attend, said then, “I wanted to immerse myself in all of the discussion going on.”

He decided the risk was small, flight history showed the computer models were overly cautious, and if Discovery didn’t fly now, there would be a problem with finishing the next 16 shuttle flights by the shuttle program’s end in 2010.

“This was hardly a quick or cavalier or uninformed or solitary decision,” he said in a June interview. “This is a decision resulting from as thorough a range of technical debate and discussion between people and among people who truly have a right to have an opinion as I have ever seen … When people draw different conclusions, it creates an environment in which I have to make a final decision, so I made one.”

Now with the success of Discovery’s mission, the experts point to Griffin and his management style as just what the space agency needed.

“He made a difficult calculation of the benefits and risks and made a decision to go ahead, and for at least this mission it turned out to be a correct decision or a good decision,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Howard McCurdy, a professor of public administration at American University who has written several books about NASA, said Griffin’s decision style reminds him of the good old days.

“This tells us something too about the management system used in the agency,” McCurdy said. “The old Apollo culture was really coming through.”