NASA Chief Promises to Build ‘New’ Space Agency

NASA chief Daniel S. Goldin on Thursday promised a bolder, “new” National Aeronautics and Space Administration that will control costs on its scientific missions in space and support the research and development efforts of domestic aircraft makers.

Goldin’s promise came at an overflow NASA town meeting at Cal State Dominguez Hills where several hundred people showed up for an opportunity to grill the senior federal official about overpriced components, underfunded programs and a lack of direction in the nation’s space program. It was the fourth open-mike session Goldin has hosted around the country in the eight months since he left TRW’s Space and Technology Group in Redondo Beach to run the space agency.

Goldin is waiting to see if he will keep his job under the Clinton Administration.

“NASA is in the middle of a very critical self-examination,” the former NASA research scientist said as he paced the University Hall stage. “Where should we go? What should we do? How can we be sure we spend taxpayers’ money not only effectively but with a maximum benefit for the county?”

Goldin conceded in the first half of the four-hour session that NASA and its contractors have sometimes served the nation poorly by taking too long and spending too much on bland projects that did not always work as promised.

“Our credibility with Congress is not at an all-time high,” he said. He paused to point to the audience, which included many aerospace engineers and executives. “And it’s not just NASA. It’s also all our wonderful contractors. We all have to clean up our act.”

But he repeated promises to remotivate NASA’s workers and suppliers by slashing paperwork and decentralizing authority, creating a new NASA.

This new space agency, he said, will try to rekindle the nation’s zest for space and science. He symbolically backed up that statement by donating $30,000 from NASA’s budget for a science education program at the Challengers Boys and Girls Club in South-Central Los Angeles.

The agency, he said, also will not shy away from risk or innovation. This he demonstrated by inviting Yuri Koptev, director general of the Russian space agency, to discuss plans to include a Russian cosmonaut on a space shuttle mission next November--and an American astronaut on a Russian space flight in 1995.

“I like to hope we will be strong enough, we will be smart enough, we will be enlightened enough to follow this path (on all space exploration programs in the future),” Koptev said through a translator.

For now, however, Goldin said he will be busy fixing the bureaucracy.

An audience member took that opportunity to step to a microphone and hold a carabiner--an aluminum loop used in mountain climbing--that he said he had bought at a sporting goods store for $18. A virtually identical piece of gear used to connect space-walking astronauts to the space shuttle costs NASA more than $1,000, the man said.

Goldin, not for the first time that afternoon, answered simply: “Guilty as charged,” and promised to investigate.