NASA budget cuts and their impact on safety culture

NASA

When one does tend to think of the NASA space program, perhaps the thought of the proud 1969 Apollo Moon landing are conjured along with the success that NASA subsequently had with the Voyager spacecraft mission that has so far been on track with regard to the predicted trajectory of its mission (Broad, 1990). Therefore, what type of problem would the elite organization, an organization that assembles the most educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists, could these individuals have internally?

The history of NASA funding has always been of issue as the program receives its budget from the executive branch of the federal government (Broad, 1990). Therefore, NASA funding has been subject to cuts, at times extensive, for the federal government to divert funding to programs within departments such at the Department of Defense, that yield a more direct return to the military industrial complex that supports and protects its corporate backers.

"As NASA pushes toward returning the shuttle fleet to space, some current and former employees are questioning how serious the space agency is about fixing the "broken safety culture" that investigators have said was a major cause of the loss of the Columbia and its crew two years ago." (Schwartz, 2005) Subsequent lack of funding has rendered cuts to the budget of NASA, which has developed into administrative cutbacks and subsequently the recruitment of talent that may not be capable of handling the arduous and complicated mathematical and scientific rigor that is requisite to many of the programs within NASA.

Fiscal cutbacks to NASA has ostensibly forced the hand of the human resources, as well as capital resources and technology which have seem to correlate with major catastrophes and critical mission miscalculations leading to damaged craft and delayed shuttle launches. "The shuttle Columbia, its countdown abruptly halted three times by technical problems, is now undergoing repairs to fix a new type of fuel leak that recently forced a flight postponement of 11 days." (Broad, 1990)

The technical issues ostensibly are stem from the fiscal cutbacks to the National Aeronautical and Space Administration's budget which caused the operating budget for these missions to be stretched in ways that would cause errors and miscalculations, most likely in the areas of materials science and the ability for chosen materials to handle certain stresses. Such stresses potentially include prolonged exposure to high heat and cold temperatures, and dramatic changes in pressure. "It's a workforce subject that has suddenly gotten deadly serious. Investigators seeking answers to the Columbia disaster say human resources issues may be at least partly to blame for the tragedy." (Shuit, 2003)

Statement of the Relevant Principles to be applied

The principles appertaining to the understanding and the functionality of NASA are broad and dynamic in that human resources must facilitate internal training programs to ensure that proper training to the level of ability show in past NASA employees. Additionally, a thorough and rigorous six sigma program should be instituted at NASA as process control and the limitation of variation is extremely important when considering the very limited range of acceptability regarding the variance of the successful operation in comparison to the unsuccessful.

Therefore critical areas include; Strategy and Management, Organizational Management, Institutional Innovation, Human Resources Management, Change Leadership and Planning Processes, and Applied Strategy. Inclusively, these areas of managerial function incorporate a top down management of human and capital resources linked by information and other forms of technology.

Program and Project Management are critical to identifying the most urgent and important programs that should undergo funding given the budget constraint NASA faces each year. Often, NASA must choose between research expeditions and surveillance missions where the benefit to human kind is more innate and intangible than capitalists are accustomed. NASA is seen as an effort of excess, that is, the federal government had generated a large enough tax base to fund programs that enable the exploration of space.

NASA is a publicly funded program, as tax payer dollars enable the development of the NASA program. Henry Mitzberg is a pioneer in the area of strategy and management and therefore his ideas are applicable to the renovation of NASA. "Even though anybody in the organization can come up with new strategic ideas (and everybody should be encouraged to do so), it is the responsibility of top management to make the final choices. There have been many calls lately to make the process of strategy development democratic and flexible to bring everybody in the organization into the process. The thinking here is that the odds of conceiving truly innovative ideas are increased if thousands of people, rather than just five or ten senior managers, put their minds to work." (McCarthy, Markides, 2000)

Additionally, Mitzberg addresses public policy as a function of applied strategy that is necessary to guide political systems. NASA is guided by a political system, there is no question. "Mitzberg argues that organizations display eight structural configurations and corresponding coordinating mechanisms. Such structural configurations are shaped by a variety of contingency factors, especially power and environmental ones. Using Mintzberg's work, eight policy modes, corresponding to structural configurations within government organizations and political systems, are identified and placed on a matrix that comprises two dimensions: standardization and centralization." (Matheson, 2009)

The standardization within NASA has always been the process of mechanical and administrative planning to yield a framework that can be replicated, ostensibly possessing internal and external validity. However, standardization would have eliminated problems inherent to the processes of the internal and external operations of NASA and therefore many of the issues with respect to human resources inefficiencies at NASA and the operational disasters should not have occurred.

Max Weber has contributed greatly to the area of organizational management and has participated in identifying trends within economics and strategy. "Three approaches are dominant in contemporary research on the economics of strategy. These are (1) the industry analysis approach associated with Michael Porter, (2) approaches based on the new industrial organization and game-theoretic reasoning, and (3) the resources-based view. In 1980s, a 'strong wind from economies' (Mintzberg, 1994) buffeted the strategic management discipline, represented by the publication of Porter's Competitive Strategy (Porter, 1980). The neglect of the resource and capability side of firms was the major weakness of Porter's analysis." (Fu-Lai Yu, 2003)

The principle of institutional innovation as a function of management and leadership is described by the renowned management scholar, Peter Drucker. "Peter Drucker often said there are no facts about the future, which begs the question, "How does an organization manage it?." In Managing in Turbulent Times, Drucker argues that given the certainty of a turbulent future, the most important task for management in such times is organizational survival (Drucker, 1980). While the task is daunting, Drucker left a legacy that provides guidance about how to manage the future; a legacy grounded in the concept of institutional innovation." (Wallman, 2010)

Further analysis by Drucker identifies the concept of institutional management. "In 1954, Drucker invented the concept of institutional management, combining the management of the organization and the management of the institutional processes used by the organization. Similarly, institutional management strategy is defined as the organizational processes and belief systems used to achieve strategic goals (Steidlmeier, 1993)." (Wallman, 2010)

Conclusion

NASA has seen a period of phenomenal success and subsequent accolades for the technical and scientific nature of the program. The benefit of NASA has been the development of technology that has trickled into the consumer markets, such as materials used in clothing and new operations and technologies now used in laptop computers. These advancements are attributable to NASA yet with drastic cuts to the funding of the program, the level of technology that is a derivative of the program may be eliminated.

The recommended managerial approaches which focus around human resources management all the way down into the supply chain are designed to address all facets of the comprehensively integrated yet someone disenfranchised managed operations and programs within the administration. Most importantly, the culture of safety must be reintegrated into the fabric of the organizational management. Without the reintegration of safety as the unifying force, there is likely to be continued failure as the motivation to remove variability in terms of the psychological component is absent and therefore fatigue and stress become larger components within the probability for human error and failure.

The budget may not allocate funding to finance all that NASA would like to undertake. However, investment into extensive training programs will assist to prepare employees to understand the very intricate nature of the mathematical modeling that is inherent to the proper functioning of the craft design. The critical errors and flaws in design that have enabled past disasters, and perhaps the ability for one to commit sabotage, if in fact true, is inherent to flaws in the overall process management and safety management of the NASA space program.

NASA must strategically identify the nature of the operations inherently responsible to facilitate the successful organization. Human Resources have been defined as a critical area of improvement. Weber has identified the paradoxical nature of the Organizational Management function within the framework of what Mintzberg had outlined as a politically influenced entity. NASA has to address political ideology as a function of what is not considered to be a core function within the operation of the organization.

It is essential that NASA integrate the internal innovation to its organizational mission. By linking innovation as a function to organizational objectives, NASA is enabling a complementary strategy that combines the proprietary nature of the ideas garnered from innovation to the extensive objectives, political and apolitical, that NASA seeks to address on its missions. Porter does not address the intimate relationship between an organization's human capital and the organization's access to its internal and external resources.

As Porter's strategy analysis is a function of the human dynamic as engaged to the organizational framework, Porter seeks to identify how the employee can be functionally situated to provide a competitive advantage to the organization. However, what Porter neglected was to identify how resources enable human capital to contribute to a safe and cost effective public sector operation.