NASA TAKES A BEATING

By Ed Magnuson.

The language was dry, understated, yet painfully clear. What caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode last Jan. 28, killing its seven passengers? ''Failure of the pressure seal in the aft-field joint of the right solid-rocket motor.'' Why was the shuttle allowed to fly if unsafe? ''Neither Thiokol nor NASA responded adequately to internal warnings about the faulty seal design . . . There was a serious flaw in the decision-making process.'' The commission appointed to investigate the Challenger accident interviewed more than 160 people, held hearings that generated 2,800 pages of transcripts, then summarized it all in an orderly 256-page report that met the deadline set by Ronald Reagan. Led skillfully by former Secretary of State William Rogers, the 13-member group produced a document that Washington's Republican Senator Slade Gorton predicts will become a ''model for presidential commissions for years to come.'' It is a tribute to the openness of the commission's proceedings that few of the answers about Challenger came as a surprise. But the findings did not come easily. Although NASA had generally been cooperative with the commission, its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which supervised the rocket boosters, and Morton Thiokol, the contractor that manufactures them, were less so. It took an FBI agent working for the commission to discover, while perusing papers at Thiokol, that a ''flight constraint'' had been declared on July 10, 1985, for the booster-joint seal--and then routinely waived for seven successive launches, including Challenger's last one. The report called this ''a strange sequence.'' The commission discovered that the booster-seal problem was not merely a low-level worry; top NASA officials were aware of it, even if they were never told of the recommendation by Thiokol engineers against launching Challenger in cold weather. The report cites a briefing on the booster seals given on Aug. 19, 1985, to the headquarters staff of NASA by concerned shuttle managers at both Thiokol and Marshall. While the briefing paper urged action to correct the faulty seal, it concluded that the shuttle was safe to fly until a fix was made. The commission sharply disagreed, declaring that the briefing was ''sufficiently detailed to require corrective action prior to the next flight.'' The commission's reluctance to assign personal blame, while excoriating the agency's ''flawed process,'' caused one commissioner, Caltech Physicist Richard Feynman, to seek stronger language. He lost in his attempt to call some of NASA's managers ''stupid,'' but will record his own views in an appendix. Democrat Ernest Hollings of South Carolina insisted hotly at a Senate hearing that someone be held responsible for ''willful gross negligence'' in the tragedy. Replied Rogers: ''I'm not sure picking out any scapegoat and prosecuting would serve the national interest.'' At his press conference last week, the President agreed with Rogers. ''I don't believe that there was any deliberate or criminal intent in any way,'' said Reagan. Instead of searching for blame, the Administration and Congress face a greater task in answering the financial and policy questions posed by the commission's recommendations. The report urges that the shuttle's booster joints be entirely redesigned rather than just modified and that the rockets $ be test-fired vertically instead of horizontally. It proposes that long-known weaknesses in the tires, brakes and nosewheel steering of the orbiters be corrected; that all the shuttle's critical parts be reviewed; that sufficient spare parts be assembled so one shuttle would no longer be cannibalized to allow a second one to fly; that Edwards Air Force Base in California be considered the primary landing site for the orbiter rather than Florida's Kennedy Space Center, where the weather is unpredictable; and that some kind of crew-escape mechanism be considered, at least when the bird is gliding toward an emergency landing. (The commission conceded that no escape system could have saved the Challenger crew while the powerful launch boosters were firing.) If all those suggestions sound eminently reasonable, they could also prove highly costly and time consuming. A task seemingly as simple as testing the boosters vertically, for example, might require that two years and $20 million be devoted to building a structure that could securely hold the bottom of the 149-ft.-tall rockets some 80 ft. above the ground. Landing the shuttle in California means spending $1 million for each return to the Florida launch site. In past years, the report says, the unrealistic flight schedules NASA had proposed had never been adequately funded by Washington. Under NASA's current $7.3 billion annual budget, spare parts were running so short that the commission projected that this year's flight schedule would have been sharply curtailed even without a Challenger disaster. Reagan gave James Fletcher, NASA's new administrator, 30 days to explain how he intends to implement the commission's recommendations. A more basic decision on whether to replace Challenger with a new, fourth orbiter remained uncertain. At his press conference the President encouraged the embattled space agency by saying, ''I think we should go forward with another shuttle.'' But one Administration source insists that ''there's a raging debate at the White House'' on whether, and how, to find the $3 billion that another orbiter would cost. Yet neither the President nor the Congress seemed ready to grapple with the difficult task of deciding just how the shuttle fits into the long-term goals of the U.S. space program. Until the shuttle has a clearly defined and widely accepted mission, finding the funds is likely to remain a thorny political problem on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral