Assessing NASA’s Safety Culture: The Limits and Possibilities of High‐Reliability Theory

After the demise of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board sharply criticized NASA’s safety culture. Adopting the high‐reliability organization as a benchmark, the board concluded that NASA did not possess the organizational characteristics that could have prevented this disaster. Furthermore, the board determined that high‐reliability theory is “extremely useful in describing the culture that should exist in the human spaceflight organization.” In this article, we argue that this conclusion is based on a misreading and misapplication of high‐reliability research. We conclude that in its human spaceflight programs, NASA has never been, nor could it be, a high‐reliability organization. We propose an alternative framework to assess reliability and safety in what we refer to as reliability‐seeking organizations.     

Exploring Space: NASA at 50 and Beyond

In 2008, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and has been embarked on a mission to put astronauts on the moon, possibly by 2020. Is this goal “back to the future”? Or is it “the way forward” as a prelude to a mission to Mars? An advisory panel to President Obama has recommended alternatives to the moon as routes to Mars. At the time of writing, Obama has yet to decide. Of course, NASA has already arrived on Mars with robots, a tribute to the agency's remarkable technical prowess. However, the ultimate challenge would be to send men and women to Mars. Why? That, of course, is the big question. The answer lies in the human heart rather than in the rational mind. NASA's exploration of this unknown frontier has more in common with the expeditions of Columbus and Magellan than the missions of most other federal agencies. Any list of discretionary expenditures would prioritize space exploration as an extreme example of an unnecessary luxury that can be postponed. So why should NASA continue to explore space? That question takes on an acute meaning during a time of intense domestic economic and foreign policy challenges. But imagine: what would be lost to America if NASA did not exist?     

After Columbia: The Space Shuttle Program and the Crisis in Space Access

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003 brought to the fore the sad history of the Space Shuttle's origins, evolution, operation, and the continuing challenge of space access. The crisis that emerged in human access to space because of the accident was greater than any experienced since the end of the Apollo program more than thirty years earlier. This essay explores the origins and operations of the Space Shuttle, the varied efforts to build a successor vehicle versus upgrading the shuttle fleet, and suggests that the first decade of the twenty-first century promises to offer both serious challenges and enormous potential for the development of new launch vehicles that may finally achieve the long-held dream of reliable, affordable access to space. The essay ends by asking whether or not the half-hearted quest for a shuttle replacement might not portend the demise human spaceflight for the United States.     

America’s First Cosmonauts: Reflections on the Human Cost of Shuttle-Mir

Shuttle-Mir, the joint space exploration effort between NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), faced a wide variety of challenges throughout its five-year run between 1993 and 1998. These included institutional differences, high costs to both the American and Russian governments, and poor public reception. The focus herein is on the personal reflections and experiences of American men and women who participated directly in the program: the seven Shuttle-Mir astronauts from the United States. These men and women joined an unprecedented exchange in which they had to train for and serve aboard a foreign space station for extended periods of time. This article utilizes archival records, official oral histories, and personal memoirs to outline three specific challenges faced in common by all of the U.S. astronauts. Primarily, they had to master both the everyday and technical intricacies of the Russian language, live in Russia during the post-Soviet economic collapse, and adapt to new institutional procedures and training methods under Roscosmos. Combined, these experiences presented serious difficulties in working with their Russian counterparts aboard the space station Mir, and made crisis situations even more hazardous. Overall, these experiences introduced yet another cost to the Shuttle-Mir program—a human one.     

Rockets,Astronauts, and Shrines: Representations of Spaceflight in Sacred Visual Art and Architecture

This article examines the relationship between space exploration and sacred visual art, demonstrating that religious iconography and church architecture evolved by assimilating humankind's entry into the physical heavens as a living parable. This is proven by the presence of space exploration imagery within places of worship—from a church building inspired by a payload fairing to inclusion of space exploration milestones as historical landmarks, from astronauts being chosen as depictions of Christian virtues to lunar material being included in church windows, and from a space shuttle being painted on a Christian Orthodox church wall to a space hotel being represented on a Buddhist temple. The incidences of space themes in religious visual arts, as well as the fervor of reception, vary nonetheless among denominations.     

Restructuring for resilience: The NASA model

Two decades of incremental decisions have locked in a vision of human space exploration through an interdependent civil space program centered on the Shuttle and the Space Station. The program lacks the resilience necessary to contain cost overruns, schedule slips, and capability cutbacks. The result is overcommitment, which makes it difficult to sustain the program in a budget-constrained environment. Coping with overcommitment through budget cuts in space science, applications, and technology could split the post-Apollo coalition and jeopardize NASA as an institution. Alternatively, terminating the Space Station could eliminate overcommitment, strengthen NASA's political base, and facilitate restructuring toward a resilient program that is sustainable. A restructured NASA might once again become a model for other agencies.     

Decentering America: the Quest for a Transnational American Studies

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back into the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to Nazi-Germany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise—are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally trans-national. The following essay considers the implications of such mental processes for the established forms of discourse among historians.     

Activation,Conversion, or Reinforcement? The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Vote Choice

This study uses multiwave panel data from the 2008 presidential election to investigate the impact of partisan news exposure on changes in vote preferences over time. Overcoming key limitations of prior research, the analysis distinguishes among the potential effects originally delineated by Lazarsfeld and colleagues ( 1948 ): (1) activation—motivating partisans who initially say they are undecided or planning to defect to shift their vote back to their own party's candidate; (2) conversion—motivating partisans to shift their vote to the opposing party's candidate; and (3) reinforcement—strengthening partisans’ preference for their initial vote choice. The results reveal only modest evidence that partisan news reinforces existing vote preferences. Surprisingly, partisan news plays a more robust role motivating changes in vote choice: news slanted toward citizens’ own partisanship increased the odds of activation and decreased the odds of conversion, while news slanted away from citizens’ own partisanship proved a strong counterforce working in the opposite direction.     

Spaceflight and the Separation of Church and State

Instances of religious expression by astronauts aboard NASA spacecraft present a unique encounter between American space policy and legal jurisprudence. The agency must adjudicate between its reticence to restrict astronauts' religious action with its responsibility to protect the constitutional separation between church and state. Though NASA won a suit filed by an atheist activist in 1969, it has not always taken proper consideration of the dangers of astronauts' religious expression. As it seeks a sustained human presence in outer space, NASA should form a policy regarding its responsibility to provide religious accommodation for current and future astronauts.     

Challenges to the Sustainability of Space Exploration

NASA has an elaborate process for identifying and mitigating technical risks in its human space exploration program. However, non-technical risks—political, economic, and societal—are not captured in this process. Such risks are large in number, diverse in character, often unpredictable, and can be impossible to prevent because they are beyond the space agency's control. NASA's mission directorates are responsible for long-term strategic planning, so despite the difficulties, the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) must direct its attention to long-term sustainability risks and the development of mitigation plans. This article surveys long-term risk factors and, where possible, makes suggestions on mitigation approaches for consideration by ESMD and NASA's top management.     

The Apollo 8 Genesis Reading and Religion in the Space Age

Between January 1969 and the summer of 1975, NASA received over eight million letters and petition signatures supporting the right of American astronauts to free religious expression in space. Prompted by Madalyn Murray O'Hair's complaints about the reading of Genesis during the flight of Apollo 8, the petition campaign points to the complex ambivalent relationship between religious Americans and their nation's space program. The Genesis reading had provided reassurance that the program, with its secular motivations, its instrumental culture, and its designs upon God's very heavens, was not hostile to faith. But what if NASA now yielded to O'Hair? The petitions flowed in the eschatological anxiety that the sacred space of the skies might be cleared of Christian speech.     

The Influence of Foreign Voices on U.S. Public Opinion

Public opinion in the lead‐up to the 2003 Iraq War presents a puzzle. Despite the fact that domestic political elites publicly voiced little opposition to the invasion, large numbers of Americans remained opposed to military action throughout the pre‐war period, in contrast to the predictions of existing theory. We argue that some rank‐and‐file Democrats and independents expressed opposition because of the widely reported antiwar positions staked out by foreign, not domestic, elites. Merging a large‐scale content analysis of news coverage with public opinion surveys from August 2002 through March 2003, we show that Democrats and independents—especially those with high levels of political awareness—responded to dissenting arguments articulated in the mass media by foreign officials. Our results, which constitute the first empirical demonstration of foreign elite communication effects on U.S. public opinion, show that scholars must account for the role played by non‐U.S. officials in prominent foreign policy debates.     

Buying Negative Agenda Control in the U.S. House

We explore the foundations of the legislative party cartel, as theorized by Cox and McCubbins (1993, 2005) , to determine how majority‐party moderates who suffer net policy losses from the majority leadership's use of negative agenda control are kept from defecting from the cartel arrangement. First, we identify formally the group of majority‐party members who are net policy losers. We find that those members occupying the initial 30% of the space within the majority‐party blockout zone—that space closest to the floor median—are hurt on a pure policy basis by the cartel arrangement. Second, we find that members in this “30% zone” are rewarded disproportionately by majority‐party leaders (relative to members in other intervals on the same side of the floor median) via side payments in the form of campaign contributions. In addition, majority‐party members within the 30% zone receive side payments commensurate with their particular policy loss.     

Influence of Industry on Legislative Behavior toward NASA

This article explores economic factors that help to explain Congressional support for NASA Authorization Acts and issues of U.S. federal space funding. Three economic factors related to political opportunism are identified and discussed in detail. Across the board, NASA Centers are a significant factor in shaping voting preferences, suggesting that the NASA presence itself plays an important role in influencing legislators. Meanwhile, other forms of economic opportunism based on the relative importance of the space and aircraft manufacturing industries in a given state and the amounts of NASA procurements are factors, but only in a more limited sense. This supports the concept that economic opportunism does influence legislative voting behavior on NASA Authorization Acts, though the bulk of the impact appears to be indirectly via NASA centers.     

Imprisoned in a Tesseract: NASA's Human Spaceflight Effort and the Prestige Trap

This essay focuses on the decision by senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials at the creation of the agency to focus its efforts on human spaceflight, Moon and Mars missions, and human settlement of the solar system. Its leaders made a conscious decision to downplay space applications projects, exclusive of technological research and development, and eschew operational activities. They did so in favor of concentrating on the human exploration and development of space. In so doing, NASA fell into the prestige trap that dominated this mission in the 1950s and early 1960s. At sum it was a tesseract, a four-dimensional object, which locked NASA into a quest for ever greater space spectaculars featuring human involvement. Power and prestige, therefore, has cast a long shadow on the space agency, forcing it into a series of programs that have been oversold and undervalued.     

England's New Scheme for Funding Higher Education through Student Fees: ‘Fair and Progressive’?

From September 2012 most home undergraduates at English universities are being charged fees of £9,000 per annum. These are funded by a government loan, which attracts interest from the moment they start their course; after three years their accumulated debt exceeds £30,000. They can also borrow to cover their living costs, on the same terms, so that those studying in London can graduate with a debt of more than £50,000—although those from low‐income families can obtain grants and universities are encouraged to provide bursaries and other support to students from underrepresented groups. Graduates start repaying their debts once their annual income exceeds £21,000—at a rate of 9% of the difference between their income and that figure: until the debt is fully repaid it continues to attract interest, by as much as three percentage points above the current inflation rate. Using data from a calculator on a government website, this paper shows that the highest‐paid graduates pay back less than those on middle incomes: the ‘squeezed middle’ pays back more not only than those on low incomes but also the better‐paid and those whose incomes increase more rapidly. This has differential effects according to occupation—and sex; and middle‐income groups also contribute more to the costs of widening participation programmes, which all universities charging more than £6,000 per annum are required to fund.     

‘Activating’ those that ‘lag behind’: space-time politics in Dutch parenting training for migrants

Space and time (or rather space-time) are crucial concepts in the legitimation of policy interventions into citizens' private lives. Across Europe, social policy measures to promote ‘activation’ among migrant communities—employment guidance, parenting training, youth work and so on—have proliferated, aiming to ‘move’ the Other into the here-and-now of European modernity. Van den Berg brings together theories of space-time, alterity and ‘cultural lag logics’ in an analysis of a contemporary case of such a policy: parenting training in the Netherlands. Based on ethnographic research, her study shows how certain societal problems are translated into problems of difference, and how that difference is in turn conceptualized as distance in space and time to be overcome through professional intervention.     

Nudging the Neoliberal Agenda: Administrative Opportunities in the Deregulated State

The current climate of neoliberalism in the executive branch is attended by active deregulation and distrust of the administrative state. As protections are rolled back, there is concern that individuals may be susceptible to information asymmetries that will influence their decision making, leading to detrimental outcomes for both their own and the general welfare. Behavioral public administration—the bureaucratic conception of “nudge” theory—offers ways to counter the pitfalls that come with greater freedom of choice, as promoted by the neoliberal agenda. Public administrators may employ alternative mechanisms, such as choice architecture, to help people make better decisions in the absence of explicitly protective regulations. After laying out the argument for a behavioral approach, this article analyzes several neoliberal agenda issues with potential nudge responses for practical implementation, as well as a justifiable call for action to protect the public welfare in the absence of policy guidance.     

Inertia and Neighboring Effects in Local Tax Policy: Illinois' Experience with a Local Option Tax on Telecommunications

Illinois reconfigured the legal basis and constraints for municipal telecommunications taxes in 2003. We use data on municipalities' initial (assigned) tax rate, fiscal condition, population, changes in tax rates of neighboring municipalities and neighbors' initial (assigned) tax rates to explain changes in telecommunications tax rates between 2003 and 2008. We find clear evidence of an important and statistically significant inertia effect—municipalities initially assigned a zero tax rate continued to stay tax free—and important and statistically significant neighboring effects—municipalities whose neighbors changed tax rates did the same, and municipalities whose neighbors were assigned relatively high initial rates increased their own rates faster.     

Influencing Public Opinion of Space Policy: Programmatic Effects Versus Education Effects

The public is generally supportive of space policy, but less supportive of spending for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) compared to other government programs. Previous research has helped identify who is more likely to be supportive of NASA spending, but not why. This study seeks to understand the causal mechanisms that influence support for NASA. Using natural between-survey and induced within-survey experiments, this study attempts to identify factors influencing changes in public support for NASA spending. Short-term programmatic and related media effects appear to have no influence on public support for NASA spending. However, correcting information asymmetries in regard to NASA's budget appears to have a significant positive effect on public support for NASA spending. The findings speak to the importance of the public being well informed on policy issues in order to make a correct policy choice, and demonstrate that individual programmatic aspects may not be as important as overall agency direction.