The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

[TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE] Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations and by grants from American Telephone & Telegraph Company anon. A presidential panel called for sweeping reforms in Pentagon methods. Philippines President Corazon Aquino ordered release of all political prisoners, including communists. Details of these stories coming up in our news summary. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Washington. Charlayne?ZCHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT:ZAfter our look at the news of the day, here's what the rest of the NewsHour looks like. A newsmaker interview with the man who headed that critical defense panel, David Packard. Then a major focus on this week's NASA testimony, with reactions from a former NASA official, a critic and the brother of the shuttle's pilot. And we have an essay by Roger Rosenblatt on the Philippines humane revolution. News Summary

MacNEIL: NASA officials today strongly denied the charge by the Challenger commission that their decision-making process was flawed. Yesterday William Rogers, chairman of the commission investigating the disaster, rebuked the space agency for launching the shuttle in spite of warnings from two manufacturers that it was unsafe. Rogers said the decision-making process was "clearly flawed" and "eliminated good judgment and common sense." Five NASA officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said they disagreed, and the center's director, William Lucas, said the decision to launch was sound.

WILLIAM LUCAS, Marshall Space Center: I'm not sure what Mr. Rogers means in terms of the decision process being flawed. I do not believe that the decision process that I know and understand, to be flawed. The process of delegating to various levels in the program, the responsibility to make decisions within their own purview and within the pre-established guidelines, as long as that does not affect another level I believe that that is a reasonable process. Throughout the whole history of NASA we have made decisions at various levels. There are just hundreds of decisions that have to be made every day in preparing for a launch and in executing a launch, and it's impossible for all of those to come to the top. So I believe the pyramiding of decision-making process to be a sound process.

MacNEIL: Marshall's deputy director for science and engineering, George Hardy, was asked what he thought about the commission's performance thus far. "Some of you may have been able to judge their fairness," he said. "I may have something to say about that when they finish." Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: A blue-ribbon White House commission today blamed an inefficient Pentagon and congressional bureaucracy rather than contractor fraud and cheating for the high cost of military weapons. The 26-page report was the result of a nine-month investigation ordered by the President into how the military is run, why weapons cost so much and don't work properly. The panel was headed by Hewlett-Packard board chairman David Packard. At a White House news conference, Packard said the Department of Defense must be changed to run the way any business is run and doesn't waste money.

DAVID PACKARD, chairman, Commission on Defense: I can assure you that we've tried very hard to make this report a new and a different approach to the problems of defense management. We have quite a few specific recommendations, but some of the key elements of the report are as follows. Effective long-range planning, beginning at the front end of the process, to produce a defense strategy and a budget based on national security objectives. Increasing the responsibility of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and getting him deeply involved in the planning process. And more important, trying to make some recommendations so that the defense acquisition process could be operated like a successful commercial business, and the only difference is that the shareholders are the American taxpayers and the profit incentive is world peace.

HUNTER-GAULT: President Reagan praised the panel's recommendations, promising to act promptly and firmly even if they run counter to the entrenched bureauacracy.

MacNEIL: Philippines President Corazon Aquino today ordered the military to release all political prisoners, including communists. An estimated 500 prisoners of the Marcos regime are still being held, and the new government began releasing some of them yesterday. Asked if the order included Jose Maria Sison, suspected leader of the Communist Party outlawed under Marcos, the presidential spokesman said, "Without any exception."

President Reagan was asked today about reports that Marcos and his family had brought millions of dollars worth of cash and jewelry with them to Hawaii. In an Oval Office meeting with reporters, the President turned aside all questions on that subject.

REPORTER: There are reports that President Marcos has brought millions of dollars worth of currency and jewelry to Hawaii from the Philippines. Is that appropriate considering the economic problems there?

Pres. RONALD REAGAN: I don't think -- again, I think that there's no way for us to know anything about this. This is up to the government of the Philippines and the people of the Philippines.

MacNEIL: Apparently irritated by the reporters' persistent questioning about Marcos, the President turned aside and was heard on an open microphone to mutter "sons of bitches." White House spokesman Larry Speakes claimed that what the President really said was "It's sunny and you're rich." Asked who he was referring to, Speakes said, "They know who they are."

HUNTER-GAULT: On the economic side of today's news, the Veterans Administration said it is dropping its home mortgage rate to 9.5 . The one-point drop puts VA mortgages at a seven-year low. The price of oil was down. West Texas crude oil dropped below $13 a barrel before closing at $13.26 on the New York Mercantile Market. The drop came after a comment by Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheik Yamani that oil might fall to the $10-a-barrel level. The oil price fall is not yet reflected in U.S. balance-of-trade figures. The Commerce Department said the U.S. economy registered a record $16.5 billion trade deficit in January. Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige predicted the trade deficit will remain high at least until the middle of the year.

MacNEIL: In Egypt, soldiers stormed a security police camp near Cairo and captured 100 of the men who mutinied Tuesday night. We have a report from David Smith of Worldwide Television News.

DAVID SMITH, Worldwide Television News [voice-over]: Government troops who'd sealed off the area for the past 48 hours were coming under fire from rebel units apparently still holding out. For a good hour there were exchanges of machine-gun fire. Reinforcements werecalled up. In small groups those who'd been resisting to the end were brought out, most of them in civilian clothes. The siege, according to the Egyptians, was finally over.

MacNEIL: There was no report on whether there were casualties in the fighting. In Israel, a former Nazi arrived to face charges of killing thousands of Jews at a concentration camp in Poland during World War II. John Demjanjuk, who is accused of being the man called "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka camp, landed at Tel Aviv aboard a plane from New York. Our report is by Peter Allen Frost of Worldwide Television News.

PETER ALLEN FROST, Worldwide Television News: After a long fight in the courtrooms of the United States, John Demjanjuk arrived in Israel, where he faces charges as a war criminal. U.S. marshals accompanied him on the El Al flight and handed him over to the special Israeli police unit. Security at the airport was exceptionally tight. Authorities tried to guard against attempts on Demjanjuk's life. An armored car took him to this prison near Tel Aviv, where he'll be kept in a special cell until he's brought to trial.

HUNTER-GAULT: Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth has conditionally suspended seven players who were implicated in drug use during court testimony last September. They are Dave Parker of Cincinnati, Oakland's Joaquin Andujar, Keith Hernandez of the New York Mets, Kansas City's Lonnie Smith, Jeff Leonard of San Francisco, Dale Berra of the New York Yankees and Enos Cabell of the Los Angeles Dodgers. All seven can play this season if they donate 10 of their salaries to drug prevention programs in their hometowns and submit to random drug testing. In addition, they must contribute 100 hours of drug-related community services in each of the next two years. A second group was suspended for 60 days under similar conditions.

MacNEIL: Government researchers reported today that they may have made some very early progress towards a possible vaccine against AIDS disease, although a human vaccine may still be years away. The U.S. Public Health Service said that test animals infected with AIDS produced antibodies which protected some cells from the death that normally results from the virus. Dr. Peter Fischinger of the National Cancer Institute said the first laboratory vaccine tests on animals would begin within a few weeks.

HUNTER-GAULT: Still ahead on the NewsHour, a newsmaker interview with the head of the panel that's proposed sweeping changes at the Pentagon, David Packard; a wrapup of a week of NASA testimony, with reactions from a former official, a critic and the brother of the shuttle's pilot; and a Roger Rosenblatt essay on the Philippines' humane revolution. David Packard: Waste Watcher

HUNTER-GAULT: Our first focus section tonight is on the President's blue-ribbon commission on defense management, better known as the Packard commission. The 15-member commission was created last summer by President Reagan following a series of embarrassing scandals and horror stories about Pentagon contractors, $400 hammers and $600 toilet seats. Here are some of today's recommendations: off-the-shelf buying of spare parts, more civilian competition for defense contracts, a civilian procurement czar, strengthening the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a two-year budget defense cycle. For more we turn now to commission chairman David Packard, a former deputy secretary of defense in the first Nixon administration and co-founder and chairman of the board of Hewlett-Packard computer company.

Mr. Packard, halfway through your investigations about four months ago, you said that things were worse in the Pentagon than they were when you were there 15 years ago. How has your opinion changed now that you're at the stage where you are in this report?

DAVID PACKARD: Well, I think the opinion I had at that time has been confirmed, and there's simply a great many more actual congressional involvement, more interference with the day-to-day affairs. When I was here we had only three or four major committees in the Congress to report to. Now there are a great many more. So in fact the job of managing the Pentagon is much more difficult today than it was when I was there.

HUNTER-GAULT: But how does that contribute to the problem of budgets and so on?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, our recommendations here are made at making some basic changes in the structure of the Pentagon, which should have been made a long time ago. Now, I'm sure you know that the concern about this was because of these horror stories, high-priced spare parts, toilet seats, expensive hammers and all of those things. And the commission looked into those matters. Obviously that was one of our first concerns. We found that a lot of those things had been happening, that some of them had been corrected, the contractors had made some corrections on these matters. But we still felt that that was an important issue and we have some recommendations in this report to deal with that problem.

HUNTER-GAULT: You mentioned the Congress. But there are other people responsible, are they not, for these things? I mean, the contractor fraud you say exists.

Mr. PACKARD: Well, actually, yes. And some of these problems involve some misconduct by contractors. And we're simply saying that the defense contractors are going to have to shape up in their dealings with the Department of Defense.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, where does the major problem lie, in your view?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, the major problem lies in the fact that there's been no real long-range planning in the management structure of the Defense Department. These issues are dealt with on a year-by-year basis, and the decisions that are made in one year affect not only the spending in that year but they affect the spending that may occur five or six or even 10 years out.

HUNTER-GAULT: Is that a function of the change in administrations, or what?

Mr. PACKARD: No, no, it's simply the function of the fact that contained in this year's expenditure are expenditures for weapons that were started five or six years ago. The initial process of building up a weapons program starts with a low level of research and development and then it builds up to a very high level of expenditure when you have the peak of the actual production and the delivery of the weapons. These peaks add up and result in what they call a bulge out in front. And in order to deal with that they have to shorten up the program, cut down -- cut them below good production rates. And what we're recommending is that this whole process be confined by some basic long-range planning that should have been done a long time ago.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Now, you said that -- some of your major recommendations, I'd like to take a few of those, like buying spare parts off the shelf. Now, these recommendations you say are going to save millions of dollars. How will that help?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, the recommendations that are going to make the major saving have to do with the major weapons' research and development and production program. And to just take a case of the DIVAD, which is a good example that people know about.

HUNTER-GAULT: The DIVAD being --

Mr. PACKARD: That's an anti-aircraft gun that was being developed for the Army. They did not take the time and pains to make sure that all of the uncertainties in that development were finished before they put it in production. We're recommending that much greater attention be placed on the important and vast development aspects of these programs to make sure that the technology uncertainties have been resolved, to make sure that this weapon will in fact meet the needs of the people out in the field before it is put into production. If that had been done on the DIVAD program, we would have saved $2 billion, which simply went down the drain because that program was cancelled. Those are the things that'll make a big difference.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right. You also recommend bringing a civilian in to do defense purchases. I mean, how is that going to make a difference?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, here we have the, what is in a sense the largest procurement business in the world, and nobody's in charge full time. Our recommendation for this new civilian acquisition undersecretary are directed at the very important requirement of having a capable person full-time in charge of this very vast acquisition and procurement program that the Department of Defense has.

HUNTER-GAULT: You know, several published reports recently have said that this report was watered down so as not to offend Secretary Weinberger, who was originally opposed to having this report. What is your response to that? I mean, have politics gotten involved here?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, I think that anybody that reads this report will find that it is not watered down. We make some very important and tough recommendations. And there has been a good deal of criticism about Secretary Weinberger, partly because of these horror stories. What people don't remember, is he's the one that got the inspector general out there with the support of the Congress and uncovered these horror stories. I'd have to admit that some of those things were probably happening when I was there -- I just didn't know about it.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, is it your sense -- I mean, you say that these reforms are going to save millions of dollars. Is it your sense that if the recommendations were implemented it is possible that the defense budget that Mr. Weinberger is now having difficulty with Congress over is not going to be necessary, that these increases can be -- some of the savings can be met in implementing the recommendations?

Mr. PACKARD: As a matter of fact, our recommendations will not have any impact on this year's defense budget because it's going to take some time to put them into effect and to have them really begin to have an impact on the system. And we hope that if these recommendations are approved at this time, the preparation for next year's budget can follow some of the procedures that we are recommending.

HUNTER-GAULT: Very briefly, there have been 30 of these reports since World War II. What makes you optimistic that these recommendations are going to be followed?

Mr. PACKARD: Well, I understand that, and we've seen a lot of them. And I simply have felt that maybe the time is ripe now for something important to be done to improve the management of our whole defense enterprise.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, Mr. Packard, we'll certainly watch with interest your progress. There's a new report to be concluded in June, is that right?

Mr. PACKARD: Yeah. Yes, it will be.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Still to come on the NewsHour, NASA ghts back: we review critical testimony from this week's Challenger commission hearings, interview a top NASA official and analyze where the investigation has led the agency's credibility. And finally, essayist Roger Rosenblatt will have some thoughts about the change of government in the Philippines. NASA: How Much Damage

MacNEIL: We turn now to a major look at where the shuttle Challenger investigation has left the credibility of NASA, long one of the country's most admired and least doubted institutions. One month after the shuttle disaster the presidential commission still has no official explanation for what went wrong. But it has succeeded in putting NASA under the critical spotlight as never before, and one of the casualties has been NASA's image of infallibility. We start with a report by Elizabeth Brackett on the ongoing investigation.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT [voice-over]: By the end of another full week of testimony, the presidential commission had come to a harsh and unhappy conclusion.

WILLIAM ROGERS, commission chairman: You'll remember that I did say at one point that we thought the decision-making process may be flawed. I believe I'm speaking for the whole commission when I say that we think it is flawed.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: That conclusion came after commission members had listened to witness after witness say they had tried to get the message to stop the launch of the Challenger through NASA's chain of command. One of the first to say that was an engineer from Morton Thiokol, the contractor that makes the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Allan McDonald had wanted his superiors to understand that he thought it was too cold to launch.

ALLAN McDONALD, Morton Thiokol: And I was absolutely surprised that NASA would accept any recommendation below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, especially when the predicted temperature was as low as 26 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, I made the direct statement that if anything happened to this launch, I told them I sure wouldn't want to be the person that had to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why I launched this outside of the qualification of the solid rocket motor.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: But NASA manager Larry Mulloy said he hadn't heard the deep concern expressed by the Thiokol engineers. What he had heard, he said, was engineers voicing theoretical concerns they couldn't back up with data.

LARRY MULLOY, NASA: I didn't hear a single engineer say it's unsafe to fly 51-L. What I heard those engineers saying was talking to their data, they were talking to their data, and they were talking to their lack of data. And they were given engineering opinion which they have stated that they cannot quantify.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: Thiokol engineers said they knew they were unable to give NASA or their own management the backup data they wanted. They couldn't, they said -- it had never been that cold on launch day before.

ROGER BOISJOLY, Morton Thiokol: I was asked to quantify my concerns, and I said I couldn't. I couldn't quantify it. I had no data to quantify it, but I did say I knew that it was a way from goodness in the current data base.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: To some commissioners it seemed that management at NASA and Thiokol had become so obsessed with detailed data they had missed the forest for the trees. Chairman Rogers.

Sec. ROGERS: The trouble is so much paperwork you eliminate the element of good judgment and common sense.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: Commission members also came down hard on NASA for not passing the concerns they did hear about the launch up the management chain.

Maj. Gen. DON KUTYNA, commission member: If this were an airplane, an airliner, and I just had a two-hour argument with Boeing on whether the wing was going to fall off or not, I think I'd tell the pilot, at least mention it. Why didn't we escalate a decision this important?

Mr. MULLOY: I did, sir.

Gen. KUTYNA: You did?

Mr. MULLOY: Yes, sir.

Gen. KUTYNA: Tell me what levels above you up higher?

Mr. MULLOY: As I stated earlier, Mr. Reinhartz, who is my manager, was at the meeting.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: Mulloy's boss, Stan Reinhartz, said the information had stopped with him. It was the kind of decision he felt it was his job to make. But a parade of his superiors all said if they had known of the depth of the engineers' concerns, they would have acted differently.

GENE THOMAS, NASA: I can assure you that if we'd had had that information we wouldn't have launched.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: When officials of a second major contractor testified that they too had opposed the launch, NASA's decision-making process became even more suspect. Rockwell International said because of the enormous amount of ice on the launchpad that cold morning, they could not guarantee the safety of the flight.

ROCCO PETRONE, Rockwell International: I said let's make sure that NASA understand that we, Rockwell, feel it's not safe to launch.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: This time the information did go up the chain of command. The number two man in the launch decision team said he heard Rockwell's concerns, but he did not interpret them to mean no launch.

ARNOLD ALDRICH, NASA: And I think the people that were in that meeting from Rockwell intended to offer me that concern, but they did not intend to ask me not to launch.

Sec. ROGERS: If the decision-making process is such that the prime contractor thinks he objected and says, testified under oath that they took a position it was unsafe to launch, and you say that was not our understanding, that shows a serious deficiency in the process.

BRACKETT: By week's end it was clear that the commission also had concerns about the hardware decisions NASA had made. The ill-fated Challenger flew with seals on its solid rocket boosters NASA had been warned about for years.

JERRY MASON, Morton Thiokol: We recognized that we might get some erosion. We also recognized that it was a low-frequency event.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: Astronaut Sally Ride, cool and precise through most of the week's testimony, seemed shocked that NASA would fly knowing of a problem with a part that had a criticality one classification. By NASA's own definition, a failure in a criticality one part means the loss of the mission vehicle and crew.

SALLY RIDE, commission member: What we've seen in the charts so far is that the data was inconclusive, so you said go ahead. That sounds to me like you were willing to accept damage to a criticality one system.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: But in later testimony the top man at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center said mission safety did not depend on the booster rocket seals.

WILLIAM LUCAS, NASA: I was aware that the seals were criticality one in terms of the program as well as many other things. But I had never considered the seals as a threat to flight safety, because I thought adequate margin was available.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: But in stunning testimony yesterday, a NASA employee for the first time backed up the leading theory that a faulty seal may have been the cause of the Challenger explosion. Launch technician Charles Stevenson was asked to speculate on the meaning of a puff of smoke seen in new pictures that he presented to the commission.

CHARLES STEVENSON, NASA: Based on our photo data, and we've analyzed all the photos, we feel that that's a leak -- may or may not be related to temperature. And we feel that it's coming out of the -- the most likely spot is the joint between the aft booster and the aft segment.

BRACKETT: Even as the commission came closer to pinpointing the cause of the explosion, questions about the process remained. At week's end the commission still felt NASA had not come up with a clear answer to the basic question, why launch when there were so many reasons not to?

MacNEIL: Today NASA responded by strongly denying that its decision-making process was flawed and asserting that the decision to launch the Challenger on January 28th was sound. Correspondent Tom Bearden has this report.

TOM BEARDEN [voice-over]: The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville has the primary responsibility for the shuttle's solid rocket booster system, and it's the actions of the officials who work here that have been the most seriously questioned. NASA made five of them available today, including Lawrence Mulloy, the chief of the booster rocket office. He was grilled about NASA's decision-making process by the presidential investigating commission earlier this week, a process he continues to defend.

LARRY MULLOY, NASA: I think in relation to the solid rocket booster project we thought back about our decision process and going into the 51L launches as well as the decision process that we have used for previous launches. And as far as my actions relative to 51L, all the proper processes were followed, and I don't believe there was any flaw in those processes. Now, I think part of the -- of a conclusion that has been drawn is that somehow in that process we had reversed a role of looking at -- let's prove we're ready to fly as opposed to one that says prove to me, since you've raised this concern, you prove to me that I can't fly. And I categorically deny that and I disagree with it.

BEARDEN: Were the concerns raised by Thiokol's engineers and the discussion and examination of that data any different than the kind of process that's occurred? Was there anything unusual about this discussion?

Mr. MULLOY: Only the timing. The content of the discussion, the level of detail that was gone into in the discussion, the probing of the conclusions that were being drawn by myself and other people involved in that telecon -- totally typical.

BEARDEN: In retrospect, is there anything about this process you feel needs to be changed now?

Mr. MULLOY: Well, I thought about the conclusion that Chairman Rogers and other members of the commission are drawing, that there should be some change in process. And if I just look at the unique things that have come forth as a result of the commission hearings, the change in process is not a matter of how things are handled at the top. I think the change in process has to occur as to how engineers who have concerns to the extent that they will write a memo that says that the shuttle should stop flying until a certain thing is done, that that needs to be communicated up the line starting there. It never made it even to Thiokol management in that case, and certainly didn't get to my element manager or to me. And what is more disturbing is that that opinion never was made known to the Marshall engineers who were working on this test team, who were aimed at improving the performance of that joint and reducing the incidence of erosion and blow-by. And that test team is just for that kind of an interchange.

BEARDEN: Do you think NASA's getting a fair hearing at this point, and do you bear any animosity, or what are your feelings toward the gentlemen from Thiokol who have expressed the testimony that they have given?

Mr. MULLOY: Okay. I'll answer the first question first. I think we've been given ample opportunity to communicate at the commission hearings what our beliefs are relative to the facts and communicate what the process was that we followed. I had been somewhat disappointed in my inability to do that on a couple of occasions. We have spent a lot of time trying to explain the redundancy in the joint versus the time that it isn't redundant, and I'm disappointed in my ability to be able to communicate clearly such that I can get a reaction from the commission that says, "I understand what you're saying. However, I disagree with you." That has been a disappointment.

Now, relative to the more dramatic statements that have been attributed to Thiokol personnel and the press, when I rst see those type things in the press it tends to be disturbing, but then when you talk to the individuals they usually didn't say that precise thing. And I nd that to be true, so I don't think that's been of any particular concern to me.

BEARDEN [on camera]: Today's series of interviews are the first one-on-one media contact that NASA has permitted with key shuttle officials since the disaster. Their stated reason for allowing them to occur now is that the officials have already testified before the presidential investigating commission. But some NASA spokesmen admit privately there is also a public relations aspect to all of this, that NASA is trying to repair some of the damage done to its public image by the intensive scrutiny of the Washington hearings.

HUNTER-GAULT: Now for some insight into the effects these charged shuttle hearings have had on relatives of the seven astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion. Mike Smith was the pilot on last month's fatal flight. Like his late brother, Pat Smith was also a one-time Navy pilot. He joins us tonight from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mr. Smith, were you surprised by the information that came out in this week's shuttle hearings?

PAT SMITH: No, I don't think surprised. A little disappointed, but not surprised.

HUNTER-GAULT: Was there anything in there that particularly disturbed you about what you heard?

Mr. SMITH: No. I don't have any problem with the process; possibly with the lack of communication -- communication not getting as far as it should go.

HUNTER-GAULT: Why weren't you surprised?

Mr. SMITH: Well, this type thing is not unusual in any large corporation outside of the government, and I don't expect it to be any different in the government.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, had you ever talked with your brother about this kind of thing? I mean, was there any indication from him that he had any concerns about this decision-making process and about the safety and so on?

Mr. SMITH: No. I believe that the entire astronaut crew, and I think that they would go along with this, have always put 100 confidence in the management of NASA. So safety -- I don't think any of them ever wanted any guarantees, but they all believed that the top NASA management put safety first. And as far as when the thing left the pad, they felt like the NASA management had done everything possible to ensure safety.

HUNTER-GAULT: After listening to these testimonies this week, has your own opinion of NASA changed significantly?

Mr. SMITH: No, it hasn't. I feel like that the process that they use is a good process. I feel like that we need to look a little bit further than what we've looked and maybe see what kind of pressure was being put on NASA from top management right on down, from people higher than NASA, from the government itself, to make this a paying proposition. Quite possibly the pressure was not obvious even to the people -- even to the top management of NASA. It might have been a subconscious type thing. But I feel like that there was some pressure being put on these people to perform, and maybe this led to a little bit of what went on.

HUNTER-GAULT: What about your family, Mike's family, his wife, his children? How has this testimony, if they've listened to it at all, affected their attitudes?

Mr. SMITH: It's just a matter of disappointment that if in fact it does come out that somebody made a decision having full knowledge of the decision, rather than the decision being made without having the complete data, then there's going to be a real strong element of disappointment. As far as bitterness, there's no need in being bitter because nothing's going to bring him back. So bitterness is not really there, but I believe that there's probably a little bit element of disappointment if in fact it turns out that there was a decision made knowing that we were going to launch outside of parameters.

HUNTER-GAULT: Is it being discussed in the family, these hearings?

Mr. SMITH: Not really, no.

HUNTER-GAULT: You said in the first few days after the accident that you thought the shuttle program should be continued. Has any of what's come out in this past week made you feel any differently?

Mr. SMITH: No. If you analyze what's come out, if it turns out to be a O-ring seal problem, that's a fix -- there's no problem with that. If it turns out that maybe the whole manned space program is being put under a little bit too much pressure to become a profitable entity, then maybe we need to back up a little bit and say, hey, look, the safety of these astronauts is what's most important. If we can't guarantee the safety of the astronauts and satisfy the government, then we need to look at it from a different standpoint. But we need to have safety first, and if that doesn't make it a paying entity then we need to look at it from a different standpoint.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, thank you, Mr. Smith. Robin?

MacNEIL: Many aerospace experts have been disturbed by what's come out of the shuttle investigation, but for different reasons. We hear two views now, from Gary Flandro, a rocket expert from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who served as a consultant to the space program. He joins us tonight from public station WPBA in Atlanta. And Gerry Griffin, former director of NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. He left NASA just two weeks before the shuttle disaster to become president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce. And he joins us tonight from Houston.

Mr. Flandro, what has struck you about what's come out of the hearings?

GARY FLANDRO: Well, I must express surprise that the flight was allowed to go ahead under the conditions that were present. It's a well-known test-flight procedure not to try to push the envelope too far without treating it as just that, a test flight. So here we were flying the shuttle under conditions that were really outside of the conditions that had been experienced before. So it should have been treated as a test flight.

MacNEIL: To use the phrase that we just heard from Pat Smith, to launch outside of parameters -- that's thesort of professional phrase, is it?

Mr. FLANDRO: That's right. So outside of the envelope.

MacNEIL: Outside of the envelope. Why do you think, in your experience at NASA in the past, that NASA managers were, if they -- as they appear to have been, so insensitive this time to the warnings of engineers from two different companies?

Mr. FLANDRO: Well, I believe possibly a little sense of complacency had set in. We of course had 24 successful flights, not to mention before that the very successful Apollo flights. So I feel that they simply overlooked things, became a little insensitive to warnings that were coming from lower levels. They'd had many of these over the years, and these hadn't resulted in any flight failures, so they became a little bit complacent and were just too easy about making the decision.

MacNEIL: Is this the way NASA acted when you did business with the agency, that it was difficult to get concerns or information up through the chain of command?

Mr. FLANDRO: Not at all. My experience with NASA over the years has been just the opposite. I've always thought of them as kind of the model of a governmental agency. And when anyone expressed concerns, no matter what the level was, this always seemed to get up to the right people and the proper decisions were made. In this case, that doesn't seem to have happened.

MacNEIL: Do you agree with Chairman Rogers of the commission that on the face of it, the decision-making process appears to be flawed?

Mr. FLANDRO: Well, certainly the communication links appear not to have been what they should be. So decisions were made without the right information being available to those that made the final decision.

MacNEIL: Mr. Griffin, in Houston, what has struck you about the hearings?

GERRY GRIFFIN: Well, basically I've got a problem in that the commission seems to, I think prematurely, have locked on to the joint and the seals as being the cause associated with the temperature. Now, that may prove to be true eventually. But I don't think the accident investigation has been allowed to sort through all of the scenarios in a way that could make sure that there's not some other problem. And I think the danger in that is, is that this inertia of conclusion caused by the commission's rather public way of dealing may cause NASA to miss the real problem, and we could fix the wrong one. Now, I may be wrong; the joint may be totally the problem. But when you start talking about decision processes and all, you need to know what went wrong before you can tell where in that decision tree to look.

MacNEIL: What was your awareness of concerns about the joint in the rocket boosters when you were in the program? What level of concern was it?

Mr. GRIFFIN: Well, let me start at the beginning. The SRBs are very high-energy systems, so at best there is risk associated with them. The joints are obviously critical pieces of that system, and because you have to make those joints in the field, they can't be made under factory conditions and that's why the O-rings have the design that they have. We have always been cognizant of the criticality of the SRBs, but there are other points in the system that are every bit as critical. We've talked here for several weeks now about the launch phase. The same managers that are dealing with the launch phase questions must also answer the question, can the orbiter fly in orbit and can it re-enter? So there's many, many decisions, more than just the launch phase. Those systems are tough because they're high-energy systems. And I believe Mr. Flandro would agree with me: they are in the launch phase as critical as you can find. In any of our decisions, though, what we had to do was manage risk. People get the idea sometimes that all these managers, clear up to the top of the agency no matter where he is, is aware of every single detail. He cannot be. He must manage risk, and he has to depend on people below him who have been assigned certain responsibilities and expect the team in a pyramid fashion to make the right kind of input to launch. So it's a tough set of decisions, there's no doubt about it.

MacNEIL: Do you think these engineers' warnings that we've heard about in this case should have been communicated higher through the system?

Mr. GRIFFIN: That's hard for me to say because all I've heard is what I've heard in the testimony. I know there's been many cases in my 20-plus years of dealing in this business where decisions were made at a lower level and not transmitted, and they were right. And in this case, that decision may have been right. We don't know until the accident investigation is finished whether the joints and the seals and the temperature were the problem. Until that's done, I don't see how we can claim that any process was flawed until we get that piece of information.

MacNEIL: Do you think the commission's being unfair to NASA, jumping to conclusions, criticizing NASA in public at this stage?

Mr. GRIFFIN: I might go as far as unfair. I would prefer to say that I think they've jumped to a conclusion that they don't really have the engineering fact to base it on. And there's a lot of supposition. I've even heard the commissioners, including Mr. Rogers, ask witnesses to speculate. One thing that I have always done in my Air Force career, when I was involved in aircraft accident investigating, don't ever ask anybody to speculate. It's the worst thing you can do, because it leads you in the wrong direction too often. And so I think they're well-intentioned in trying to find out what happened -- I don't question that they're well-intentioned. But I question just the process in the way we have blown it up into more of a post-Watergate kind of atmosphere, trying to find blame, rather than finding first what caused it and then chased that train through the system.

MacNEIL: Mr. Flandro, in Atlanta, do you share that feeling about the way the commission's proceeding?

Mr. FLANDRO: I would agree that there perhaps is a little too much hurry to point the finger at some one person or a group of persons as being responsible. And I would agree that we certainly ought to look at every possible failure mechanism. A failure of this sort is usually the result of a combination of very small facts that taken one at a time might not appear to be a serious difficulty, but when they come together in a certain combination, the result is a disaster. And I think we need to look at this problem in that way and not be too quick to point the finger.

MacNEIL: Mr. Smith, on the way the commission's conducting itself, do you feel that it's -- from the point of view of the families, do you feel -- are you applauding the way the commission's going and getting at the truth, or are you worried that people are being made scapegoats or it's jumping to conclusions?

Mr. SMITH: Well, it's hard to say if they're getting at the truth. I think the points have been well taken. You've got -- an accident investigation has got to be completed. You need to find out why the shuttle didn't -- why the shuttle had the accident. Then you can back up and see where there was a mistake in the decision-making process. And it's a good point; it's not going to be one thing, it's going to be a combination of things when they finally get to the bottom of it.

MacNEIL: Mr. Flandro, to come back to a point that Pat Smith made earlier. He believed that it could well be that it's the pressure on this program from people above NASA to make it a paying proposition and therefore to keep the launch schedules going that may have induced this attitude. What do you think about that?

Mr. FLANDRO: Well, I think that's possibly a right viewpoint. I think that this is thought of as the space transportation system, and we've begun to think of it that way. After all, we had 24 successful flights, so we've begun now to feel that this is a routine kind of a thing. And possibly with that in mind then, we're not quite as careful as we could be.

MacNEIL: Mr. Griffin, what do you say about that, that the pressure to keep the thing on schedule in order to demonstrate that it can do, to the Congress and to the administration and to the public, what it's supposed to do, has changed procedures or induced a different feeling or attitude down through the structure?

Mr. GRIFFIN: Well, I was very involved in that up until about six weeks ago. And obviously we have been trying to increase the flight rate. We built more orbiters, we built more launchpads, et cetera, and so, yes, we have had a basic objective to increase the flight rate. But I can guarantee you, in no time have I ever had anybody put any kind of pressure on me as the director at the Johnson Space Center when I was there to launch in the interest of schedule. As a matter of fact, the flight that we -- I think it was the flight right before this one, we must have scrubbed five or six times. And we did it sometimes based on a pre-flight weather call or pre-prediction. And I don't call that -- in fact, I sometimes felt we were playing it maybe as conservatively as we could, maybe even a little bit too much. But there was never any pressure by anybody to do anything. We had no motivation to have a failure. I mean, that was the worst thing that could happen to us. And these people that you've heard before the commission and the people that are investigating the accident, the last thing in their life they would want to happen would be to have an accident.

MacNEIL: How does that strike you, Mr. Smith?

Mr. SMITH: Well, I certainly believe that's true. Nobody wants to have an accident. And I'm not saying that any pressure was being felt by these people maybe consciously. But I think it's a pretty well-known fact that they do want to make NASA pay its own way. And I'm just saying that maybe -- this allowed -- maybe Mr. Aldrich to hear what he wanted to hear, to go ahead and get the flights off. I'm not saying that that's true, but that's a possibility, that subconsciously there was some pressure being felt to possibly get these flights off on schedule.

MacNEIL: What about that, Mr. Griffin -- to hear what he wanted to hear or not hear what he didn't want to hear? I mean, everybody's just human.

Mr. GRIFFIN: Well, sure, sure, everybody is human, but I've known Arnie Aldrich for almost 25 years, and I understand exactly what Pat is saying, and I understand what he's saying. Arnie Aldrich is not aimed at ever doing anything that would put either the hardware, or more importantly the lives of the astronauts, at jeopardy. And I just -- I don't think that that happened. I wasn't there, I wasn't there that day. But I've known him too long and I've known other people in the chain that work for him and the people that he works for, that that's just not in the vocabulary. Now --

MacNEIL: Sorry, go ahead.

Mr. GRIFFIN: Could I add one thought?

MacNEIL: Sure.

Mr. GRIFFIN: I mentioned earlier that you manage the risk as low as you can. That's what really the job of the management of the program is. When you manage it the best you possibly can, it's never zero. It will have -- there is some risk involved. Part of that, trying to drop that to a comfortable level, for a level of risk where you feel right, can be done by hard rules, parameters that you can measure between certain limits, and then there has to be a judgment added at the end. We have not -- we -- I think NASA is a model of excellence in that respect. But we've not always been 100 successful. The Apollo 13 incident, the Apollo 1 incident; we have had other things that have happened in orbit that have never caused us serious problems. But we are not -- as you say, we are only humans, we are not machines, and neither is the management process. It has judgment associated with it, and obviously the people that made this decision to launch are going to find that problem and they're going to fix it so it will never happen again.

MacNEIL: Well, in your view, Mr. Flandro, is the problem -- aren't there two problems? One is whatever the mechanical failure was or technical failure, and the other is the failure, if it turns out to be that, of people at a certain level of NASA to appreciate the seriousness of the warnings and communicate those upwards?

Mr. FLANDRO: Well, I think those are certainly correct points. I think perhaps the most important point, though, is that everybody in the decision process was aware that they were flying under conditions that were really outside the range that had ever been tested. The solid rocket motors had never been fired at those low temperatures. So when warnings started coming up, I think there should have been a lot more attention paid to them.

MacNEIL: Doesn't that strike you as outside the ordinary way of proceeding, Mr. Griffin?

Mr. GRIFFIN: No, I don't -- I'm not quite sure which data that Mr. Flandro is pointing that's outside the limits. It's my understanding -- and I'll admit I didn't know this until after the accident, in fact after the hearing, I guess, is where I became aware of it -- that the solid motors were qualified to 31 degrees. And I don't even know, because I wasn't there, exactly what the temperature was at launchtime. But certainly that's something that's got to be looked at. There were engineers and management at Thiokol that looked at it. The answer from what I here in the testimony is that the answer came out of Thiokol to go. Now, obviously we've heard too that there was internal rumblings, and that's not unusual in any decision, whether it's go or no-go. And obviously those -- the negative side did not make it out through that process. So I don't know whether we were out of parameters or not. From what I've heard -- I mean, I'm not a solid rocket expert -- it sounds like to me that we were, albeit we had never launched at that cold a temperature, but the engine -- or the motor was qualified to that temperature.

MacNEIL: Well, Mr. Griffin, in Houston, thank you for joining us; Mr. Flandro, in Atlanta; and Pat Smith, in Raleigh, thank you. Humane Revolution

HUNTER-GAULT: We close tonight with an essay which will also appear in next week's Time magazine. The thoughts are those of our regular essayist Roger Rosenblatt.

ROGER ROSENBLATT, Time magazine: Try not to forget what you saw this week. You say now that it would be hard to forget, impossible. Filipinos armed to the teeth with rosaries and flowers, massing in front of tanks, and the tanks stopping, and some of the soldiers who were the enemy when they climbed into the tanks, embracing the people and their flowers. Call this a revolution? Where were the heads stuck on pikes? Where was the torch for the estates of the rich? The rich were in the streets with the poor, a whole country up in flowers.

In a short string of remarkable days, a crooked election was held and exposed, a dignified woman established her stature and leadership, a despot ranted, sweated, fled, a palace changed guard, all with a minimum of bloodlust and a maximum of determination and common national will. Who could forget what the Filipinos did for themselves this week? Not since their own have Americans approved so heartily of a revolution.

Pres. REAGAN: We've just seen a stirring demonstration of what men and women committed to democratic ideas can achieve.

ROSENBLATT: Yet the week's activities may slip away easily, for the same reason that they seem so astonishing and memorable at the moment. The revolution was played on television. A serial docudrama of easily read scenes and unambiguous images. Network anchormen went on location to serve as hosts. The principals in the story sought news shows as their battlefields. Exposition was clear, continuity assured. The Marcos television station was taken as a play within a play.

FILIPINO ANCHOR: Channel Four is on the air again to serve the people.

ROSENBLATT: And characters emerged. Vice President Salvador Laurel, honest, sincere. General Fidel Ramos, heroic. The once and future defense minister, Juan Enrile, sophisticated. White House emissary Senator Paul Laxalt, fair-minded, compassionate. Corazon Aquino came across as strong and increasingly impressive. And the star, as ever, Marcos, his face a chart of unreason, corruption and bluff. The hard eyes asked always, "Is there one more hand to play?" The people, "No."

Unforgettable images, so one says. And still it may prove difficult to retain them. Democracy is always more picturesque seizing government than governing. When the show from the Philippines is off the air, as it is likely to be in a week if peace and order continue to dominate, it should be easy to recollect the plot and the cast. But will you remember the theme? The theme is in fact our own, that a people released from oppression will of their natural inclinations seek humane values. A revolutionary thought to the likes of Hobbes, who called democracy an aristocracy of orators. But not so wild an idea to Americans, who over the long torturous years have seen the theme take hold.

History in some of its blacker moments has shown that democracy can twist itself into the tyranny of the many, can run to chaos and go mad. But in the long run, if it is given the long run, it usually turns kind, generous, fair. The Filipinos did not seem to require a long run. The revolution process was edited for television. Yet the old essential impulse stood up for all to marvel at. There before your eyes a thought became decision became a deed, with no other impetus than that a people realized that they had a claim on their own souls.

Where does one come up with such a radical idea? Bertrand Russell wondered sadly, "If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?" Interesting how often democracy prevails. The unwieldy comic hero of stage and screen wipes off the pie and winds up triumphant. Somewhere in the frightened, cavernous, mysterious mind, among the infinite supplies of vacillations and flaccidities, a quiet insistence resides, murmuring the old familiar lines: everyone counts, everyone is worth a great deal, everyone is responsible for the honor of his life.

Try not to forget what you saw this week. It was ourselves in celebration once again.

MacNEIL: Once again, the main stories of the day. NASA said its decision-making process is not flawed as charged by the Challenger commission. A presidential panel called for sweeping reforms in the Pentagon purchasing methods. Philippines President Aquino ordered the release of all political prisoners, including Communists. And a late story. A Swedish news agency reported that Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, was shot and killed on a street corner in Stockholm.

Good night, Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Robin. That's our NewsHour for tonight. Have a good weekend. I'm Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Good night.