I had to watch a live broadcast from CNN over the net, where the people moved in a jerky fashion a half-step behind the sound. The image was of the JPL control room, a dead place compared to what the Lockheed Martin control room must have been as the engineers were busy getting ready to perform health checks on the Lander the minute telemetry was obtained, the ACE busy talking with the DSN stations to prepare for lockup on the first possible chance.

You would think that all of this Mars hullabaloo would seem so far away to me now that I had left that life behind. But the minute I heard the ACE over the comm system, I felt myself sitting at the Attitude Control console, watching everyone's intense faces and getting distracted and annoyed by all the higher-ups crowding around the screen that I had to monitor.

Ten minutes before contact. My hands were sweaty. People were crowding around my computer to watch. Ten minutes after contact. Nothing. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. No contact. I felt numb, just like I had when I came in to work that fateful morning in September and heard the Orbiter was lost.

It seemed almost as if I expected failure, and all that anticipation and worry was merely an act to defy the inevitable that I now had to come to terms with.

I knew the Lander would never be heard from again after the first contact, but I kept the CNN broadcast going all through the night, a parent's vigil of slim hopes and constant prayers for a child who has been missing for days.

And on Tuesday, they admitted defeat. Another failure for the "faster, better, cheaper" mindset.

I have been spending the last day or two thinking about what these failures mean to me, having spent many agonizing hours trying to make these spacecraft work and subsequently agonizing over why I had put myself through such torture.

If I were to be honest with myself, I cannot claim complete disappointment at the failure of the missions. Such a blow to NASA is undeserved, but some eyes needed to be opened. Not at the management level, but at the ground floor, with those who had direct influence over the design and operation of the spacecraft.

When you think of "faster, better, cheaper", what do you think of? The size of the spacecraft, the rate of output of missions? What I think of now when I hear this overused mantra is people. The right people that were missing for the right job.

What I discovered while working at Lockheed was that there were three types of engineers: the old school, the new school, and the ones who wanted to do whatever it took to make things work, and work properly -- with all risks considered.

Now, the old engineers weren't always necessarily old, there were just the type that had done this job before and insisted on doing it exactly the same way it was done before, regardless of whether or not it fit with the current program, budget, scope, etc.

These were the kind that would typically do all the shouting and accusing in team meetings to stress a point or force an issue that usually had no solid foundation.

The new engineers are the kind I see developing as a result of the need for faster and cheaper programs -- people fresh out of college that are doing senior-level design work.

I am not inherently against this, but many of the new engineers simply do what they are told, and never look beyond their little task to understand what they are doing.

This is an all-too-easy mode to slip into when the pressures of deadlines loom overhead almost every single day. I needn't say any more about the other ones, those who try to make things work. Lockheed was fortunate to have quite a few of those around.

So what Laura? So what if there are a bunch of different types of people working on the Mars Surveyor Program?

Simple.

These types, when forced to work together in a high-pressure environment, just don't get along. And make deadly mistakes.

NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" is intrinsically built on the notion that a small, tight-knit group can accomplish as much as the older projects did, with improvements on design, speed and cost by knocking out much of the beauracracy and paperwork built into the bigger missions.

When you are in a group where half the people dread talking to the other half, the team breaks down, and each person is fending for themself, and not working to make sure the mission as a whole works.

I will shamefacedly admit that there were a few points during the design where I didn't care what happened to any of the spacecraft, just as long as my control designs weren't to blame for a failure.

Such a selfishly-careless attitude wasn't bred into me -- it was beaten into me. The attitude control group in no way fostered teamwork. In fact, they encouraged competition, especially between the other members of the group.

This was mostly done through blatant acts of favoritism when it came to assigning tasks to the engineers in the group. Even before I was hired on, one of the younger engineers already bore the sobriquet of "Golden Boy".

I am sure he prescribed to the philosophy of competition, since I usually had to give him the third degree just to get any information from his lips. There was another person in our group who was sure one of the other engineers was purposely trying to undermine him.

Now, on top of this dysfunctional group, let's hover some herculean deadlines. Issues get dropped because no one is willing to give up information. Incomplete analysis is considered acceptable, now that the deadline is here. Some problems are ignored because no one wants to take the blame for impacting schedule.

When I still clung to the notion of truly believing in designing spacecraft that would work, I took on one of these problems that was "conveniently" getting ignored. A member of our group had just quit recently, and left the initial attitude design for first acquisition unfinished.

By sheer chance I discovered the attitude was no longer power safe due to some recent design changes. When I brought this up to my lead, he didn't believe me, and refused to change the database since it would be locked down within a few days. I spent almost 40 hours in the next two days to prepare a presentation to the change board to allow this change.

After I had successfully presented my case, I was threatened with a permanent mark on my employment record for insubordination and disrespect. Those of you that know me are quite aware of my feistiness, but disrespect is something I have yet to attain.

It was at this point that I decided a change in groups was appropriate, and moved down to Mission Operations. There were a lot of fantastic engineers in Mission Operations, and I was glad to know them. The Orbiter and Lander would've never gotten as far through their mission if it wasn't for many of those people (mostly trying to rectify engineering mistakes).

They truly were a team in their own sense, if it wasn't for one person. Unfortunately, an entire team can be destroyed by one person, and for the Orbiter, this was the case. NASA has officially taken blame for the units conversion error, but the discovery of this error was hampered by a single person, at least from the Lockheed side.

You know how I mentioned that there were three types of engineers? Well, for attitude control mission operations, there was one new engineer, two "true" engineers, and an old engineer leading the group who wanted us all to act like new engineers and solely take direction from him.

I kid you not when I mention that he literally withheld work from each one of us as we happened to fall out of favor with him at any given time. Our new engineer felt so abused by this attitude that some days he literally wouldn't do anything unless physically told to by our lead.

Unfortunately, the new engineer, who was still pretty new to the whole attitude control business, was in charge of formatting the small forces files that were sent to JPL containing the conversion error. JPL, when they finally received the data in the proper format, did notice the error and asked us to look into it.

There were meetings almost every week between the JPL NAV guys and our group, which mostly consisted of smoothing feathers and providing JPL with empty promises. The new engineer in our group attended these meetings and usually just sat there, for fear of getting the lead mad at him again. And then the meeting would end, and nothing would get accomplished.

If our new engineer hadn't gone comatose from the constant oppression, I am sure he would have found the error within a day -- as long as it took them to find the error after the Orbiter crashed.

It was around July that I left Lockheed Martin (God is truly alive!). I had reached my tolerance limit when my promotion at Lockheed was threatened because I didn't want to rehash a scuffle with my lead that happened more than two weeks previous. It was time to find a company that understood how "faster, better, cheaper" works.

I have found that at EarthWatch, the company where I currently work. They truly believe in the foundation of teamwork, and actually screen candidates based on whether or not they would work well within the group, regardless of ability.

With over 20 people in our group right now, we're a pretty close-knit team that I know will do great things and will not sacrifice a mission due to personality problems (although we have our spats once in a while).

When EarthWatch becomes the gem of the imaging industry, I would like to hold my head up to NASA and say, "When you look for contractors to build your spacecraft, maybe you should be looking not at what price and engineering the company can offer you, but what kind of people they can offer you."

Author's note: After much deliberation, I have decided not to include any names in the following article in part to protect the innocent, but mostly because you would have no clue who I was talking about.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the January issue of the NASA Academy Newsletter, and is reprinted here by permission of the Author.

MARSDAILY.COM
NASA Denies Cover-up
by Guy Clavel
Washington (AFP) March 22, 2000 - NASA on Wednesday "categorically denied" a report alleging it knew in advance of a fatal design flaw in the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) that disappeared in space in December.

NASA's Fear Of A "Non-Upright Touchdown"
Cameron Park - November 17, 1999 - In the weeks before last December's failed Mars south polar landing, SpaceDaily's Bruce Moomaw investigated the potential for a non-upright landing and found NASA had much to fear.