THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 1, 1995 TAG: 9504010234
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
Come Monday morning, competition for parking spaces will ease. Come Monday lunchtime, the cafeteria crowd will have thinned. Come Monday, there will be 272 fewer civil servants working at NASA Langley Research Center.
Nearly 10 percent of the center's 2,765-person permanent federal work force accepted an agencywide buyout by the 5 p.m. Friday deadline, Langley officials said. The final tally exceeded the original target of 250. The vast majority, 256, chose retirement, while 16 resigned outright.
As a result of the buyout, the Hampton facility will be losing some of its key people - scientists and engineers with combined experience of hundreds of years. A number of them helped give birth to the manned space program, or participated in the development of key aeronautical technologies that made possible modern, cost-effective jet flight.
``We're losing some excellent senior people,'' said a senior researcher who requested anonymity. ``There will be loss of technical capability. Our younger people will probably relearn some things through their mistakes.''
Ironically, the Langley streamlining, urged by the Clinton administration and NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin, comes as the research center has learned it will participate in two new space-related initiatives.
One, the X-33 project, aims to develop a lower-cost successor to the space shuttle. The other, the X-34 program, is gearing up to design a small, reusable rocket to carry payloads of 2,000 or fewer pounds into low-Earth orbit. Langley would assist in extensive aerodynamic and structural evaluations of both vehicles in its laboratories and wind tunnels.
``With shrinking budgets and pressures to get more for less, (these programs) represent a crucial test of employee resourcefulness,'' an internal NASA memo notes.
More Langley shrinkage appears likely.
Director Paul F. Holloway has said that administration of the center's atmospheric sciences research could be turned over to a university-led consortium that could include aerospace companies. Affected would be programs totaling approximately $50 million - the center's annual budget is roughly $700 million - and slightly fewer than 400 researchers and support staff, including independent contractors.
``There is nothing worse than boredom on the job,'' Holloway said during a Thursday interview. ``I assure you, this job is not boring. You don't get an opportunity to go to sleep in this office.''
On Thursday, Holloway announced that he had decided to remain in his director's post, ending weeks of speculation that he would participate in the buyout. Holloway, 56, said he would stay at Langley ``as long as I think I'm contributing something.''
Any buyout extension appears unlikely. NASA administrator Goldin has said that no additional early retirement offer will be made. Future NASA staff reductions, Goldin warned, will come in the form of mass, involuntary layoffs.
The administrative and program changes swirling around Langley have created for the center its most turbulent time since the beginning of World War II. Then, the center increased its staff by several thousand and expanded its programs.
Langley's fate - which programs will go and which will stay - won't become clear until sometime in May.
``The thing to understand is, there are no ground rules today. There are no guides,'' Holloway said. ``That's both disappointing and challenging. It gives us a tremendous amount of freedom to do something that's innovative and of benefit to the taxpayer. But it's disappointing because the time is short, and we had hopes for a finite number of options.''
Holloway's decision to remain at Langley comes as good news to the center's shell-shocked civil servants, demoralized by the fluidity and pace of NASA restructuring.
``I'm a happy camper. He's the glue that's keeping everybody hoping that we can get through this,'' said Gaudy Bezos-O'Connor, an aerospace technologist. ``If Paul had left, morale would really have foundered. Knowing he's still there, employees will handle the change better.'' by CNB