NASA and Ethics: Training and Practice

Abstract

This paper is about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) and the practice of professional ethics. It has been eleven years(Jan. 28, 1986) since the Challenger accident and the past decade has been a time of investigation, assessment, and finger-pointing, as well as a time for introspection and internal reform. While there has been a lot of rhetoric about ethical commitments at NASA, there has also been a dearth of empirically-based knowledge about what NASA and its various contractors are doing about professional ethics and what decisionmaking criteria are being used. It has been a decade of cost-cutting and personnel cut-backs. One has to wonder what, in all this time, NASA has done to create an ethical climate in which events like the Challenger accident are less likely to happen. In the fall of 1995, as part of competition for a mini-grant from NASA, a request for funding to complete an ethical profile of the agency was submitted. This papeR contributes to knowledge about NASA and ethics by reporting on the results of the first year of research which was spent in doing a comprehensive literature and web-site review along with phone interviews and e-mail correspondence with NASA ethics officers. The goal of this first year was to see what ethics activity has been documented and to ascertain what work is being done to raise the ethical question with NASA. Questions for which answers were sought include: (1) What is NASA now doing regarding ethics?; (2) What training is being provided? By whom? For whom?; (3) Are the answers to these questions different at different NASA installations?