ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - Sarah McGregor is what she had dreamed of being since seventh grade: a space-shuttle engineer.

Watching her climb scaffolding recently to inspect the heat shielding on a shuttle's belly may have brought to an onlooker's mind NASA's glory years, when moon landings made adrenaline flow in legions of young engineers.

McGregor, 23, looks forward to the day she sees a shuttle, her assigned shuttle, Atlantis, leap free of its launchpad at Kennedy Space Center.

"I'm trying not to think about it too much," she said. "That will be huge."

But McGregor's passion notwithstanding, these aren't the Apollo years. The agency isn't racing for the moon and extending manned-spaceflight technology. Atlantis first flew when McGregor was almost 5 - and critics say keeping it flying is a waste of money and talent.

Worse, the board that investigated the Feb. 1 shuttle Columbia accident castigated the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for having a failed culture of safety that wasted lives. And a member of that board, Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, singled out Kennedy Space Center for "dysfunctional" safety operations. He found "cause for alarm" that NASA inspectors are no longer given the opportunity or the authority to be an effective voice in shuttle safety.

KSC Director Jim Kennedy acknowledged in a recent interview that safety attitudes "need to be changed." But NASA is proud of its practices and suspicious that changes will trigger more problems. Its approach to safety reform has been tedious and in the hands of multiple review boards.

As a result, 11 months after the Columbia accident, NASA has yet to reveal to KSC workers any specific changes that will bridge the expanse among enthusiastic workers such as McGregor, the Columbia board's criticisms and Deal's concerns.

"As far as new policies and procedures - zero," said a line manager for shuttle servicing.

Long before the Columbia accident, flying and maintaining a fleet of shuttles built with 1970s technology had been a challenge for NASA.

For the past decade, Congress and the White House imposed tight budgets on the agency, even as costs of the international space station spiraled out of control. NASA's response was to delay shuttle upgrades, cut 7,000 jobs, aggressively privatize shuttle maintenance - and insist that launches go off on time for construction of the space station.

The Columbia accident, which killed seven astronauts, exposed some of the consequences of those decisions. NASA, the accident board found, had routinely ignored potential hazards in order to maintain its launch schedule. Breakaway pieces of insulating foam, like the one that struck a fatal blow to Columbia's left wing, had been observed many times before. But NASA never found a solution - other than to keep flying.

The board also found several other hazards it said should not have been tolerated. It concluded that NASA's "safety culture no longer asks enough hard questions about risk."

So besides coping with tight budgets, a stressed work force and aging orbiters, KSC now is under orders to rehabilitate its safety culture - to manage better, listen to employees better and perhaps hire more safety inspectors.

The stakes are high. The loss of another orbiter could mean the end of the shuttle program, which is essential for construction and upkeep of the $100 billion space station. That is why, officials said, they're moving slowly and carefully.

For now, KSC is simply trying to understand its safety culture. Management recently gave copies of the Columbia board's final report to nearly 13,000 center workers - from schedulers who rarely see the shuttles to night-shift technicians who have their hands on the orbiter most of the time. They were instructed to look for parallels between the flawed decisions that led to the disaster and what occurs in their workplace.

It was a move suggested by the report's chapter on safety culture: "People who are marginal and powerless in organizations may have useful information or opinions."

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Deal, one of 13 members of the Columbia accident board and commander of the 21st Space Wing in Colorado

 Springs, Colo., was assigned by the board to focus on safety operations. What he found, after talking to more than 80 KSC workers, disturbed him.

"Not one of them said safety is where it ought to be," said Deal, whose conclusions were echoed by nearly two dozen KSC workers interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel.

In particular, the Air Force general was alarmed by what he learned about the 100-plus NASA shuttle inspectors at KSC.

These inspectors once roamed hangar floors to catch worker errors and stamp them with a "hex" - a black-ink outline of a stop sign that signified a problem had to be fixed, reinspected and tracked with a new paper trail. NASA inspectors were the final assurance that the thousands of steps in shuttle servicing were done right.

But by the time Columbia disintegrated over Texas, Deal said, inspectors had come to be regarded as bogging down shuttle operations and were essentially shoved aside. Use of the hex stamps virtually stopped, the Columbia accident report found, even as the number of mandatory inspections for each servicing of a shuttle was cut by NASA from about 40,000 to fewer than 10,000.

Deal said inspectors were discouraged - even threatened - by NASA managers at KSC from making surprise or random checks of repair work. The accident report said inspectors were "told to cooperate with contractors to fix problems rather than rejecting the work."

Sidelining the NASA inspectors, Deal said, left most of the "eyes-on, hands-on" inspections to employees of United Space Alliance, the company that does most shuttle servicing and stands to earn or lose millions of dollars by meeting NASA's launch schedule.

If anything, he said, the trend should have been in the opposite direction, given that the aging shuttles were riskier to fly, launch schedules were more demanding and NASA was on cost-cutting binges.

Deal put all of his concerns together in a nine-page "supplement" to the board's report, to provide broader detail about how NASA undermined its inspection process and what needed to be fixed at KSC.

He found that inspectors weren't paid well enough, lacked sufficient training and didn't have enough clout. And there aren't enough of them.

Three years ago, NASA acknowledged its ranks of inspectors had shrunk to an alarmingly low number and hired 35 more. But since then, retirements and other departures have resulted in the number of inspectors dropping to about 110 - about the same number that NASA found alarmingly low three years ago.

As their numbers and role diminished, Deal said, so did their voice. Despite their expertise, they simply weren't being listened to by managers.

"That sets up animosity and distrust," he said.

Deal, 49, speaks with authority.

Earlier in his career, he flew an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the world's fastest jet. He has managed two aircraft-safety programs and regularly investigates crashes.

Now his command includes the Cheyenne Mountain fortress near Colorado Springs. The installation, originally built to survive and respond to a nuclear attack, monitors spacecraft and space debris. Its sensors recorded the fiery end of Columbia and a crew that included commander Rick Husband, a friend and Air Force colleague of Deal's.

The Air Force has learned hard lessons from aircraft crashes and lost many high-ranking officers. "There are a lot of (Air Force) bases named after dead guys," said Deal, who hopes NASA comes away from its hard lessons with a stronger approach to safety.

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The NASA official most responsible for formulating the KSC response is Kennedy, who took the post in August.

He is a career manager for NASA; people who have worked with him say he is "hard-nosed" about engineering excellence. Yet Kennedy, 54, is also spoken of as having strong "people" skills - potentially useful for probing and repairing safety culture.

"Nothing will be ignored," Kennedy said. "The report is going to make us better."

He defined the culture of safety as the "natural behavior" of workers when they don't have specific orders to follow. At KSC, he said, that behavior is "90 percent good."

Several reviews are under way to determine whether inspectors have enough authority and independence, whether the number of mandatory inspections should be changed, and whether inspectors are able to have their concerns heard by management, he said. Kennedy added that, when Deal released his supplement, he was told by NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to learn the concerns of shuttle inspectors.

"He said to me to personally go out and talk with every one of the quality (inspector) people," Kennedy said. "I'm going to give them answers to every one of their questions."

To a layman, it's difficult to see how safety practices can be improved at KSC, where shuttles launch, land and are serviced.

The simplest tasks are done meticulously. For example, there is a rule that workers "tether up" - wrap security tape around wristwatches and otherwise secure personal items - so that foreign objects don't fall into a shuttle.

More complex procedures require multiple sets of eyes. A task such as installing a shuttle computer requires technicians, engineers and inspectors for the physical labor, while more engineers and inspectors orchestrate the procedure from a distant control room via headset radios and video images.

The pampering given a shuttle is apparent from a look at Atlantis, on track to be the first orbiter to return to flight. Catwalks, vent ducts, power cabling and test tools engulf the orbiter. As many as 150 "worker bees" swarm over it.

The 90-ton spacecraft is enormous - but their work often involves minute adjustments with thumb and forefinger grasping an instrument, while the pinky juts outward.

On a recent afternoon, USA mechanic Billy Witt attached metal brackets called spanner beams to the back side of a U-shaped, reinforced-carbon-carbon panel that costs nearly $1 million and is part of the leading edge of Atlantis' left wing.

The nuts and bolts at the attachment points of spanner beams must not be too tight, to allow for flexing during the jolts of a launch or landing. So Witt, wearing a jeweler's magnifying glasses, used thin strips of metal - feeler gauges - to check the attachment points for tolerances that are thinner than a sheet of paper. The task looked like flossing teeth, only with much more repetition.

"There's a lot of precision work," said Witt, a 13-year veteran.

Precision takes time; attaching spanner beams to a panel requires more than four hours - and there are 44 panels.

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The two shuttle disasters that have occurred so far, Columbia last year and Challenger in 1986, were triggered by design flaws that were widely known but ignored by the space agency.

What worries Deal and others, though, are the one-time glitches - such as wiring damaged by workers, tools inadvertently left onboard an orbiter and other mistakes - that can sneak through the process.

Bob Sieck, a retired NASA engineer who lives in Titusville, Fla., said he learned early in his career just how easy it is to overlook glitches waiting to cause serious problems.

He was a troubleshooting engineer in 1970 when Apollo 13 flirted with disaster. He subsequently turned his knowledge of the event into a lecture about safety.

During a ground test of the Apollo 13 rocket, engineers were unable to drain liquid oxygen from a tank that had been slightly damaged by handling. Their solution was to turn on a heater, warming the super-chilled liquid into a gas that then escaped through a vent. It was a tricky operation, with no sensors to monitor rising temperatures.

Sieck remembers how Johnson Space Center told everybody not to worry, asserting that a thermostat inside the tank would prevent overheating. But the engineers overlooked the fact that the thermostat was certified for 28 volts from the rocket's electrical system - not for the 65 volts provided by a ground supply.

Nobody realized it, but the thermostat was fried - and temperatures inside the tank got hot enough to char insulation on electrical wiring. The damaged tank was launched with Apollo 13. Two days later, the wires sparked an explosion - and only luck and heroics got the crew home.

"It was preventable," Sieck said, who went on to direct 52 shuttle launches. "On a day-to-day basis, you've got to be looking out for clues and signs of breakdowns."

To Deal, one such breakdown occurred when a part that wasn't flight-certified - tested to withstand the rigors of spaceflight - was bolted onto an Atlantis engine a few years ago and launched into space.

It was a metal plate - about 2 inches wide and 4 inches long - used to cover an inspection hole. It had been certified for use only during engine test firings.

Deal said NASA downplayed the incident, declaring there wasn't significant risk of catastrophe. But that didn't matter, he said, because NASA's certifications for flight hardware are the backbone of shuttle safety.

"How many of those things do you accept?" Deal said. "Zero should be the standard."

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Nearly three years ago, NASA inspectors began to push hard for a better way to look for signs of breakdowns in critical hardware. They wanted to inspect engines just before they were installed in shuttles.

At that point, the 14-foot-tall engines are in a horizontal position, and inspectors can stand nearby while the engine is rotated much like a chicken on a rotisserie. Components, such as the plumbing for a powerful pump that spins at nearly 40,000 rpm and could fill a swimming pool with liquid hydrogen in about a minute, are in plain sight.

Once the engine is installed, inspectors must squeeze into a cramped compartment, deal with obstructed views and risk damaging critical parts.

NASA has rejected the request several times, saying that its study of mandatory-inspection points hadn't found such an inspection necessary.

But Columbia accident investigators also learned that NASA wouldn't budge because there weren't enough inspectors to do the additional checks.

That, said Deal in his supplement, is a "poor excuse."

Deal said he isn't certain why NASA has gone to such great lengths to silence its inspectors. But a widely shared perception among workers is that NASA, shackled by tight budgets and schedules, does not want to interfere with shuttle servicing by USA.

Another common belief is that USA has been blinded by the formulas that determine its paycheck, which is about $1.5 billion a year. The company, owned by The Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin, is paid for its costs, such as payroll, and earns profits by meeting a variety of standards that include quality, deadlines and cutting costs.

USA officials have said that safety is their first priority, which is reinforced by the compensation formula. But the Columbia accident board warned that NASA's method of payment to the company "sends a message that money, not technical excellence, is the important objective."

Nearly two dozen KSC workers interviewed for this story did not want to be identified for fear of retribution from their employer.

"They would whack me in a heartbeat," said a longtime shuttle technician who works for USA.

The new KSC director may be well-suited for the task of sorting through workers' perceptions and worries about safety practices.

Kennedy has brought regular-guy credentials to the space center, where the uniform in the three shuttle hangars is often blue jeans and a T-shirt imprinted with the logos of NASCAR, Mosquito Lagoon or Bike Week.

His red pickup, parked in a prominent spot in front of KSC headquarters, has a Ron Jon Surf Shop license plate - he grew up nine blocks from the Cocoa Beach business and bought surfboards there - and a Harley-Davidson sticker (though he now rides a BMW).

He is said to find it easy to talk to nearly anybody and to have a photographic memory for faces.

"The one issue that means the most to me and has all the cultural implications wrapped up in it is, do we have this feeling of openness and honesty with all employees where everybody's voice is valued?" Kennedy said. "I think that's the biggest cultural issue we are facing."

One worker, hearing that statement later, agreed, saying, "A big part of the culture is, 'I'm an engineer, and you're not, so shut up.'"

One thing that Kennedy and other shuttle managers agree on is the commitment of KSC's workers.

"The people who actually work on the shuttle know what they are doing and how to do it," a USA scheduling specialist said. "I think they put their heart and soul into it."

Because they are so committed to their jobs, many workers said, there has been no crisis of personal confidence because of the Columbia accident.

Scott Thurston, the NASA vehicle manager for Atlantis, and Roberta Wyrick, the USA manager for Atlantis maintenance, agreed in an interview that it's hard to detect a change in behavior since Columbia.

There's a sense of loss, they said, but no guilt or additional stress.

"They know everything they are doing is critical," Wyrick said.

Deal is quick to agree that the KSC work force performs at a high level. Yet, he cautions, "worker bees can do only so much" and said many would like to have their tasks reviewed by the "extra set of eyeballs" provided by NASA inspectors.

The general said he is concerned that the space center still hasn't revealed any proposals to restore the opportunity and authority for NASA inspectors to do that.

"Congress has asked us to come back in a year" for a follow-up investigation, Deal said. "If they are looking to get a passing grade, they ought to make sure our concerns are met."