NASA NEEDS A MODERN GEORGE FERRIS

After more than 20 years of effort, NASA's bureaucrats, scientists and engineers can't seem to solve the foam problem. The foam insulating plates keep popping off the shuttle fuel tanks, endangering the ship and crew.

With the whole shuttle program now grounded, critics insist that NASA needs a new culture.

That's a lot of bull-something. What NASA really needs is "the man."

"The man" is an individual with the ingenuity, common sense and personal drive to solve the shuttles' myriad safety problems once and for all. A man like George Ferris.

Ferris was a young engineer from Pittsburgh who came on the scene during the construction phase of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair when the city and the fair's leaders were desperately looking for something which would top the great Paris Exposition of 1889, for which Architect Alexandre Eiffel erected his magical 900-foot steel tower. And Ferris had to accomplish the feat in less than one year – a far cry from NASA piddling around with foam for 23 years.

Ferris designed a project which was so outlandishly difficult that the Chicago World's Fair leaders and committees rejected it as "too foolish and too dangerous." But Ferris stuck to his guns and the Chicago World's Fair officials ran out of time. Although the Chicago World's Fair and its grounds were brilliantly done and would eventually lead to an entirely different concept of how new cities should be built (and old ones rebuilt), everyone connected to the fair was suffering "second city syndrome" to Paris. (New York wasn't even in the running as a host city.) Finally, during the cold, wet, rainy spring, Chicago Fair officials agreed to let young Ferris erect his project.

His design was that of a giant wheel, standing over 250 feet tall, which would revolve on an axis. The wheel would contain 36 passenger cars, each capable of carrying 40 passengers plus one "conductor," whose only job was to see to the safety of the riders. The original Ferris Wheel could carry 1,476 people at the same time – virtually a whole town. If it could be done, the gigantic, revolving wheel of steel would out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower, which, while taller, was merely stationary.

Although no one had ever attempted to build even a small passenger wheel before, Ferris was faced with the seemingly impossible task of getting the whole thing done in a few months. He had to mobilize machinery makers, steel producers, engineers, bolt manufacturers, foremen and workers from all over the country. Never before in America had projects remotely similar and on such a grand scale been attempted.

Despite bad weather and construction glitches of all sorts, Ferris plunged on. No one had ever contemplated the lifting of so much steel above the ground. Construction methods had to be invented as the project moved forward. Because of his late start, Ferris could not complete his work in time for the fair's opening. But by June, the Ferris Wheel was up and running. Although its design appeared to be fragile and dangerous, Chicago's leading citizens climbed aboard to show how safe it was. Within two weeks, the giant wheel became the Chicago World Fair's main draw and made incredible amounts of money for both Ferris and Chicago. That something so new, so big, so heavy and so precise could have been built with the engineering technologies of the 19th century is probably a miracle. And to go from start to finish in less than six months was even more incredible. During the entire length of the fair, the great steel wheel performed flawlessly without incurring a single stoppage. There were no passenger casualties.

Now compare this with NASA's problem. The technologies behind the shuttle go back to the Wright Brothers and their flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Space rocketry developed in the mid-twentieth century. With that kind of rich technological heritage, handling foam in the 21st century should have been duck soup for NASA. If a George Ferris had looked at the problem, he would have probably come up with an entirely new, different and far more effective means of protecting the space craft from re-entry heat. Actually, if Ferris lived today, the space shuttle itself would have been superceded with something far larger, lighter, cheaper and safer.

Not all great problem solvers lived in the past. Remember when Mayor Koch and his gang of experts were trying to get the ice rink in Central Park to function? They spent six years trying to solve the problem, much like NASA. Then "the man" came on the scene. Donald Trump promised to fix things for free and get the whole job done in under six months. Pushed into bringing Trump aboard by an outraged public and a ridiculing press, Koch sat back red-faced and watched Trump bring in Canadian ice rink engineering and solve the problem in less than six months.

Wake up, America. The problem NASA is not the culture, as bad as it is. The problem with NASA is that they don't have "the man."