Giving FAA and J Lynn Helms the Bad News
We met with Jenna Dorn, then Special Assistant to the Secretary, to debrief her about the meeting, our announcement that Secretary Dole had changed her decision, the National Security Council SIG (Space) group’s decision, and the options. A couple of days later, the Secretary and her immediate staff discussed what needed to happen, and the next steps. Bob Fairman came away from that meeting with the unenviable assignment to tell the FAA Administrator, J. Lynn Helms.
That morning, I was in Bob Fairman’s office learning the details of the meeting with the Secretary. My actions may have saved DOT’s chance to become the lead agency. But at the time, I was not his favorite person. Bob was very unhappy about having to be the one to tell Helms the bad news. Helms wasn’t going to be happy about the news, and Helms wasn’t going to listen to the news quietly.
Bob’s plan was to do this over the phone. “If I have to be the one who tells him, then you are going to be in the room with me when I tell him the bad news,” he said to me. As expected, J. Lynn Helms blew up. His first question was if it wasn’t going to be put into FAA, then where within DOT was the “lead agency” role to be placed? I had been asked the same question at the White House, and my answer was that we were going to put it in the Office of the Secretary where it would get the direct attention and support of the Secretary.
Helms’ problem with this answer was that he had no respect for the Office of the Secretary staff or its role. It was bad enough that the role would not be placed in FAA, but for it to be in OST was an insult. He lambasted Bob, asserting that OST had no operational experience, and he questioned how we could ever think it was going to work.
Bob Fairman was a fast thinker, but he had two things going against him: a) Helms was angry, and b) although Bob had earlier recommended putting the function in FAA, he had no idea what the lead agency involved. So I was there in the room with Bob, scribbling down answers or quietly giving Bob a response for Helms while Bob had his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. Helms was doing a lot of talking—and Bob, a lot of listening.
Bob told Helms, “It is really just making policies for launch vehicles and facilitating”. That didn’t satisfy Helms. “It is just temporary, Lynn, while we get this industry started”. Helms still wasn’t satisfied.
That line of reasoning wasn’t going to work. Helms had just lost the commercial space responsibility, and to his line of thinking it was related to aviation, i.e. his bailiwick. I realized there was an angle that would allow Helms to back off a bit. While Bob covered the phone, I gave him this argument. “There is nothing operational at the moment. We don’t even have legislation. We plan to keep the policy stuff in OST, and when there is something operational, that will go to FAA”. This line of discussion made more sense to Helms, who himself was aware there was no actual industry. That seemed to satisfy Helms for the moment, sufficient for us not to have to deal directly with the issue.
Although Bob answered Helms that way, Bob and I both knew that because of what we had told the White House and what Secretary Dole had told President Reagan, the function could never go to FAA. The function stayed in OST for the next ten years and 31 launches. During that ten years, DOT got legislative authority to license and regulate the industry, and it became an operational activity; however, by that time J. Lynn Helms was in political trouble and left the FAA. The length of time the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (OCST) was in OST gave us time to develop the office’s own regulatory strategy and identity. There were at least two attempts by FAA to wrest control of the function from OST over that 10 year period: once when Alan McArtor was FAA Administrator and then again later when FAA was under David Hinson’s leadership. Neither succeeded. Two times, I worked to try to get OCST established as a separate agency within DOT, once under Courtney Stadd and once under Stephanie Lee Meyers. Each attempt almost succeeded, but the timing was off. Then came a change of Presidents and parties and the political climate and institutional memory of DOT changed. A couple of years after I left OCST in 1995, the office and its authority were transferred to the FAA. Frank Weaver was the Director at the time. Had one of those latter two attempts to establish OCST as a separate entity within DOT succeeded, the function would never have been transferred to FAA.