Posted: Thu, Sep 19, 2002, 7:56 PM ET (2356 GMT)
NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said Wednesday that he was disappointed in the way employees at the Kennedy Space Center were told this week that a project they had been working on was shut down. The 570 employees involved with the Checkout and Launch Control System (CLCS) were assembled in a parking lot Tuesday morning and told that NASA had scrapped the project, which was over budget and behind schedule. Word of the shutdown had already reached the press; some employees reportedly had newspapers with articles about the shutdown with them when they were officially informed. "We treated folks poorly," O'Keefe told reporters Wednesday. "That's a real failure of leadership at the program level." KSC director Roy Bridges defended the way the shutdown was handled, instead blaming the Orlando Sentinel for publishing news about the shutdown before the official announcement. "You were at fault because you got this in the newspaper before we were able to get to our people," Bridges told a Sentinel reporter. "You're actually ruining people's lives here."

Related Links:

•  Florida Today article
•  Orlando Sentinel article