NASA's Inspector General Probed

Boehlert said the Science Committee frequently sought and obtained Cobb's guidance regarding NASA's troubled financial management, and O'Keefe said Cobb was instrumental in getting the agency to improve audit procedures.

"We consciously dismissed an external audit firm, and Cobb ran the process to select the new group," O'Keefe recalled. "He was the one who [improved] the internal controls. If it weren't for him, it wouldn't have happened."

Besides the objections to Cobb's management style, the complainants accused him of suppressing or stopping a number of investigations and audits involving safety issues and the loss of considerable amounts of money.

One former member of the IG's staff described in documents a 2002 shuttle launch in which Air Force controllers at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station declared the range "red," ordering a shutdown, because the shuttle's backup command destruct system was not functioning.

The command destruct system is designed to stop the shuttle during initial liftoff by blowing off the orbiter's solid rocket boosters if spectators or bystanders are in danger. The maneuver can cause serious damage to the shuttle or even destroy it.

The controllers were overruled by the range commander -- an Air Force general -- and the launch took place, with NASA engineers unaware of the malfunction. The former IG staff member said in an interview that the Air Force passed the investigation to NASA's IG because it involved shuttle-related safety concerns, but that Cobb killed the probe in early 2005, saying, "Let the Air Force handle it."

In another safety investigation, Coldren said that just a few weeks before the February 2003 Columbia disaster, Cobb quashed efforts to inquire into the cancellation of funding to upgrade deteriorating gantries, launch pads and other shuttle infrastructure. "The shuttle program wanted it, somebody killed it, and I wanted to find out who it was," Coldren said. "Cobb said we were not entitled to that information."

In another complaint filed with the Integrity Committee, IG auditor Carroll Tom Hassell described how "a person in a South American country" over three days in late 2002 logged into the Marshall Space Flight Center's supposedly secure computer system, stole space shuttle data valued at $1.9 billion and shipped it to a third country. The complaint said Cobb's office refused to report the theft to the Commerce Department as an illegal transfer of intellectual property.

Although Hassell, who retired in 2003, and other IG complainants have left NASA, others have remained. Several employees, past and present, said they were marginalized for speaking out too loudly and too often. "My colleagues and I have been begging for work for quite a while," one source said in a letter to Nelson charging retaliation for excess zeal. "I don't have to leave the confines of the OIG offices to find fraud, waste and abuse."

Last month, an internal survey of NASA's 193 IG employees produced a stark assessment. To the proposition that "I am encouraged about the future prospects of the OIG," 45 percent of 101 respondents marked "disagree" or "strongly disagree," and 24 percent marked "agree" or "strongly agree." The rest said they were indifferent.