WASHINGTON - NASA may be in for a major shift in the way it handles its day-to-day operations. A Senate panel now plans to look into the federal agency's management process in light of a string of troubles in the past year including grounded rockets and lost spacecraft.

The Senate Science, Technology and Space subcommittee will hold a hearing on March 22 to examine such issues as NASA's Mars missions and delays in the International Space Station.

In addition, congressional aides say that legislation may be introduced to address a growing concern on Capitol Hill that NASA may need a major management overhaul.

The hearings will focus on a pending Congressional report from the General Accounting Office involving personnel issues at NASA, aides on Capitol Hill say.

The panel will take a look at several failed missions that left the agency in a drawn-out public relations nightmare despite its share of successes last year.

As NASA closed its book on 1999, it left in its wake two unsuccessful robot missions to Mars, an ineffective space telescope, delays in sending shuttle fleets and a space station spinning unproductively.

In addition to mission failures, the agency has been plagued by a critical reduction in skilled staff after emerging from a restructuring in the past several years.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an independent NASA advisory group, addressed these concerns in its recent annual report saying that "NASA must continue to address workforce problems aggressively and establish program priorities that ensure a workforce capable of achieving long-term safe and effective operations."

At a budget hearing before Congress last month, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin addressed the workforce problem vowing to hire more people this year.

He also said that NASA would be conducting a personnel review with the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the federal government that monitors the space agency’s operating expenses.

Congressional sources say that they will be looking at the connection between staffing problems and missions. The failed missions the panel will focus on:

• Back-to-back failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September, and the Mars Polar Lander in December, which left the agency red-faced over the Red Planet.
• The big-budget $3 billion Hubble Space Telescope which shut itself down in November after it lost enough of its working gyroscopes to make it unusable. Scientists knew back in February 1999 that Hubble was on its way to failing but said there was little that could be done then to launch a rescue mission.
• Delays and nearly $1 billion in cost overruns on the International Space Station.
• Three shuttle missions that got off the ground but were tripped up by glitches. The first was Discovery on STS 96 in May, which had to be held back for repairs after a hailstorm caused damage to its external tank. The second was Columbia's flight in July. Due to bad wiring it could have suffered an early engine shutdown after launch which would have resulted in an emergency landing. Backup systems keep the engines running. The last was Discovery, which had its launch delayed nine times over two months.
• The X 33 program which has been criticized for delays, technical problems and an increase in costs resulting in a negative impact on space shuttle and space station operations.

Calls to NASA headquarters on the topic of the upcoming hearing weren’t returned.