NASA Flails

A good description of the current mess, from Bobby Block and Mark Matthews:

With the space shuttle set to retire this year, and no successor imminent, today’s NASA is being pulled apart by burdensome congressional demands, shrinking federal budgets, greedy contractors, a hidebound bureaucracy and an ambitious new commercial space industry that wants to shake up the status quo.

“Our civil space agency has decayed from Kennedy’s and Reagan’s visions of opening a new frontier to the point where it’s just a jobs program in a death spiral of addiction and denial, with thousands of honest innovators trapped inside like flies in bureaucratic amber,” said space-policy consultant James Muncy.

It occurred to me yesterday that NASA is a lot like Cuba, with its perfectly preserved 1950s vintage cars. It’s frozen in time in the sixties and seventies.

[Update a while later]

An excellent analogy at The Space Review today: NASA must take a small-ball approach.

[Update a few minutes later]

Can NASA develop a heavy-lift rocket? On the evidence, the answer would seem to be “no.” Of course, the real question is whether or not we need one, but Congress does, to keep the jobs going.

13 thoughts on “NASA Flails”

  1. no successor imminent

    Bobby Block tends to write intelligent comments, but I’m always unhappy when people use the word ‘successor’. For one, the shuttle is both a spacecraft and a launch vehicle, which will not be the case for near term systems. Furthermore, there is no need for single successors in each role, in fact there are good reasons to depend exclusively on redundant suppliers, except perhaps for deep space vehicles. And even then you could argue it is better to wait for multiple commercial vehicles to make the transition to deep space operations before going beyond LEO. I think there are good arguments either way.

  2. Yes, everyone makes that mistake, but it’s really just short hand for “the next NASA-owned-operated vehicle to get its astronauts into orbit.” It shouldn’t have a successor, even in that sense, of course, because the very concept is flawed.

  3. I was just thinking about NASA and the collapse of the old U.S.S.R. and along you come with the Cuba analogy. They may have to figure out new ways to support private space (scraps from the table) once they can no longer maintain this bogus jobs program anymore.

    I’m not sure how you get beyond LEO without a base of some kind to support.

  4. Don’t you hate it when public discourse is framed in suggestive language that makes implicit (and false) assumptions? Another one of my “favourites” is when people speak of “the” HLV, which is “needed” for exploration. Fortunately this sort of thing only happens with space policy, not with politics in general. Oh wait.

  5. It would be a real hoot if SDHLV went ahead, and Aerojet came in with a superior solid rocket motor bid, on superior on all fronts — technical, cost, and schedule. The protests would go on for a decade. In fact, it might be kind of like the new Air Force tanker program…

  6. I think the flailing are the initial growing pains. You have an older generation that runs NASA, has been around since (name a very early NASA program), and knows nothing about getting people to space other than astronauts on a government vehicle. Then you have a younger generation that remembers stories about somedayy, they would get to go to space. The young ones never understood things to be government owned and they wonder why it is only a select few get to go at all.

    As NASA tries to figure out what to do next, you have members of the older generation fighting over the best method to build a government vehicle. They want support from the younger base, which thinks both sides are missing the point. The only commonality is they all fear losing jobs, either by forced retirement (with savings looking bleak) or by program cancellation (with student loans yet unpaid). So the motivation to get it right is there.

    The good news is that everyone outside of NASA is moving on. One day, NASA will quit the infighting, step outside, and notice that they are just another USPS and the age of UPS, Fedex, and DHL. Highly expensive, way inefficient, and everyone wondering why it is they still exist. The bad news is: they will still exist.

  7. “The flexible path suggested by the Obama Administration is perceived by some as too vague and indefinite (see “Prognosticating NASA’s Future”, The Space Review, March 29, 2010). That may be an accurate judgment, but that plan envisions a process rather than a constituency or destination focus, which has been typical of NASA initiatives. Such a project or destination focus becomes finite, with an end date and no logical follow on into the future.”

    A process and a destination or destinations are not mutually exclusive. Having a destination should not mean that nothing else happens afterward.

  8. but Congress does, to keep the jobs going.

    Obviously, whats needed from honorable administrators is a plan to keep people employed doing something useful instead of building a pork rocket.

  9. reader, which is exactly what commercial space would do. The current pork contractors are also some of the future CCDev contractors. Double the launch rate of ULA and plenty of people working for Boeing and LockMart will get jobs. ATK, on the other hand, won’t be laying anyone off if their SRBs are no longer required, they’ll just reassign them to working on missiles.

  10. Trent,

    That is an extremely naive view of employment at ATK if the SRBs go away. As best I can gather, they have laid off 2000 people in the last 2 years.

    http://www.standard.net/topics/atk/2010/09/30/more-layoffs-atk

    Once the SRBs are gone for good a few thousand others will likely be let go as well. Everyone that could transfer to the missile side of the house probably went there years ago. There are no more jobs to be had on the military side. ATK is clearly fighting for its life and I can sympathize. Layoffs are no fun at all, particularly during the Great Recession.

    On the other hand the SRBs are old and very expensive technology. They were built into the Shuttle program because it was believed that they would be cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Neither proved to be the case and I have seen no proof that the 5-segment boosters developed for Ares will be any better. It’s time to move on to something else.

  11. NASA is not so much like Cuba, more reminiscent of Los Alamos. I went there when I was working on my final commissioned article for Wired magazine, and gradually realized that most of the brilliant guys had left or died years ago. People were busy writing proposals to keep the grant money flowing, but there was nothing productive happening.

    I had been told to write about a huge simulation of atomic explosions (from the subatomic realm to the macro realm), which would run on (at that time) the world’s most powerful computer array. When I described this to someone who had retired from Los Alamos a few years previously, he just laughed. “You don’t think that simulation is actually going to work, do you?” he said. He then gave me a quick summary of other simulations that hadn’t worked. It was quite depressing.

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