A long (I haven’t read the whole thing yet) article on SpaceX and other private companies versus NASA in terms of its appeal to employees:
SpaceX inspired Hoffman to reimagine a career with opportunities to work on her engineering projects even if the technicians were busy and not have it considered diverting work from contract labor. If she chose to work long hours at a commercial company, she wouldn’t be “punished for being an overachiever.” If she spent months on a project, she could be assured it would get launched into space.
For Hoffman, having her projects go unfinished at NASA may have been the personal foul that tipped her toward private industry, but she also suspected her own engineering frustrations were only the surface byproduct of more institutionalized problems. NASA’s financial insecurity, its lack of administrative direction and its bureaucracy had worn on her confidence in its future.
As the author notes, today’s NASA isn’t capable of doing what the 1960s NASA could.
[Update a few minutes later]
Ah, here it is:
“You can take safety overboard,” Leonce said. “I’ve sat in many meetings where we’re just arguing over the simplest things. It just becomes borderline ridiculous. I don’t think we could have ever gotten to the moon if the culture that now exists at NASA existed in the ’60s.”
Leonce said he understands the older generation’s anxieties considering they’ve worked through the deadly Challenger and Columbia disasters. Yet private launch companies will be more attractive for engineers fresh out of school, he said, because that culture of risk aversion is “a death in itself.”
Yes.
I would note that one of the reasons I left Rockwell over two decades ago was that in my decade and a half in the industry, virtually nothing that I worked on ever came to fruition (and many of the things I had to work on never should have). I also think that Bonnie Dunbar is deluding herself.