Jon Goff has some thoughts about outsourcing NASA employees to private industry.
It’s an interesting concept, and not to discourage him from out-of-the-box thinking, but it has several flaws, more than one of which is almost certainly fatal.
Where would they work? Senator Shelby is not going to countenance a program that ships a Huntsville employee off to Mojave (and there are a lot of NASA employees who don’t want to move to Mojave). It’s not just the jobs that are important, but where they are. So it may necessitate moving the company to places like Huntsville to take advantage of it, even though it may be a terrible location from most other standpoints (e.g., flight test). In addition, a lot of the jobs that Congress wants to save aren’t just NASA civil servants–more, probably many more of them are contractors. How does that work? Does Boeing send you an extern and get reimbursed by NASA? How do you work out proprietary issues (among others)? How do you ensure that they send you the best employees, and not the ones they were going to lay off?
Also, there will be a huge discontinuity with skill matches. The current Shuttle work force, for the most part, knows very little about vehicle development, and what they know about vehicle operations, from the standpoint of a low-cost launch provider, is mostly wrong. Also, while a lot of people work for NASA because they’re excited about space, many there do so because they like the civil service protections and pensions. They don’t necessarily want to work the long hours often demanded of a startup, and they come from an employment culture that may be quite incompatible with the fixed-price private sector. I won’t say any more than that, but this is one of the reasons that the Aldridge Commission’s recommendation to convert the NASA centers to FFRDCs went over like a lead blimp.
And how would one qualify to get these “government resources” and how many would you get? As many as you ask for? After all, if the product is free (and contra the paragraph above, desirable) surely demand will exceed supply. How will you allocate the supply. It won’t happen on price, obviously, so some other solution will have to be developed. Would a company “bid” for an extern (and would they be able to bid on a specific person, or would they have to take pot luck?) by putting some kind of proposal to demonstrate how worthy their cause and their use of her will be? Who will be the equivalent of a source selection board for such a process? Can the current acquisition regulations even accommodate something like this? I know that this currently occurs for a few individuals, where it is mutually agreed, but I’m not sure that it would work for an entire work force.
Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head.