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Policy

Sacrificing Efficiency for Politics at NASA

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 14, 2013
Filed under

NASA has broad political support, and therein lies one of its biggest problems, Houston Chronicle
“By spreading its funds across the country, and having 10 field centers, NASA can count on a broad political base. But by having so many fiefdoms (the NASA centers), and feeling compelled to spread contracts across the country, the space agency ends up being horribly inefficient and accomplishing significantly less than it could. I’m not sure there’s the political will to fix a problem that’s been evident for four decades any time soon.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

29 responses to “Sacrificing Efficiency for Politics at NASA”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    It might be politically dangerous to fix that. NASA’s not like the Department of Defense or the like, where we can defend the agency on its immediate importance to the economy and/or national defense. We defend it on scientific, technological, and philosophical grounds, but that doesn’t tend to convince Congressfolk skeptical of spending money on anything but better weapons and social welfare programs.

  2. muomega0 says:
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    “Spreading money across the maximum number of states, and 10 field centers, seems to make limited fiscal sense”

    The usual response is that consolidation is the answer and will result in “big savings” enough to enable exploration sooner and economically. After a few years, all the programs eliminated gradually work their way back and little has changed, except for the local economies 😉

    “…feeling compelled to spread contracts across the country”

    From the map provided, the distribution occurs from the contracts way more than the field centers. Why not consolidate the contracts first for mission and operations and manage them from HQ? Why not compete the contracts rather than provide them long term and sole source, allowing 80% of NASA contracts to shuffle around the country?

    If one consolidated HSF at MSFC, would HSF end up with ISS splashdown in the next few years to pay for six day lunar sorties with no technology development except for LV engines?

    How about HSF at KSC? Would NASA end up with COTS and a BEO flexible and economical exploration plan?

    “I’m not sure there’s the political will to fix a problem that’s been evident for four decades any time soon.”

    How does one correct 70 and 130 mT shuttle derived and Orion? By consolidating them at MSFC and JSC?

    • sunman42 says:
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      “Why not consolidate the contracts first for mission and operations and manage them from HQ?”

      If I recall correctly, NASA tried just that about a decade ago, and it was an unmitigated disaster. True, you can blame that on NASA, but the one size fits all philosophy sometimes just doesn’t work.

  3. Littrow says:
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    While Berger and Kraft have some good points to make I think they are confusing a couple of issues.

    (1) the number of NASA centers. – yes it could be smaller however only a small fraction of the money (15%) goes to the NASA centers and their employees. As Gerstenmiers’ chart shows the money is spent all over the US.
    (2) Kraft says you just need one NASA center for unmanned and maybe 2 or 3 for manned. NASA does other things.

    First within unmanned there is planetary (which Kraft is thinking about) and there is earth orbital science and earth orbital applications and there is aeronautics and aviation….

    The bottom line is that NASA needs to figure out what its job is and how it intends to operate. The manned space biz in the last couple decades decided they did not need to do research or hardware development-they were all about operations. We never ceased to hear from our “leaders” most of whom are still in place that we are an ops organization. Any ops person, regardless of their background and experience could be placed into any leadership position while peopl experienced in DDT&E got no promotions and no leadership positions. These “leaders” went to great lengths to disenfranchise their R&D people, they gave most hardware responsibilities to foreign partners, they shut down many of the domestic US factories that had built the hardware they were flying.

    Now they have no Shuttle, ISS is finished with most hardware of the last 20 years built in other countries regardless of whether they put a US flag on them, these “leaders” now want to design and build new things, and yet they have little domestic capability either in terms off factories or knowledgeable people within NASA. Funny how that works. Notably even with restricted budgets in the unmanned planetary front NASA continues to make some great progress. Its the manned biz where NASA seems to have no idea what it is doing. Notably, Boeing and Sierra Nevada and Space X don’t seem to have these issues. What is the real NASA JSC, KSC and MSFC problem?

    • Littrow says:
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      “NASA seems to have no idea what it is doing.”
      “What is the real NASA JSC, KSC and MSFC problem?”

      I think I have answered my own question.
      The leadership (or lack of it) is the problem.

    • Rocky J says:
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      The 15% may be incorrect. Does this account for the contractors at those centers, the contractors off-site and contractor money laundered through each center. There are hidden costs. Berger and Kraft are correct that NASA does not need all the field centers. Fiefdoms is an absolutely correct description of how each center is operated.

      The diversity of operations and the spread across the nation was by the actions of politicians in the 60s to build political support and funding for their districts. NASA engineers didn’t conceive it or ask for it. But NASA is most definitely bloated.

      SLS as I’ve driven over and over again, has already outlived its usefulness. Commercial has a better, cheaper alternative besides the LEO Commercial Crew, too.

      The NASA structures were needed to reach the Moon by 1969. The early developments by NASA, manned and robotic, were labor intensive. We needed a lot of basic researchers, HW & SW engineers, secretaries and clerks (remember them). So one had the field centers populated. Today, the internet and present communication age makes the academic community a quick and capable means for supporting and developing NASA missions.

      There is great legacy in the senior personnel and not all are dead weight but there is an obligation and responsibility to keep careers fresh. NASA has not been effective in keeping many careers from going stale and ineffective. Part of the problem is that, like how the industrial sector has changed by robotics, computers and mechanization, similar effects are impacting the need for researchers and engineers directly employed by NASA.

      The field centers do not need to become ghost towns. KSC is trying to survive by diversifying, Ames’ Moffett Field is becoming an incubator. Portions or all of a field center could be given to its respective community and used by academia and by industry for incubators.

      SLS is not cost effective, not by cost per pound (4x more expensive than emerging alternatives) not by development cost or maintenance cost. I am sorry this is the case but commercial is emerging and will have a heavy lifter, which we do need, ready before SLS. A commercial SLS alternative does not need to be manned rated. LEO can stage the rendezvous and uniting explorers with the hardware needed for near-earth or inter-planetary missions.

      SLS is not the rocket science that thrilled the nation in the 60s. It is not innovative, nor cost effective and NASA needs to be cutting edge elsewhere now and not with making big boosters.

      JPL could almost manage all robotic SMD but GSFC contributes quite a bit. Consolidating GSFC activities into JPL would not work. Physically JPL is confined and too small and there is room to spread the wealth but the NASA Field Centers do need to be leaned down. And they have by forced attrition and there are deliberate actions. There are studies to determine strengths and weaknesses and leaning along those lines. Space advocates must speak loudly and make sure these activities bare fruit and do not become vaporware.

      Closing Centers have been talked about forever and they are still there. Gee, what is Texas’ JSC doing with 11,000 personnel? Realistically, leaning down these centers, redirecting their facilities for use locally is a good strategy. We do need to be smarter than creating mini-Rust Belts around each of those Field Centers.

      • e parabolic says:
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        > Gee, what is Texas’ JSC doing with 11,000 personnel?

        I wrote this once (a few years ago), but never posted it. The tag line is… all at ONE end of ONE building at ONE NASA center.

        In 1956, the mantra was: That is impossible – we can’t do that.
        In 1958, the world was totally different and the mantra was: “That’s hard, but what CAN we do? We’re going, get out of the way!”

        Knee Jerk Deck Chair Philosopher: “It’s impossible to completely simulate the weightlessness of space, so it must be impossible to do so usefully enough to learn how to work in micro gravity”
        FAIL: At JSC, this is commonplace, simulating to good effect in the Neutral Bouyancy Lab.

        K.J.D.C.P.: “It is impossible to completely simulate two spacecraft docking together in micro-G, so it must be impossible to simulate this condition usefully enough to test real hardware.”
        FAIL: At JSC (and a similar facility at MSFC), we use 70 tons of steel, more tons of concrete, and a robot capable of moving in 6 degrees of freedom with 10,000 pounds of force to do this quite usefully. There is Low Impact Docking System hardware mounted to it _TODAY_ for an ongoing test series. The Six Degree-of-freedom Dynamic Test System (SDTS) dates back to the the Apollo/Soyuz days but is still ready and working now. Luckily, nobody told the robot it was doing the impossible or convinced NASA that they were stupid to keep equipment like this around, up-to-date, and working.

        K.J.D.C.P.: “It is impossible to simulate humans pushing large objects out of the payload bay, or maneuvering other large payloads in micro G.
        FAIL: At JSC, this kind of simulation is done on an air bearing floor or in the Virtual Reality Lab where a human stands inside a robotic system that simulates the inertia of the load.

        K.J.D.C.P.: “It is impossible to simulate walking on the moon. Just give up.”
        FAIL: You could build a large steel structure with a fast response system to offload most of the gravity to let full scale humans practice moving on the Moon, Mars, or near an asteroid. Gosh, luckily we have a new one at JSC called ARGOS. Hmmmm, “lucky” we happened to have a robot with the same form factor as a human who could fortuitously fit into a human simulator. If you do the fanciest tourist trip through JSC, maybe you too can see videos of a bipedal robot walking in simulated reduced gravity, or an actual human floating along simulating maneuvering off the surface of an asteroid.

        K.J.D.C.P: “You don’t have a contract”
        Think about what a 1000 day timeline forces you to create: A system beyond the kind of thinking that says it is OK to take 8 months to procure the smallest part. Imagine an organization that can try various things and cast about for a real solution to a large problem before spending decades doing a Galileo-style point solution at a local optimum.

        K.J.D.C.P: “We have a risky mission here that, while relatively quick and inexpensive, is still multi-year and consequently in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Let’s put lots of expensive science hardware on it and delay the first demonstration by years! Then it will be ‘Useful’!”

        Someone call security: K.J.D.C.P. just doesn’t get it and he’s blocking the door where a prototype lunar rover wants to exit through for another test series in the desert.

        (Except for the NBL,) all this capability is just equipment I’m vaguely familiar with because I’ve walked around it: all at ONE end of ONE building at ONE NASA center. Imagine what could be accomplished if you could energetically challenge every building.

        Don’t tell us what we can’t do. Ask us what we can do, then let us do it.

        • muomega0 says:
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          Reducing docking risk by any means would be valuable. Recall that due to AR&D risk, ESAS’s goal was to eliminate all 3 launch solutions (only HLV need apply).

          Would it be practical to have a crew member stay in the NBF for a year continuously? How about ARGOS? How many crew per year? What do they do after the exercise time, so are not the science missions/repair/demonstration of technology a practical use of time? How well does the robot mimic bone and muscle loss? There does not appear to be a practical way to simulate GCR on earth, or is there?

          yes, there is quite a bit of challenging work ahead, and directing and releasing energy from every building is possible. there are no shortage of ideas, except when TRL below 6 need not apply.

          • dogstar29 says:
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            At the rate robotic technology is improving, it’s not clear how much humans can add as far as capabilities in space are concerned.

        • dogstar29 says:
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          The major obstacle to human spaceflight is not the need for simulation of weightlessness, it is cost. The value of any form of commerce has to be greater than its cost, and dedicating thousands of people to operations development is expensive. Americans no longer want to pay taxes at the rate they did in the Sixties. The numbers simply do not add up to any future for SLS/Orion.

      • Littrow says:
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        Even if you include the contractors at those centers often the companies and corporate profit are going elsewhere. There are pluses and minuses but the money is still being spread around.

        As companies like Space X are showing, take some talented and capable people and set them to work and they can produce. NASA has no shortage of talented and capable people. They need to be led to produce and perform and no doubt they’d be able to. But if the leaders just whine, then no one produces and no one is going anywhere.

        The idea that there are too many facilities or too many centers has no bearing on this. Its a false complaint. Not that much money goes into facility management. Its not like NASA has to pay taxes.

    • Gary Warburton says:
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      The real problem is not Nasa`s. The problem is in congress with the group that are doing everything they can to stall, harangue, and disrupt commercial space to make it fail for their own political reasons. Negate and ridicule these people and let Nasa do its job, get rid the rid of the Archaic SLS.and Nasa knows what to do.

  4. Spacetech says:
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    Plain and simple–You will not find the word “Efficiency” anywhere in the NASA dictionary.

  5. mfwright says:
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    Efficient or not, you have to spread out the costs (which is mostly contracts, not center facility operations and maintenance). If consolidate to fewer centers, some states will feel they are not getting a piece of the action but still have to kick in some money (taxes). Call me bias but I and many others would not be pleased if ARC were closed. Most of us in Bay Area have little to do with SLS and many fewer will ever see it launch. At least here we can occasionally enjoy “science nights” and meet some of the people that spend tax money on NASA activities,
    http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/ai

    • kcowing says:
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      You clearly have no idea what ARC does. But that is part of NASA’s problem overall: inability to relate what it does, why it does it, and where it does it.

  6. dogstar29 says:
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    There’s no point in consolidating when no one knows the mission. A few centers like JPL are quite specialized already but most could shift to more emphasis on practical commercial technology.

  7. Gary Warburton says:
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    Nasa is not going anywhere when you have a bunch of geriatic politicians running things and ordering the construction of an archaic monster rocket called SLS. Get rid of the politicians and you get rid of the problem.

  8. Michael Spencer says:
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    There are seriously 11,000 people working in Houston? Just a question from an interested citizen: what do they do? Some of them support the station. And the astronaut corps needs support. But what else?

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      NASA has over 80 active missions.
      http://www.nasa.gov/missions/#
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

      it’s not just the ISS and astronaut corps, NASA manages all the US unmanned missions around the solar system, as well as studying the Earth.

      and don’t forget the A part of NASA. Aeronautics.
      http://www.nasa.gov/topics/

      NASA is the government agency tasked with improving our general knowledge of aerodynamics, studying the atmosphere, improving the fuel efficiency and maneuverability of aircraft.

      • Brian_M2525 says:
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        You are right. In Houston there are some people who support NASA aircraft operations (astronaut T-38s, Zero-G flights, WB-57 and some stop-bys of other NASA aircraft. There are a couple dozen people doing earth observations and planetary research including curation of lunar samples. However I’d guess that all of the people working unmanned spacecraft and aircraft activities is a pretty small number relative to the 11000. I think Michael Spencer’s question is a fair one. I’ve often wondered how the numbers compare to 20 years ago or 40 years ago,

        • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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          well, at its peak during Apollo, NASA employed around 400,000 people, most of them contractors, actual number on the NASA payroll was in the high 37,000-41,000 range.

          back in the Space Shuttle days NASA had a smaller staff, averaging about 20,000 (and about twice as many contractors, about half of whom were dedicated to maintaining the orbiters between flights).

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

          a few web searches tells me that NASA currently employs about 18,000 people, which are spread out over the various NASA facilities around the USA. frankly that seems like a really low number for a major government agency.

          i think a “couple dozen” running Earth observations is a gross underestimate. nearly half of NASA’s active missions (which i linked to previously) deal with Earth observation. a better guess would be that there’s a couple dozen people for running each active mission. that would be roughly 2,000 people who are dedicated to running active NASA missions. each mission group would also have support staff and managers, people who report to the NASA administration, etc.

          also there’s many janitors and facilities maintenance people at NASA (which are needed to keep their facilities (some are 60 years old, after all) in good working order), but keep in mind they also employ a lot of people with very high levels of technical or engineering experience. their flight testing, wind tunnel testing, vacuum chamber facilities, rocket engine testing facilities, astronaut training facilities, etc. many of them unique in the world, require special technical expertise. each facility also requires support staff, managers, IT people, secretaries, etc.

          • Brian_M2525 says:
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            HUG DUG
            You keep confusing JSC in Houston with NASA across the country. You also keep confusing civil servant NASA with contractors working for companies under contract to NASA.

            The question was about 11000 people in Houston.

            You responded about 18000 to 40000 on the NASA payroll except you were talking NASA wide civil servants across the country.

            There are a small number in Houston doing earth observations and aircraft. That is only in Houston. There are also centers for earth observations in Maryland, DC, Ohio, Alabama…

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            i thought i was quite specific in separating people actually on the NASA payroll from contractors.

  9. Geoffrey Landis says:
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    I think that the problem is clearly shown in the graph in figure 1
    http://blog.chron.com/scigu
    not the stars shown in figure 2.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Clearly, but the fact that NASA management still seems to be under the assumption that funding levels will significantly increase in the future is a real problem. This is why some people refer to SLS as a launch vehicle to nowhere.

  10. kcowing says:
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    You must be listening to another video. I pushed “hard” on SLS costs in a 3 part question – but NASA had no answer. If you are going to make accusations you had better have facts to back them up. As for insulting my colleagues – you have been warned about this behavior before. Find another blog to use to hurl your anonymous insults.

    • Rocky J says:
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      My apology to the reporters. The name calling was out of line. My comments have generally been reasonable and thoughtful but I let some frustration get the better of me. I will keep to making constructive criticism.

  11. Anonymous says:
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    The talk about closing centers and gaining efficiency from not having projects being spread all over the country is woefully simplistic and misses most of the real discussion.

    As the DoD found out with BRAC, when you close a base you often just ended up adding construction at another base. You pull it off by going after the weak, often with business development incentives, giving land back to private development, abundant demolition and cleanup jobs, all construction-like, and all a great stimulus to the local area with the closure. The new base gets new construction, facilities, and so on. And the relocation and all that of people. By the time it’s over BRAC has literally seen the thing that was once in State A duplicated at the same or greater expense at State B. No savings. Zip, zero, zilch.

    There are a few key ingredients that all the simplistic talk glosses over in talking about not having NASA spread all over.

    First -answer the question of weather or not NASA maintains all it’s functional responsibilities, but in a smaller footprint? These closure debates are usually just passive aggressive ways in which spaceflight goes after aeronautics, or some in NASA wanting to get rid of some competing program, space vs. science, and all that. Notice the space people being the center of the quotes in these articles (Kraft or Gerst), and it’s being from a spaceflight state.

    Second -what vision does anyone espousing such a move present, even at a high level, that actually makes any process at the remaining sites any more efficient, properly aligning incentives (notice the centers are highlighted, not contractor plants and contracts per se which also behave like perpetual centers), and having even a high level notion of a “to-be” vision? Lack of this tells you the prior is all the there, there. Talk about functional integration, consolidation and joining groups and people to work together who were once separate, and you may finally be on to something. Moving all of A to B, as DoD found out – only imagined savings, at lots of cost.

    Lastly, when does anyone actually dare say what such a move might cost? Where has anyone ever done even just a ROM on closing one little old NASA center, to provide severance to those who might be riffed, costs to relocate those you would, costs to develop the site with the chosen state into a new usage, costs to demolish, costs to build new facilities at an existing center, more office space, moving any still needed facilities to the new site, oh and my favorite – costs to clean up and do environmental mitigation on the mess that was decades in the making.

    When you don’t see any of the prior, even mentioned, even talking about “challenges” (other than politics) once again you know you are at just the bluster and passive aggression and simplistic thinking of the people being quoted in the article.

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      very good points – and considering that many of NASA’s facilities have quite unique capabilities, you’d wind up having to either move specialized equipment halfway across the nation or demolish them at one facility and build them new elsewhere, probably at tremendous expense either way.

      Stennis, White Sands, Ames, Dryden, Plum Brook, Glenn, Goddard… which of these facilities would NASA close down? how would you choose which location is best to consolidate the very different capabilities that each facility offered? and if you did shut one down, what would you do with that location? far too many problems… consolidation would have had to been done decades ago, i doubt it would be possible now, except perhaps in bits and pieces over several years, spreading out the cost as much as possible (though that also does result in a greater overall cost in the long run).