GAO Progress Report on CASIS: Disappointing
International Space Station: Measurable Performance Targets and Documentation Needed to Better Assess Management of National Laboratory, GAO
“- CASIS, however, has not been able to fulfill its responsibility in the cooperative agreement to interact with the ISS National Laboratory Advisory Committee, which NASA was statutorily required to establish under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, because NASA has yet to staff the committee as required by the NASA Authorization Act of 2008. As a result, CASIS is not able to fulfill its responsibility in the cooperative agreement that requires it to coordinate with this committee and review any report or recommendations it originates.
– NASA and CASIS did not establish measurable targets for these performance metrics, and NASA’s annual assessment of CASIS was not documented.
– CASIS officials told GAO in July 2014 that setting measurable targets would be arbitrary because CASIS processes and metrics are still evolving. In January 2015, however, the Chairman of the CASIS Board of Directors told GAO that setting measurable targets is a priority for the board. CASIS, however, has yet to establish a date by which measurable targets will be developed. Using the established metrics, NASA is required by the cooperative agreement to perform an annual program review of CASIS’s performance.”
I fault NASA and CASIS. There are several reasons.
They have a personnel problem on-board ISS, and that is that there is insufficient manpower on-board to support more than a very limited amount of crew science support.
They have an organizational problem. Except for minor little self-contained Cubesats and Nanosats, they cannot get payloads on-board in a reasonable amount of time, like under 18 months. This is owing to the complexity of their integration paperwork and their convoluted technical review and approval processes, many working simultaneously, in parallel, and competing with one another. They had an effort to try and fix that, but it petered out when they were afraid to reduce the size of the organization and the number of personnel.
The current NASA managers, early on, tried to cut and even to eliminate the science and education programs that develop and fly payloads. They did not completely succeed; there are still a handful of Earth observation, micro-gravity, and a large number of human space medicine people, but NASA no longer funds academia like they used to so professors and students are not developing much science to fly. The current set of NASA/contractor managers felt it was more important to preserve the large NASA engineering workforce rather than distributing resources towards utilization.
They also seem to take the prima dona approach that if anyone wants to fly a payload, they should attend the ISS program’s utilization conferences. Mostly the people who attend those conferences are the NASA and contractor workforce and these people have no need to learn what they do-they are already doing it. They are preaching to the choir. Researchers in industry, particularly in industries that might be able to afford a space-based research program, probably are oblivious to the ISS and they will not attend a conference they do not know about. NASA and CASIS ought to be targeting specific non aerospace industry conferences and companies and take the story-hopefully a better story- to the potential experimenters.
These are all lessons learned on past programs. NASA seems to learn no lessons from the past….every program is like starting over.
Deja vu all over again.
Another problem is that most payload developers want NASA to pay them, whereas NASA assumes it will be the other way around.
They have seen for the last 15 years, since they started assembling ISS, that there current approach does not work. It should not be a surprise; This approach has never worked in the past either. The problem is that they have seen how their process has failed them for 15 years and yet they have made no changes. They keep doing the same thing over and over again thinking something will change and it hasn’t; the situation has not improved. You might expect they would try to do things differently.
So, so surprising! Oh, did I say that outloud?
My own personal experience is not CASIS but integration. There are some really great people doing some really forward leaning stuff. However, when you have to coordinate and integrate with ISS there is a lot of bureaucracy that you have to naviguess through.
JSC, KSC, the flight docs, budgeting of astro time, logistics, money. The list goes on and on. As many of us know budgeting astro time is closely controlled and getting time is really tough and requires so much coordination. Throw on that Keith’s favorite person at NASA, the PAO, and well you have a recipe for what the GAO found.
CASIS can set all sorts of “measurable targets” but they are ultimately still at the mercy of the bureaucracy and ISS. CASIS is so much like other programs that are breaking the traditional way of doing things. I agree with what a lot of people say when it comes to CASIS PR.
CASIS, like everything else at NASA, has problems but no where near the problems such as JWST and SLS. I see both sides.