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Cutting NASA Education In Order To Save It

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 23, 2017
Filed under

Keith’s note: This is kind of strange. If the intent for the NASA Education Office was to do something “NASA-wide” then you’d think that an agency-wide organization/approach would be needed for that. This is what the NASA Education Office has done for decades. But instead of thinking agency-wide and fixing the NASA Education Office they have decided to close the agency-wide Education Office and shove the remnants inside of the Science Mission Directorate. When I asked Acting NASA CFO Andrew Hunter about this he said that NASA does not have a response to this issue and that Acting Education Office AA Mike Kincaid is working on that. So, in other words, they are shutting down the Education Office – without any plan to do all of what the Education Office has been doing for several generations. Hunter and (earlier today) Robert Lightfoot both went off on the whole “inspring the next generation” thing and rambled on about websites and social media – most of which is not paid for by NASA Education office but rather by NASA PAO or the mission directorates. Yet somehow we are supposed to think that doing less education stuff can actually result in more inspiring of the next generation. But wait: Hunter thinks Congress will add things back. So why delete things in the first place if you expect them to be put back?

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

26 responses to “Cutting NASA Education In Order To Save It”

  1. NArmstrong says:
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    I don’t think it is so strange.

    It is basically admitting that Space Ops and Exploration has not been supporting education since the current AA came in and about the time that Sean O’Keefe left.

    The same bunch who has no strategy for where they are going, who killed Shuttle without a hearing in favor of Orions and SLS that “are going to allow engineers to do exciting things again” (at many times the cost), despite the fact they probably will never fly no matter how many billions they keep pouring in, a gateway space station out in the middle of no where for no conceivable purpose, and the same bunch that shut down ISS science, just as ISS was getting ready to support science, is also against STEM education, because it is someone else’s job.

    I wonder what Space Ops and Exploration’s job is? They aren’t exploring. They aren’t launching astronauts. They have no plan to go anywhere anytime soon-really no plan for at least a generation. There seems to be no strategy other than give billions to big contractors for what seems to be diminishing returns.

    Seems to me there is a logical answer to this. The millions that go into education are nothing compared to the billions that permit engineers to feel excitement; but the millions for education actually allows the engineers to communicate excitement. The billions for engineers is going exactly no place fast nor anytime soon.

    Maybe we need some leadership and strategy in Space Ops and Exploration for a change? They have not had any in a long time.

  2. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Not really. Once again I refer you to the INSPIRE Act signed into law.

    https://www.congress.gov/bi

    It proposes an agency wide mentoring program. In private industry such mentoring programs have been more effective in bringing minorities and women into organizations and advancing them on the career ladder. Its a customized, personalize approach as opposed to the old industrial model the education office is built around.

    BTW, under the INSPIRE Act NASA was supposed to deliver a report to Congress on the mentoring strategy.

    “Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate a plan for how NASA can best facilitate and support both current and retired astronauts, scientists, engineers, and innovators, including early
    career female astronauts, scientists, engineers, and innovators, to
    engage with K-12 female STEM students and inspire the next generation of women to consider participating in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and to pursue careers in aerospace.”

    • NArmstrong says:
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      So mentoring a few thousand employees (a program NASA has already had for many years) is now the equivalent of educating millions of school kids ? Sure thing.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Mass production does not equal quality production. Eye candy is not the same as education, and they could get the eye candy from the PAO.

        • NArmstrong says:
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          NASA has about 15000 employees. Maybe 5000 work in human space flight. Maybe a fraction of those, lets say 1000, participate in a mentoring program. Those are almost all degreed engineers, some with multiple degrees. They are no longer a primary target for educational content.

          There are 50 or 100 million students in schools in the US. NASA Education is supposed to be creating products of value for that rather large part of the populace. Content that would be of value is not “eye candy”. If PAO produces “eye candy”, I have not seen it. If PAO is expected to produce educational content, then Education should probably be incorporated into PAO. I think this is what NASA is trying to kill.

  3. TheSpaceGuy says:
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    Imho the science mission directorate has always beat the pants off of the office of education because it is the SMD education efforts that are closer to the exciting mission science and have been the ones that produced all of the exciting content and the teacher workshops. I have never really understood why NASA had an office of education in the first place. It has always been the smd doing the actual heavy lifting in the nations classrooms

    • NArmstrong says:
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      I agree with you that SMD has produced some exciting content and conducted or sponsored some good teacher professional development. Not all has been about science. An example was the 7 minutes of terror video about Curiosity’s landing on Mars, several years ago.

      I don’t think that Space Operations and Exploration produce anything like that, at least not in many years. Space Ops and Exploration gets a budget fully commensurate with SMD, so why doesn’t it produce anything analogous? It has some exciting things going on but they don’t use that exciting content to educate or inspire.

      SMD’s downfall has been the coordination of its educational content across programs. That is where a centralized NASA education office could be valuable-to identify the content needed for education purposes and to coordinate the production of the needed content.

  4. Neal Aldin says:
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    If I understand the Space Ops and Exploration methodology, they have tried to shut down activities they felt were, lets call, ‘superfluous’. The things they have systematically stopped funding are history, knowledge management, science, media services, which included photo selection and distribution, and now education. Apparently their philosophy was that their group was responsible for making the exciting thing, human spaceflight, possible and diverting money into these ‘superfluous’ functions which do not contribute to the space launches directly, might enable or accelerate human space flight goals.

    Some years ago NASA decided that instead of separately funding such’superfluous’ functions, the Programs, Shuttle, Station, Orion…would receive all the funding and they would be ‘taxed’ in order to pay for ‘superfluous’ functions, like education, and also things like facility maintenance, field center operations. So these ‘superfluous’ functions no longer had an independent means of support. They were completely dependent on the Program taxation for survival.

    I see some serious issues with this short sighted approach.

    First, if they do not have the field centers functioning and well maintained, then everything becomes more difficult.

    Education, knowledge management , history and photography distribution should have internal as well as an external components. Internally, these functions maintain, support and help to develop the workforce.

    For some reason, the Space Ops and Exploration workforce no longer seems to be capable of carrying out the simplest functions. There seems to have been no continuity of experience and expertise from earlier programs, such as Shuttle or NASA Mir, to ongoing programs like Station or new programs like Orion. Orion was poorly defined and poorly designed. No standardized process for establishing the program was followed. Apparently the Constellation Program forgot they had to define basic parameters like program goals and requirements before they set out to build the spaceship. Space Ops and Exploration has spent tens of billions $$ for a spacecraft that was safe, simple and soon, and yet they have almost nothing to show for it. Resting on the laurels of an earlier generation, which gained its expertise in Programs like Apollo, a generation ago this same outfit built and placed into orbit an ISS, but now their organization is so hamstrung that ISS is not operating effectively and its potential for accomplishment is being wasted on a daily basis.

    The conclusion I draw from this is that their philosophy does not work. Their ” ‘all business’, all engineering, all the time and stop the ‘superfluous’ activity” approach is a chauvinistic engineering management philosophy that has failed to maintain expertise and capabilities.

    Their is also an external component. Starting with Mercury and continuing through Shuttle, every mission got books devoted to the mission’s plan before flight, and then books that published the program’s record of accomplishment after each mission.

    Now the content can be placed on line instead of all in books, so distribution is relatively inexpensive, but you still have to formulate the content in a coherent and meaningful way.

    If you look at the Science Mission Directorate, this is still their approach, and they seem to accomplish their mission. Is it any wonder that education will be continued in SMD?

    If you look at ISS, this is no longer done. ISS is simply a continuum. The crews are no longer distinct. there are no programmatic goals. There are no ‘missions’ being planned or completed. Rockets come and go, but no one really knows what reason they were planniñg to go for or what magnificent discoveries they might have returned with. Why bother to publish a lithograph or a webpage of the best mission photos, when we can have a website where the public can go to see ALL the photos, despite the fact that 99.9% offer absolutely nothing to see.

    Once again, the engineering management’s philosophy is a failure. No one is broadcasting news of your great achievements, because no one knows what they are. Perhaps the first failure is a management philosophy which does not work, and the second failure is putting engineers in charge of communications, or media distribution, or education. They don’t seem to be getting anything across.

    A fix for this dysfunctional situation is required and it has nothing to do with eliminating education. The fix is to eliminate dysfunctional engineering management and their dysfunctional philosophies.

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      I think the attitude that the NASA manned space management seems to be showing is a juvenile, teenager’s -like attitude that they already know all there is to know and need not think about what is or is not known or try to document or disseminate what is known. This is a very problematic and short-sighted attitude. I think Mr. Aldin’s comment that this philosophy is not working is right on he mark. It is probably why NASA is no longer making progress and instead is wasting my money.

      • NArmstrong says:
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        Yes, I am reminded of an ancient Chinese proverb: if you are thinking about next year, plant a bush, if you are thinking about 10 years from now, plant a tree, but if you are thinking about a hundred years from now, teach your children…

  5. Daniel Woodard says:
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    I’m of mixed mind on this. There are two divergent goals.

    1) Train the relatively small number of students that really want to work in the space program through intensive onsite co-op and similar programs. Here the cost is quite high per student and getting that money for the department or program that will employ the student (particularly to provide an actual job opportunity) is the long pole.

    2) Promote science and technical education throughout the nation. Here onsite programs are impractical. There are approaches that might work; teacher training, university competitions, web resources. But a leader with experience, judgement, motivation and a clear sense of purpose is needed; otherwies the program can become nebulous and ineffectual. Having websites approved by NASA authorities and managed cor consistent format by NASA IT contractors is a lot less critical than having them frequently updated, interesting, informative, and ideally having informed personnel with time to answer student questions.

    • Neal Aldin says:
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      I think NASA does some of #1 but I doubt its a huge expense. Mainly NASA is getting cheap labor in the form of students working as coops or interns. From what I have seen and experienced they students and interns could get a lot better training if the program were managed better, including finding g organizations who want and make good use of the students.

      For #2, two forms of published assistance are required. One are displays of significant NASA achievements. These should be in the form of wall posters and short, interesting, educational videos on a par with PBS NOVA. These ought to be made available for free and be in libraries and schools across the country as well as be available on line in an easily findable and well organized archive. More extensive classroom teaching materials ought to be available for all grades and they have to be a complete unit, all the required teaching materials about different aspects of space flight. The materials should be written and presented in the manner of Project Physics textbook (developed under government grant). And the teachers need to be trained to use these.

  6. Space Lorax says:
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    Worth noting: the
    internships/fellowships funded and administrated through the education
    office comprise a serious percentage of the technical population of NASA
    centers. And a lot of those interns go on to careers at NASA, or would
    like to.

    The real concern here isn’t losing generic “inspiring STEM activities” for children. It’s cutting the next decade’s workforce off at the knees.

  7. Donald Barker says:
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    It is part of our wider national illusion that our education system as a whole is ok, when it is not. WE are way down in the quantity, quality and inspiration ladder for all education levels below college. And the lowering of the standards bar across the board has been eating away at the upper education system for years. Add that to the ongoing socio-technology addiction/usage experiment we are doing on ourselves and WE are setting up this country for a huge educational gap in the near future; possibly the downfall of the nation. NASA is just one small example of this ongoing problem that no one seems to want to address or fix. Sad.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Education – particularly higher education – has been completely monitized. Areas of study are ranked, not for intrinsic value, but disproportionally according to future earnings. The country has wrapped itself in the whole ‘business case’ mentality, and at great peril. A student turning away from a natural passion, seeking instead a major in business administration fails herself and fails the country.

      Worse, our government reflects these debased values by failing to support education. Students are now, on average, $38,000 in debt when graduating; the total student debt is twice the credit card debt. Yep: of the entire country.

      Blameworthy, too, is the tendency to need short term results, a predilection also learned from Wall Street. The value of an educated populous is beyond dispute; but funding higher education won’t show results for decades. Like physical infrastructure, this investment would pay off handsomely.

      The obeisance we pay to STEM must be similarly addressed. Yes, NASA naturally focuses on these studies, but the country should not. Nor should we value an engineering degree more than one in Classics or History; let students follow their interests. We will all benefit.

      Steve Jobs had a lot to say about the intersection of art and technology, building one of the world’s great companies by seeking and finding this critical inflection point. We would all benefit from this point of view.

      • Donald Barker says:
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        Yes. And I was only speaking of the quality of education and actual learned knowledge of students have when reaching upper education levels, which is getting worse and worse every year on average.

      • NArmstrong says:
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        I agree with your insight and I think the problems you identify are exactly the reasoning behind the NASA management’s philosophy that there is no need to educate for the future-internally inside NASA and externally to students and the public. NASA thinking is that tweets and Facebook posts will get them public attention and in turn Congressional budgetary support this year or next. That doesn’t seem to be paying off. The NASA budget keeps declining. Other agencies-look at the NRC or NIH over the last 15-20 years, have seen enormous budget increases and now are being pared back; NASA’s budget has been in decline for years and how NASA has been operating has not helped. I genuinely don’t think the NASA managers think they need to provide the information needed to educate students or the public since those grand and inspirational missions like the Lagrangian Point gateway, is right around the corner and that mission will encourage and inspire future learning-except the grand mission that is being done today is ISS, and the grand missions NASA management is dreaming of are decades off and may never happen. Now people are recognizing that a lot of NASA’s talk is unlikely. In many respects in the past, education was the face of NASA. NASA management has not been thinking about how to educate people about today’s program in a long time.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          ISS could be made more inspiring by better reporting on ISS research. Of course, a little more funding for outside researchers to actually build experiments, particularly for Earth observation, would also help.

          • Brian_M2525 says:
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            I agree that there does not seem to be a cohesive story about ISS, whether its research or other aspects, like how it relates to future or past programs. And just talking about science doesn’t tell anyone about why the ISS and its human crew are important or about the benefits of space-whether its the environment, or location. Like, lately they have lots of nanosats, which are great because the sat owners don’t have to deal with NASA, but are these sats are just hitching a ride and the presence of an ISS doesn’t really provide any benefit?

            I like to think about AMS. Arguably its one of the biggest, most important, potentially most significant scientific experiments on ISS. It is sponsored by the Dept of Energy, and has dozens of nations involved. NASA, ISS Program works essentially as a contractor to the DOE, actually making money by providing integration and operations services.

            Besides never hearing this story, why is it that its beneficial for AMS to be on ISS? Is there something unique of benefit, like the astronauts can maintain the instrumentation?

            Remember about 10 years ago, after many years and many tens of millions of dollars of services provided, NASA told the AMS project they were no longer going to launch AMS and no longer place AMS on the ISS. It took an act of Congress to stop this and redirect NASA. NASA and ISS were seen as unreliable partners. For some reason they opted to stick with ISS. Whats the benefit?

            The whole story gives NASA a black eye-its NASA’s own doing-but what the ISS Program does, if anything is talk about the science of AMS. I’m sure some physicist somewhere cares about that part of the story, but why is ISS important for AMS? If it is, no one has said why.

            Its not just reporting on the research. Why is there a space station?. ISS has about 12000 people supporting it. With all those people, no doubt highly trained, why is it that they cannot figure out, communicate, educate about ts value and potential?

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            There are major potential benefits IMO, not least because externally mounted sensors can actually be made university-level academic science projects, a critical part of NASA education.

            Finally after all these years ISS has an Earth-pointing platform for sensor payloads. Assembling a sensor, packaging it for external mounting, power and data and getting manifested on a commercial cargo logistics flight are much less expensive than getting a launch on a satellite, and allows much better performance, lifetime and maintainability than a cubesat.

            There have been excellent proposals for medium-aperture astronomical telescopes for the ISS, particularly in the UV. Not everything needs the Webb, and the vacuum around the ISS is actually quite clean, and maintainability would be a thousand times cheaper than the Hubble. But so far there isn’t any funding.

            Finally, back in the 70’s when he Space Operations Center was proposed,there were plans for fueling and checkout of probes and co-orbiting sensor satellites.

      • fcrary says:
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        I agree with most of that, but not when it comes to the “S” in STEM. When it comes to financial prospects, a Bachelor’s degree in astronomy is worse than one in history. You aren’t likely to get a job in the field without going to graduate school, and outside the field, well it’s assumed that history majors at least learned to do things like write coherently. Their job prospects are better. If someone does go to graduate school in sciences, the pay as a graduate student is very poor, and after getting a PhD expecting job security or to ever make over $100k is unrealistic. So, technically-minded students with eye for their financial prospects tend to go into engineering rather than science. That hurts science, and also hurts diversity in science. People from lower income backgrounds tend to be more concerned with future, financial prospects.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          As the father of a PhD candidate in physics, I have to agree. It’s important to understand the universe, but who will pay for the work?

  8. fcrary says:
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    This might be a very simplistic idea, but… If NASA want to inspire the next generation of potential engineers and scientists, what about having NASA do something inspiring? It’s been a while since they did (at least on a big scale.)

    • Neal Aldin says:
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      Its is kind of a chicken and egg question. Most of this is specific to the human space side, although unmanned programs originally modeled their efforts on the manned.In order to get the $$ to do inspiring things, NASA has to ‘sell’ whats its doing. One of the principal ways it has done this in the 20th century was with educational content. The content was in the form of paper products: educational publications (EP), NASA Facts (NF), and mission reports (MR), among others like special publications (SP). There were also 16mm films. These were all designated ‘product lines’. In addition, the NASA Media Services Office made sure to assist mainly the news media in getting out content by providing Press Kits, Photographs, Videos and audio reports. Beginning with the 21st century, NASA eliminated most of these product lines and started shuttering the offices and eliminating the people. Someone at the top figured that since there was now an internet, the citizenry would find information if they were looking for it. But NASA stopped producing it. NASA also withdrew funds from much of their speakers bureau and exhibit programs. Even in technically creating the information that would go into these products, every program through Shuttle, wouldnhave periodic technical conferences in which the engineers and offices were asked to stop what they were doing and write in a report what they had done, what they had accomplished it, what they had learned, and what they recommended for future programs. You can find the voluminous midprogram and final program reports because they are highly sought after collectibles. At the time they were the principal way NASA formally told people what they had accomplished. The last of these was the Shuttle Technical Conference in 1984. NASA management has lost their way. They decided with an internet there was no longer a need to create the content. So chicken or egg: do you digest what you’ve done and distribute it in a meaningful way? or do you just do the job and hope someone finds out about it? NASA management have taken the latter approach. They are hoping everyone finds out what they’ve done through twitter, facebook and instagram and if the public or students (about 1/3 of the public) really are looking for information they can use Wikipedia. Since no one knows or understands what NASA is doing any longer, Congress is not providing the funding, which means NASA is doing less and less which means few inspirational missions. But who would know, since NASA no longer tells what they have or have not accomplished?

  9. Jack Burton says:
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    What year did the education office start?

    • Neal Aldin says:
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      There has always been one in NASA, so since 1959. NACA also had a small education office, although in NACA one of the major goals of the agency was the preparation and distribution of educational reports about ongoing research. Many project engineers remember that much of their work and time was spent in writing the reports.