NASA Wallops Is Examining Downsizing In Plain Sight
Potential Reduction At Wallops Flight Facility, WBOC
“Goddard Space Flight Center said they are evaluating opportunities to streamline and improve the relationship between the center’s in Greenbelt, Maryland and Wallops Island. Goddard told WBOC today in a statement, “The importance of a synergistic relationship between the two campuses is vital to the future of each campus and Goddard Space Flight Center as a whole.” Bale is disappointed that Goddard is even entertaining the idea of any potential reduction. “We’re unclear and unclear is not good,” Bale said. “That area of uncertainty would be very detrimental to how we operate, attracting new customers, and attracting the potential business opportunities that continue to evolve here.” Goddard is expected to make its final decision within 45-90 days. There is a meeting scheduled next week for the many people who want to spare Wallops from any reduction with a vision of expansion in the future.”
NASA Wallops Flight Facility to explore efficiencies with sister campus, Delmarva Now
“Keith Koehler, a spokesman for NASA Wallops Flight Facility, issued the following statement from Ken Human, who recently retired from NASA and is leading the review team: In light of agency efforts to improve management efficiencies and the increasing prominence of commercial space, Goddard has formed a team to study and evaluate opportunities to improve the organizational structure and effectiveness of the relationship between Goddard Space Flight Center’s campuses at Greenbelt, Md., and Wallops Island, Virginia, Koehler wrote in an email on Friday.”
Keith’s note: Notice how NASA will not explicitly rule out job reductions at Wallops? Phrases such as “exploring efficiencies” and “streamline and improve” are the passive-aggressive ways that NASA spokesmouths avoid saying that job reductions are under consideration when in fact they most certainly are on the table. Notice how NASA will only say “The 90-day study will wrap up by late October … and is not expected to have any impact on the Wallops facility before the study is completed.” The operative phrase here is “before the study is completed”. What about after the study is completed? I’ve seen this movie before.
synergistic Haven’t heard that buzzword in awhile.
MARS would actually be a great place for Elon Musk to test the BFR. Hopefully they will make a pitch to him and then they will just be able to switch to the private side.
Wallops put out a notice several months ago that they wanted to do all kinds of expansion. Like widening the causeway to the launchpad. I guess not.
They might have gotten a feeling that this was coming, and were trying to do something big to avoid it.
How else could we pay for tax cuts for billionaires? http://Www.robert-w-jones.com
By ‘cutting governmental waste and ‘red tape,’ of course!
And there’s is a lot of it out there too.
Waste and red tape that Congess created and then rails against in their reelection campaigns!
Yes. But the world would also be better if we didn’t feed click-bait trolls. Although I often make that mistake myself. As a general rule, a one sentence comment followed by a link to the commentor’s personal web page is click bait. He has no real interest in the subject; he’s just using the discussion to advertise himself.
Edit: Rereading my comment, I wondered if I was being too hard on Mr. Jones. Then I realized that I have no way of knowing if he actually wrote the comments in question. A half-good piece of software could parse comments on a web site, put together a sentence simple sentence along similar lines, and tack on a URL. Maybe I’m entering Mr. Musk’s paranoia about AIs, but I would like this “Robert Jones” to post something a computer could not. Maybe a few paragraphs about his opinions, rather than single, isolated, short sentences?
“But the world would also be better if we didn’t feed click-bait trolls”
Point taken.
Why do we even need a Wallops? Can’t Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral handle all the launches?
I find it interesting when NASA actually tries to manage itself and look for efficiencies that there is such an uproar on here. NASA has lots of inefficiencies and duplication that no self respecting profitable business would allow or continue. I get the part about having to maintain certain national assets and sciences that do not have a monetary ROI, I lived it. These things need to happen. However, we should support these studies.
Originally Wallops was a suborbital facility and was able to provide launch facilities at lower cost than Cape Canaveral, which served primarily the DOD. The advent of Space Florida provides a simpler mechanism for leasing CCAFS facilities, but if Wallops can serve customers at a competitive cost, including the cost of approvals, access, schedual flexibility, etc, then it is hard to see how closing it would save money.