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Commercialization

CASIS Pays Big Bucks For Leadership With No Space Experience (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 19, 2018
Filed under , ,
CASIS Pays Big Bucks For Leadership With No Space Experience (Update)

Keith’s update: Sources report that CASIS Executive DirectorJoseph Vockley has actually been asleep at the wheel at CASIS. Literally. CASIS employees say that he falls asleep at both internal CASIS and external meetings – including those held with NASA. Vockley has stated to many people that he is really not in charge at CASIS – and that the CASIS Human Resources Manager and Board Secretary, actually runs the organization. This is how NASA plans to convert ISS into a fully commercial venture – the people in charge at CASIS are not actually in charge.
Keith’s 11 December note: CASIS, the non-profit created to run the ISS National Laboratory, has been on a hiring spree of late. Three high level executives have been hired at $300K+ annual salaries recently. Meanwhile, existing CASIS staff are not getting cost of living increases and having their vacation benefits cut. It would seem that no one is going to fix the big, lingering problems at CASIS.
Joseph Vockley was recently hired as the new Executive Director of CASIS. He has zero experience with space but he’s pulling in a salary close to $400k a year. In addition to Vockley CASIS has hired CASIS Chief Strategy Officer, Richard Leach (an old buddy of Vockley’s) and Vice President Christine Kretz. Neither of the positions filled by Leach or Kretz were advertised. Neither Kretz or Leach have any space experience.
When you ask Bill Gertsenmaier and Jim Bridenstine how they will be certain that the ISS will be able to be taken over by commercial funding when NASA pulls out, they point to CASIS as the prime solution to that looming problem. CASIS’ response is to hire new leadership with no basic space flight experience. This is not what you’d expect an organization that needs to beef up its space commercialization skill set would be doing to meet that challenge. Indeed, CASIS is still unable to use all of the crew and other resources that NASA offers it on the ISS.
We’ve been looking into the CASIS mess since its inception. In the past year Bill Gerstenmaier finally seemed to have gotten the message and had his staff tell CASIS to clean up its act after years after year of underperformance. In “Is CASIS Fixing Its Management Problems?” the series of NASA and CASIS interactions on management are examined. Alas, it would seem that CASIS was only paying lip service to NASA’s concerns and NASA is utterly disinterested in making CASIS do the job that they are being paid to do.
CASIS Responds To NASA’s List Of Problems With CASIS, earlier post
CASIS Is Still Broken, earlier post
Earlier CASIS postings

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

28 responses to “CASIS Pays Big Bucks For Leadership With No Space Experience (Update)”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Even worst they appear to have no experience in economic development or marketing which are the key skills that will be needed to commercialize the ISS. What a joke.

  2. Tom Mazowiesky says:
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    CASIS is the escape valve… when the ISS shuts down for some reason, NASA will stand off to one side, and say “see what happens when we’re not in charge?”

    • fcrary says:
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      Every time I think I am the most cynical and bitter person around, someone like you proves I’m not. Thanks for the Holliday cheer. It’s great to know that it’s not just me…

  3. fcrary says:
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    Wow. And that $400,000 is salary, so he’ll get more when you count benefits and possible bonuses. I guess I’m a bit jealous. I wouldn’t mind making that much in return for doing, err… what exactly? I guess I’ve lost track of it, but what is it CASIS and its Executive Director do? Or are supposed to be doing? To me, $400,000 means ten graduate students doing real, useful work.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      What they will do is just still around drinking lattes and waiting for firms to express interest in using the ISS for research and then they will tell them how difficult it will be to get a payload to the ISS so they will go away. Then when only a handful actually push on and send payloads to the ISS they will declare there is no real market for microgravity research.

      What they need to do is develop a strategy to market the various capabilities of the ISS as widely as possible to as many potential customers as possible and work with them to make the process of getting their payload flight qualified as easy as possibl. It’s how you actually build a market for innovations.

      • fcrary says:
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        Your description of what CASSIS should be doing sounds very much like a description of what NanoRacks is doing. But NanoRacks is actually making money, and most of that money doesn’t come from NASA. (At least not directly; I’m sure some of the non-NASA money is actually from non-NASA researchers who get their money from NASA contracts and grants…)

        • Richard Brezinski says:
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          I suspect if the new CASIS managers had the track records of the Nanorack management some of us might have had more confidence.

  4. Richard Brezinski says:
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    CASIS is funded by NASA and so NASA is either happy, or not, with what CASIS is doing. At one time NASA was concerned about making the space program, and particularly the human space flight program. show benefits for the expense incurred and NASA took an active role in funding scientific research and utilization. NASA no longer does this. CASIS gets, by comparison, a little money that NASA apparently hopes will be enough for them to accomplish something. So apparently NASA leadership has decided they really do not care. NASA is in the business of flying astronauts. Whether the astronauts do useful things is someone else’s responsibility. At one time NASA also designed and built spaceships to carry astronauts, but now they seem to have turned that over to internationals and industry and NASA has washed their hands of this too. NASA doesn’t seem to get less money than they used to. NASA just seems to do a lot less with the money they get than they used to.

  5. DJE51 says:
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    Hey wait a minute – Keith, you complain that CASIS doesn’t get anything done, and then you complain when they hire staff that will get them done! If we ever want CASIS to do these things, then we will need to pay their leaders, Directors, etc appropriately. Lower level hires will not be able to do the trick, or have not demonstrated this talent. So, let the professional managers that have demonstrated their talent to do things have their salaries, and let’s get on with it!

    Mind you, I have no idea whether these hires will do that, but the concept is still sound. Hire talent to get the job done that needs to be done, and pay that talent enough that they will be attracted to an alternate, non-governmental job.

    • Richard Brezinski says:
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      I don’t think the salaries of the new CASIS management is much different than the people they replaced. Those, people despite their high salaries, did not get much accomplished. The only thing of note as I recall, was an experiment looking at building a better golf ball. Was the golf ball company paying for the ISS resources? Or was a questionable experiment flying free in place of other potentially viable, valuable activities.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        There are over 23 million golfers in the U.S., individual’s who taxes have gone to fund NASA for decades, who could potentially benefit from the research on golf balls. How many American taxpayers do you estimate would benefit from the other “more valuable” activities you are referring to?

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      From the posted info it appears at least Dr. Vlockley has been working at CASIS for several months already so we should have been seeing big changes. After the failure CASIS has been, some big changes and successes ought to be in order very quickly if what you say is true. Has there been any signs yet? It appears it took several months even for them to announce the leadership changes.

  6. NArmstrong says:
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    You have to wonder whether, through NASA’s support of people with questionable ability to do the job, is NASA deliberately trying to undermine the entire National Lab concept? They have to have some reason.

    • Richard Brezinski says:
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      I don’t know whether NASA wants CASIS to succeed or not, but I have seen over many years that NASA’s human space flight program putting unqualified, inexperienced people in charge of functions they know nothing about is nothing new. Its not unique to CASIS; it happens all the time especially in the ranks of the civil service and especially in the programs. And while these inept people try to run the program, the best and most competent are leaving as quickly as they can get out. I think this explains the one reason the program is in the poor shape it is in today. Take a look at the resumes of virtually any of the NASA people in leadership positions and see what their chief accomplishments have been, particularly in R&D. Typically they get put into a management slot early and have never done any R&D, or other functions pertinent to their responsibilities.

  7. Donald Barker says:
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    So sad and unfair and wasteful. I, like many other space workers, have worked directly in the industry for over 24 years, educated in space engineering and science and make less than a 5th of the stated salaries for those people. I think there are many out there that are highly qualified, highly and directly experienced, and that understand and have ideas (based on experience and facts) as to where the the future of our space program should be headed. This is definitely not a meritocracy or even anything that will generate good or lasting results. Just a sad waste.

    • fcrary says:
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      It’s only tangential relevant but one regular NASA Watch commenter might have an interesting opinion. Instead of arguing about minimum wage laws, I think we need a maximum wage law. Or, more properly, a compensation ratio limit. That is, a law requiring a limit on the maximum and minimum compensation a company can pay employees. I think a factor of ten might be reasonable. That would mean that, if the CEO gets $400,000, then they have to pay the janitor $40,000. Minimum wage laws just push on one side of the issue and are objected to for a number of reasons. This wage ratio idea of mine would give companies the freedom to raise or lower salaries. It would just that the top and bottom don’t differ by orders of magnitude.

      • TheBrett says:
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        I like this idea. It would probably lead companies to give their regular employees significantly greater compensation in the form of shares in addition to their base pay, assuming that counts for the sake of the ratio.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          It would be interesting to see it apply to the many sport franchises were most employees get minimum wages while star players receive millions per game! ?

          • TheBrett says:
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            Given that the NFL managed to get themselves a carve-out from anti-trust rules, they’d probably wrangle an exemption on this as well.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            I’m a little surprised at this reaction from you, Dr. M; I expected something a little more like “governmental interference in the free market”.

            Perhaps I misunderstand your views?

          • fcrary says:
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            Actually, that’s the main problem with my idea. There are so many ways to game the system that it would be virtually unenforceable. In the case of professional sports, just incorporate the players and the coaches as a separate company. One that contracts facilities and services from a different company runing the stadium and paying the janitors and people working the concession stands. Then you could pay the lowest level $30,000 and the star players $30 million.

  8. Lawrence Wild says:
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    OK CASIS here’s free advice for a game plan. First go to the National Science Foundation and ask them for a list of the top ten areas where micro-gravity could produce usable results. Anything from crystal growth to materials science to aerosol studies to biological growth studies, or just anything. Second take that list and find the three leading companies that do that type of research, get the names of their R&D managers and take them to nice lunches. Find out what it would take for them to fund the Science rack experiment and build the gear. Negotiate, heck bring along the congress critter from their district and get them to cough up a grant if you have to. Then go to NASA and SPACE-X (or better yet Blue Origins if you can get Bezos to speed up his timetable) and beg, borrow, or blackmail your way to getting those payloads launched. The name of the game is in getting companies to think about and project the ISS as a valuable resource, something they integrate into their R&D process so when the time comes they are will willing be interested in fronting their own money to continue the process. Prime the Pump then keep greasing the wheels. But whatever you do be everywhere pushing everyone, Sell, Sell, Sell. Heck I learned this part in Junior Achievement back in High School. Where’s P.T. Barnum when you need him!!

    • fcrary says:
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      I didn’t make it to the exhibitors area at last week’s AGU conference. But in the past, I don’t think I’ve seen a CASIS booth. That part of the conference is packed with people selling every sort of hardware, software or service a geophysicist might need, because they know there are around 20,000 potential customers in the building. Isn’t that somewhere CASIS should want to be?

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Or, just wait for the paycheck.

      • fcrary says:
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        If you look carefully at the meter in a taxi, and at the posted fare, you’ll find someone spent time thinking about “paid by the mile” versus “paid by the hour.” If it’s 100% of either, someone’s getting ripped off. Similarly, I don’t expect CASIS managers to be paid exclusively based on results. But I also don’t expect them to be paid a flat, and high, salary regardless of how little they accomplish. And, since they are almost entirely government funded, I think I’m allowed to have expectations. A private company like NanoRacks can set executive salaries however they like; I’m neither a shareholder nor an employee, so that’s none of my business.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          I was thinking that actually little action at all would produce, at last for these folks, the same result as the effort you describe: a nice paycheck either way.

  9. NArmstrong says:
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    It is not like CASIS is a new concept that has not been thought of or tried before. There are similar examples; commercial efforts trying to find and integrate non-NASA payloads and experiments.

    As one blogger noted, NANORACKS is a similar example, with a CEO who had a lot of experience in Russian space commercialization efforts, a CTO who was instrumental in integrating payloads on Shuttle and Spacehab, and a lot of workers who came out of Spacelab and Mir.

    There was Spacehab which was a small organization composed of some very senior, very experienced retired NASA SESs, and retired McDac VPs, and several people from NASA R&D and industry. There was an experienced astronaut who mainly represented the astronaut’s perspective. Spacehab was a small ‘front’ group, supported by a larger group of very experienced and capable Spacelab/McDac and Boeing managers and engineers.

    There was Space Industries, who had some senior and very experienced NASA people at the helm. While they had trouble establishing their own mini-station they were very successful helping to develop and fly payloads on Shuttle.

    Especially in the case of people working on behalf of NASA, like Spacehab, they had very close NASA oversight by NASA people who had lots of successful experience in payload and mission integration and some NASA help when it came to making inroads into R&D industries.

    So there are people who know how to do what CASIS is trying to do.

    Not taking advantage of ISS capabilities is costing the US people billions of dollars. In all of these examples, experience and prior successes have been the keys to success.