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Biden Space

In Search Of That Infrastructure Stuff At NASA

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 5, 2021

Keith’s note: In case you have not noticed the big thing on President Biden’s agenda for Congress these days is INFRASTRUCTURE. A lot of NASA is falling apart. Various NASA technologies could be very useful in assessing the state of America’s infrastructure. So … I went to NASA.gov to see what NASA is doing. Nothing about infrastructure on the home page. So I used the NASA.gov search engine to see what infrastructure goodness NASA has in store when the Biden folks ask how NASA is going to help.
The top search result I got is for a NASA YouTube video titled. “Genomicic Sequencing of Outbreaks. Infrastructure, Confinement, Immune Suppression, Space Has It All“. For starters the proper spelling of the key word in this title is “genomic” not “genomicic”. Second of all this video has nothing to do with ‘infrastructure’ in the sense that the White House is interested. Third: you’d think that someone at NASA would read the newspapers and get the idea that maybe the Biden folks might be interested in infrastructure across the Federal government. Alas, NASA has never done that “whole of government” thing very well. Why start now?

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

4 responses to “In Search Of That Infrastructure Stuff At NASA”

  1. John C Mankins says:
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    Back in the early 1990s, I was ‘executive secretary’ for the NASA contribution to the “National Facilities Study” — a one-year effort examining the requirements for, and status of the US space infrastructure base, including wind tunnels, vacuum chambers, arcjets, rocket test stands, etc. At that time (c 1993-1994) there were significant shortfalls.

    Today, there is an urgent opportunity to jump on the ‘infrastructure budget bandwagon’. That’s all well and good. For goodness sake, some of the funds — if approved — should go for space infrastructure (on Earth and in space). However, there is also a real need to charter a serious, knowledgeable national team (NASA, DOD, National Security, FAA, DOC, NSpaceC, etc.) to lay out an integrated view of the requirements, the shortfalls, and the needed investments.

    Just my opinion…

    • kcowing says:
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      Totally agree. You’d think that someone at NASA – as gifted with foresight as you – would have heard the Biden priorities and started to find out what NASA does, did, needs to do, and tweak teh search function (it is easy to do) so that policy makers, NASA employees, and the public, can see what NASA’s doing as part of the Federal government. But that’s “work” and its about other people’s agenda items – so why bother.

  2. NArmstrong says:
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    I suspect that 25 years ago, like in the early 1990s, it would have been much easier to identify individual center strengths, functions and facilities than it is today. Speaking from a human space flight perspective, Shuttle Mir made good use of JSC capabilities. By the mid-1990s, one big program, ISS, with inexperienced, unsophisticated, short sighted and narrow-minded leadership, and with a new policy in which all funding went to the programs for subsequent dissemination to the centers, they managed to shut down facilities and abolish a significant part of the center engineering workforce. At JSC after all we kept hearing that JSC was the “Operations Center” and it was only our job to fly shuttles but others would be responsible for designing, building and maintaining them. For JSC, ISS and center leadership caused a lot of damage and so far they have not yet recovered. Now, perhaps there is a lot less need since others like Space X, seem to have taken over the prime duties of what used to be the Manned Spacecraft Center.

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      Maybe they never got the memo that if you design it, develop it and maintain it, you pretty much own it and get to decide who will fly it. Russians understood; MSFC understood.