Confusing White House Policy Regarding Space Actors

1. I think it’s worth mentioning that a NASA official was interviewed on the BBC and angrily denied that Shatner and his crew-mates were astronauts. So, the official US Government policy on New Shepherd flights appears to be ‘Not astronauts; nothing to do with or of interest to us’.

   1. Wow! Space is hard, public affairs less so. It always surprises me how much NASA and the White House no matter who is in office manage to screw things up.

      1. Bottom line seems to be this: For years, NASA has wanted to increase public interest in the manned space program. Now several somethings have come along that may do just that, they’re focussing on gate-keeping because they’re mad that they’re not running the show anymore.

         1. NASAs astronauts can once again make it into space from US soil but it is powered, almost independently of NASAs resources, by Space X.

2. NASAs fall from power in human spaceflight is now going on 2 decades. They seem to have lost whatever credibility they once had. They totally did it to themselves. They had best embrace whatever the other guy is bringing to the table because NASA brings so little.

   1. For planetary spaceflight, NASA is by far way ahead of everyone else. What do they do that HSF does not? Perhaps many smaller groups as compared to one large group that is much more difficult to manage from top down?

      1. I’d say smaller projects, not smaller groups (although the two are connected.) Most planetary science projects involves clear goals which can be accomplished for under $1 billion and, at least from approval to launch, less than five years. That means several can be done in parallel, and one failure isn’t regarded as catastrophic. And, in terms of staying on schedule and within the budget, the larger planetary missions do noticeably worse than the smaller ones. (Although it helps that the smaller ones have a greater chance of being canceled if the go over budget…) Bigger projects also have more problems getting approval and continued funding. NASA’s Discovery missions aren’t approved by Congress. NASA’s Discovery program is. But that’s just a line item to do a series of missions. Each individual mission doesn’t have to justify itself to Congress. Larger missions like Europa Clipper do.

         1. I think it is all about politics at 2 levels: the large, national government and industry/corporate level, and the internal within NASA level.

            Most big human space flight programs: Constellation, Artemis, Orion, SLS…depend on the efforts of a single big contractor working on a cost plus contract under the supervision of NASA. A cost plus contractor has zero motivation to complete anything; NASA is usually operating outside its circle of knowledge to make changes that cause delays.

            Most science and planetary projects do not operate this way. The instruments are built by small project teams which are competitive in their zeal to complete and ensure functionality. The bigger contractor and its NASA supervision is under constant pressure to keep up. On top of that orbital mechanics often drives the schedule; miss it and you may be waiting years or decades to make the next launch window. One other aspect and that is legacy hardware; much of the hardware for this year’s system is based on left over, previously designed hardware from a prior year’s program.

            At the internal political, within NASA level, there is another organizational influence. Two groups, the pilots and the operations ‘engineers’ have taken over. I use the term ‘engineer’ euphemistically because neither group has spent their careers designing, testing or building hardware. They have been focused entirely on checklists and procedures; paper products that have little to do with design or development. Because of their notoriety the groups get while completing their missions, some are under the mistaken impression that there is genuine design knowledge.

            It wasn’t this way during the early programs; the technical organizations within the “Manned Spacecraft Center” were individually responsible for their respective systems. When the pilots and operators took over during Shuttle, they killed those technical engineering organizations. They began to recognize NASA only as an operations organization. They gave away much of the engineering responsibilities to other NASA centers and to the Internationals.

            Today and for many years, now for decades, there are efforts to deliberately place people who have come out of operations in charge of technical functions and organizations in which they have zero background, knowledge or understanding. These “zeroes” operate at every level of leadership from the Administrator, the Program Manager, down to the smallest technical group. NASA technical expertise in leadership in human space flight is dead. We are completely reliant on externally led groups, the commercial Space X, and the Internationals, to get everything done.

            1. There were some ops people brought in on Apollo and Shuttle. McDivitt, an astronaut, and Lunney a Flight Director, but they were not brougnt in as Program Manager until after the design and development phase were complete and the vehicles were flying ‘routinely’. Prior to that time they sought out technical experts with a history of managing a large organization to develop sophisticated systems. Now, any flight director or astronaut will do and they wonder why no logical, workable plan ever materializes.

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