Long Term Impact of Shutdown on NASA JSC
Impact of the Federal Shutdown on Private Industry and the Nation: The NASA-Johnson Space Center Experience, Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership
“Before the shutdown, JSC had approximately 3,200 federal employees and 11,000 private sector employees supporting its human spaceflight and exploration mission. As a result of the shutdown, JSC is closed, except for 100 federal and a very limited number of contractor employees who support the International Space Station’s operations, which have been deemed critical, or in fed-speak ‘excepted services.’ For a company, the shutdown means that contract work stops. Employees who work in a federal facility are already home. Employees who work on a contract off JSC property will be furloughed as the respective contracts run out of money. That means about 20% of the 11,000 private sector company employees are furloughed now. About 60% will be furloughed by mid October. Over 90% will be furloughed by November 1. If the shutdown continues, an additional 10,000 people will not have a paycheck. Dozens of companies will have been severely weakened, and an entire support community of small service businesses will be damaged as their customer base erodes. These businesses include, but are not limited to, small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned and service disabled businesses. The short-term harm to workers and their families is incalculable. The longer-term harm to the companies is just beginning to be understood.”
I wish more coverage of the shutdown would include contractor and “secondary” effects. Goddard has 3,000 furloughed Feds who will at least get backpay at some point, as the news frequently repeats, but the 7,000 onsite contractors are mostly furloughed and likely won’t get any pay. Then, of course, you have all the surrounding businesses, suppliers, etc. There are many furloughed employees who were barely getting by before and are now sitting at home knowing they probably won’t get paid back for this time, and that sucks.
It can even affect people who were not aware that a large part of their business depends on government contracts. I remember several years ago during the defense cutbacks in California, an example was a printing company that suddenly had a huge drop off in business from some of their largest customers. When they started contacting these customers to find out what was going on, they found out that these customers were primarily doing work for defense companies. The printer had no idea that so many of their customers were doing government work, and they found out the hard way.
JSC has projects funded on a yearly basis, at what point do they run out of time?
The message is that if you work for a private company such as space X you can expect some level of security in your job, if you work for NASA as a contractor, you might as well be an artist rather than an engineer because there is no job stability. I’ve known people to have longer more stable contracts with Pixar / Disney than with NASA, government shut downs are now a weapon in the political arsenal used by either side. Why NASA is not operated out of a trust and kept from being linked to the massive mess we call our government I’ll never know. Space and socialized services don’t mix, it’s more than likely that a government would dismantle it’s space program to provide for socialized services freebies. Commerce, Exploration, Science… you have people they have needs which create commerce, you explore, find something, study it’s properties through science then employ it solving the problems through commerce, which gains you more exploration and science. If you kill exploration and science to serve commerce, commerce can’t live on it self for very long, because instead of providing upward growth commerce alone must regulate everything, without science and exploration there are no new means to solve problems or provide for growing populations. Eventually people grow weary of those systems, and you get collapse, it’s happened again and again though out human history.
The problem isn’t any “mix of space and socialized” services. The problem is the lack of political and public will to fund NASA. If the will was there, you can be sure it would be funded.
Operate NASA out of a “trust”? Really? Who’s going to pay for that “trust”?
Well, perhaps technology transfers should contain a clause regarding profitability, once an owner has recovered initial investment, and exceeds profits of X amount they pay a one time technology transfer donation, that is tax free. That money goes into a trust that can only be used for space flight, materials, tools, and wages, and cannot be touched by any form or function of social services, meaning no pensions, or retirement benefits can be created out of that fund. Also no educational projects or anything kid related can be funded from that. I understand outreach, but it should not be taken out of funds needed to keep a mission on track and facilities up to date.
The will of the American public; typically it’s been the fear of the American public, fear that someone else is doing or going to do something that they can’t and poses a threat, I can say that in confidence from looking at Sputnik, then MIR.
In a stagnant economic situation without exploration of some sort, and the resultant break throughs, the utopian free stuff can and likely will turn the US into a 3rd world country, a large unskilled population as compared with it’s own elite class that has access to privileged information/ education technology, health services and social networks relating to employ. Such distopias resolve as makers in one class and users in another, something that has been identified in social commentaries since before the industrial revolution.
If we had real microgravity and the right tools we could be making medicine related compounds in microgravity, curing all kinds of things thought to be impossible, likely including aging. Similarly, materials science in space, building semi-conductors and optical crystalline systems would assist in creating the processing density for functional artificial intelligence systems that would provide transparency to silly political agendas.
I look forward to the day when it’s possible to say, well if you think you’re right my AI has all the documented evidence why you are wrong, and your argument illogical and wasteful.
I’m quite certain that an AI would determine, more people is better for the species due to genetic errors induced by limited gene pools, and that longer life means greater accumulation of creative knowledge and ability. The AI would then conclude that the only way the human race is viable is if it moves into space and creates habitats for itself.
Space contains unlimited matter, Earth does not, space solves all socialized service problems.
Jobs: Research, Assembly, Programming, Administration, Operations and many more…. any job you find on Earth you could have in space and there would never be enough people to fill all the positions.
Health: Greater understanding of biological systems, and their reactions to environmental changes and food sources/ compositions. The ability to monitor heath down to the molecular level and provide diagnostic solutions remotely.
Family: With endless materials and also a number of completely empty planets, families can be assured of work, and wealth. Immorality in space kills people even faster than on Earth, so people dependent on one another and separated by space are more likely to be respectful and moral. When life is precious it’s less likely to be exploited.
I see where you’re coming from with this, but I’d be afraid that it was too complex and unstable a solution. It would be created and maintained by government and law, and could (and surely would) be abused by that same government and law, who would likely 1) treat it as a slush fund to be borrowed from and not repaid (like old age pensions), and 2) not be maintained and replenished as required, similar to what happens now, and 3) quietly reallocated to something else by a rider on a completely unrelated bill. I think this simply requires more trust and good faith than would actually exist, but it would be, in my opinion, a good type of system if it could work.
I still believe that many of the answers lie in better education of the public/voters. For example, well-planned R&D always pays for itself eventually, directly or indirectly, yet not only Joe Public but more and more businesses fail to recognize this and often believe the opposite to be true. That’s just one example of how the public is hurting themselves as much as the government is hurting them right now.
Don’t ask me how to make it happen, but I firmly believe that funding things like NASA requires taking the entire decision away from Congress and somehow having it accurately reflect the informed decisions of the voting, tax-paying public. That’s how the system was intended to work from the beginning. And better (non-biased) education is a key.
No not in government hands at all in a Trust operated by something called the NASA trust, or the space flight trust, which means no bill or law could be made to access those funds because they are not technically operated by the government, but by a board of persons selected from space flight contractors and private space flight business. The whole goal is to remove instability from high technology research programs. It’s really simple to make a constitutionally operating trust that has an amendment that states the trust will freeze all assets and funds allocated to a project if those funds are found to be used for social benefits of any sort. As such there would be insurance programs available that workers can participate in that are not connected in any way with the trust.
As far as the public is concerned, there are only a tiny fraction of early adopting technology persons that know enough to understand what we are talking about, I’ve traveled all over this country, even in the last decade, and a vast majority know more about Star Trek than the realities of space flight and research programs related to energy and so on. Even most of the congressmen don’t have enough time to be updated on space programs, right now their biggest problem is how to stop the revolving door between USDA, FDA, EPA leadership positions and private corporations before more people end up dead due to profiteering in the food industry. The funny thing is that while that is a huge threat directly to their constituents, most don’t even understand that.
Basically you’ll need to create a pubic notified group of people who sign up to vote on NASA topics, and must pass a test about space flight every 6 months to prove they have kept up enough to be informed enough to vote about NASA specifically. Like a google + group, or a Coursera class, perhaps it would need to be proprietary to NASA. Since this is not about voting for representation or the federal government such a system would not run a foul of civil rights. Anyone has the right to participate, but they are required to understand or at least desire to want to understand, that’s not that hard.
I was a member of the public and I attended the Moon Mars and Beyond conference at JSC in 2005, I told Admiral Steele at that point after hearing 2 days worth of power points from all the NASA heads, that a heavy lift vehicle takes priority over all these programs. I was told the typical response of that’s a priority but…. It’s now 2013 if there had been a way to vote on what NASA would do next I know I could have campaigned and we’d already be using robots and tel-presence to build the first telescope facilities on the moon to aide in research on Asteroids and develop skills in automated construction. Heck we don’t even have automated construction of buildings on Earth yet, and there’s no reason to with cheap labor, so the technology will only be developed in locations where the environment is to hostile for people to easily work.
The public doesn’t get and hour with a power point to explain why NASA heads are lost, instead we have to watch as the paint peels off the walls, and most everything corrodes into garbage.
I see what you’re proposing, and it certainly has its attractions, but I’d be concerned about two things, neither of them new: 1) how do you get enough people “involved” to make it work?; and 2) where is the money coming from? (Both the NASA budget and the money to operate your proposed system.)
If the money is still taxpayer money, then you can’t separate it from government influence. You could in theory by crafting a specific law, but in practice it wouldn’t work out. Things that are, in all honesty, more important to the people and more “sacred” than NASA have been pillaged time and again in the past, so it would surely happen again in this case. This is an “illness” that I suspect every country faces.
I’m not sure how you would go about selling this idea to the public or the politicians. The number of people who would support this idea would be far outnumbered by those who would object to a small group, that they’re not part of, being afforded special power and privilege, and this would be completely independent of any understanding of the idea, or lack thereof. Like many other good ideas, I think it comes down to the mice voting to bell the cat.
All in all, I’d like to see it tried, but maybe first on a subset of NASA, or another smaller issue altogether, as a test case. I think we’d want to learn more from experience before committing to it on a large scale for NASA or anything else.
Just my thoughts on the matter.
People: Okay getting people is simple now, I’ve been do analysis of social media trends and usage as well as paying close attention to systems and methodologies related to activism. This can be accomplished through social media scraping, if someone needed bars and graphs and charts related to user activities and time. While I cannot endorse many of the successful campaigns, I can say that they were hugely successful in accomplishing their goals with a minority in population. So for better or worse the issue if getting people involved for the initiation of a program is solved, keeping them is a matter of delivering outcomes, and showing how whatever outcomes match the set goals that were announced.
Funding: This is fun, really because there are so many ways to mix and match funding, and also to get money from the public without ever touching government, kickstarter has proven this
http://www.wired.com/gameli…
http://mashable.com/2013/08…
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
http://www.crowdsourcing.or…
Secondly legislation to match funds perhaps by successful kickstarter programs.
This is much more complicated and many things I can point out I’ll continue this thread in a little
I’d like to see actual verifiable data that shows that a space agency can be funded via something like Kickstarter. I doubt such data exists.
You are correct about that assertion, the whole of a space agency would unlikely be funded by something as individual as kickstarter. If you have a kickstarter for corporations, where investments are on the order of millions and billions it would seem calculable, again the technology being so new, proving it’s viability is hard on a larger scale.
I am not myself a user of any of the social media tools, so I can’t saying anything about that aspect of it, but given how ubiquitous they have become so quickly, I’m willing to believe that what you’ve proposed will work, if someone is willing to invest the necessary on-going manpower.
As for your funding proposal, I’m afraid I’m not convinced. These tools are all one-time solutions, and trying to repeat their use yearly would yield a result of rapidly diminishing returns at best, even if you used only one of them a year and switched between them from year to year. Providing a yearly budget sufficient to operate NASA, or anything like it, will require something that is repeatable (successfully repeatable) and has more predictable timing aspects, even if we were to both downscope our goals (timewise) and suddenly start doing things much more efficiently and effectively. With respect, I believe that this one needs some rethinking.
Space contains unlimited matter? That’ll be news to cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists.
So, what about research done on quieting aircraft exhaust or de-icing research? Should the “profits” from those also go to manned space programs? Why? Why shouldn’t the money produced from such programs go back into those programs? Perhaps you missed the tidbit about NASA being about more than just manned space flight.
Space certainly does not solve all socialized services problems.
In context unlimited is not directly linked to the scientific measure of infinite, however, if the universe is expanding and dark matter interacts with the energy existent in the fabric of space, new matter might be formed, but the jury is out on that one.
So back to unlimited, if you by yourself walked into a Walmart distribution center you would find yourself in the midst of unlimited resources, calculated by your average life time and the resources available. When you add lots of people to that equation you no longer have unlimited resources, as such the earth is said to have “limited” resources. To get back to a condition where population numbers equate to unlimited resources you must move into the environment of space, where using Suns as a measure of matter, there are billions of suns just in a small section of our galaxy if we accept the the Milky Way is composed of 100 billion stars. At any rate at the largest population numbers you might come up with on earth there are and equal number of suns in this Galaxy, meaning in space there are unlimited amounts of matter that can be converted for the use of human kind.
Of course tell this to an environmentalist, and they will say they belong to the nature of space and the cosmos and humans should be depopulated and stay on Earth as part of their eco system. Just read an article in popular science by an author who thinks we should employ environmental impact studies on the moon.
After the cold war, NASA should have been significantly downsized to an R&D organization along the lines of NSF for space research and development. Any substantial projects should have been created as independent programs fire-walled from a smaller, more focused NASA. We are now living with the natural consequences of not following this basic strategy.
Agreed, if the trend continues we’ll end up there, it’s just hard to see all those hopes and dreams and facilities to accomplish said dreams left to crumble. Once upon a time you could even do engine tests at JSC but no more since the locals complain “it’s too dangerous and loud” they say, all the while the silly Cracking plants put out Benzene, and from time to time Texas City completely explodes with loss of life, and you don’t hear much complaining about that saying “hmm lets stop all oil cracking.” Heck if I had my way I’d launch from JSC just like Wallops, Vandenburg and Kennedy, just close the school down on launch dates, or build a really nice observation bunker for the students. The American population at large is to risk adverse to think creatively anymore, they think they are smart, and in the process of being smart they lose everything good that made America and Americans awesome.
America pretty much goes to foreign countries, blows them up then pays to rebuild them, how about with no loss of life we blow up our own facilities when it accidentally happens and rebuild state of the art ones stronger and better than the old. If JSC was surrounded by monolithic dome homes you could crash rockets all day long and not burn down or destroy a single house. I guess after a super storm comes and a tidal surge flattens the Area, as there are many wooden homes built in the tidal surge areas around NASA, using eminent domain a space port there won’t be out of the question since nobody is likely to get a permit to rebuild in those zones. I say this because I went house hunting in the area, and discovered after looking at the maps, and the sand and pebbles in the empty sites, there’s clear evidence of tidal surges where brand new developments have been built in League City.
Interesting idea. But I think that in order to bring about any sort of overhaul of NASA on that scale you’d first have to answer one question and get large-scale agreement on the answer. The question — what is NASA’s purpose? Why does it exist?
I’m not in the least interested in mission statements or visions or any of the rest of those pointless statements that were designed to sound high brow rather than actually explain anything. Everybody needs to understand and agree on why NASA exists and why it should exist (manifest destiny?, please I defy any two people to even give the same explanation of what that means).
Before we can intelligently say what NASA needs, how big it should be, what budget it really needs, etc., etc., etc., there needs to be consensus on it’s reason for being and it’s agreed goals. Many have said essentially this same idea time and again; we all nod our heads sagely and then go right back to all the same old arguments based on what each of us wants to see and considers priority. We’re stuck in a loop of our own making and the politicians are happy to have us stay in that loop because it gives them a much freer hand to play the pork game.
Much of the problem resides in having to many chiefs for the indians. No one entity is both clearly and legally at the top of the food chain that contains NASA, so all of the studies and reports and whatever are in effect all scrap paper and wasted money; just a collection of powerless opinions.
It’s not pretty, but that ‘s how I see things.
I love risk, but I’m just not sure launching from JSC would be safe… next thing you know we’ll be launching rockets from Headquarters.
Hey cars are scary and dangerous, and trucks and tankers explode quite violently, it’s nice that the damage is contained to the highways, but still the danger exists. Airliners are in many ways just as dangerous as a rocket, my feeling is that if you have a decent enough probably of safety then launch from wherever is most convenient. The quarry’s are still blasting, the liquid oxygen trucks still threading down highways near residential neighborhoods. Like I had said before make the home values near launch site drop, raze the houses build monolithic concrete dome homes for the site operators. Make it even more fun, if a rocket hits your property you get a few million dollars and a property makeover, and you don’t even have to sue for it. (Hydrazine clean up will likely mean most non concrete objects will have to be re-mediated)
I am not a US citizen, but if I was, I think I would find an email address for every one of the responsible politicians and send them a statement like Keith’s excerpt — something emphasizing all the numbers — once every couple of hours for every day this goes on. And maybe hit the fax machines of the local politicians as well. And I’d encourage everyone I know to do the same.
And just to rub it in, I’d add a question at the bottom asking: how much did you get paid this week?
This inexcusable situation is not going to fix itself, or just magically go away. And the responsible people don’t appear to be doing much about ending it. They are going to have to be “encouraged,” perhaps even have their careers threatened, by the people before they’ll act. So far, it’s not taking anything out of their pockets.
It’s really none of my business (I’m Canadian), but I have US family and friends that I care about. On general principles, it’s just not right; in fact it’s outright hypocrisy given the US platitudes about freedom and human rights. How is this different from government abuse of the people that US government politicians complain about in other countries? It’s not just a pay check; it’s the welfare and safety of thousands of US families being put at risk. I don’t hear of Frank Wolf writing any letters about this injustice.
Just my opinion, of course, but I think it should be a very loud wake-up call to everyone.