This is the core problem in every mature bureaucracy, and it goes in spades for government at every level.
As I and many others have pointed out here, early NASA — Apollo’s NASA — was a freak of circumstances that is unlikely ever to be repeated.
Short of burning down the whole place and starting over with a cadre of engineers and technologists with recent wartime experience in the military or industrial production, NASA will not and cannot move nimbly in any endeavor.
Military production? You mean the kind that spent more to procure and build the “next-generation” fighter than any previous military procurement, only to have that fighter thoroughly beaten (and out-classed) in a dog fight by a fighter from the previous generation?
Actually, one of the main ingredients in Early NASA (to pin a label on an era) was the large cadre of people who had had experience in WW2 and Korea. Anyone of an age to contribute to Early NASA was used to getting big important things done within large organizations run under military discipline or its industrial equivalent.
For the industrial side of it, check out Maury Klein’s tome Call to Arms and you’ll understand the extent to which large industrial companies were put on wartime production regimes.
Early NASA was a direct inheritor of the mindset that technical people brought to the new agency — a mindset conditioned and trained by then-recent wartime experience. If you were 25 years old in 1944, you were 39 years in 1958 — approaching your peak ability to contribute.
My basic point is that The Right Stuff wasn’t just for the flyboy jet jockeys. There was a civilian managerial and engineering version of it that was just as important to making Early NASA perform.
The “military industrial complex” of today does not work that way. I only got a whiff of it through the NPOESS project; the Air Force was in charge of procurement (including the selection of contractors, etc) and, to my mind (as I was down in the trenches looking up), NPOESS was a failure largely due to the way Air Force (ie, the military), and the contractors it chose, handled the many problems that arose.
Rather than studying the issues and making difficult decisions to move forward, they were mired down in study after study after study (and PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation). The end result was pretty predictable, a skyrocketing price (those studies cost money) with not enough to show for it.
Now the NASA of today may have morphed away from the “Right Stuff” approach of yesterday as well. And lord knows NASA has problems with project management. But I will say that once NPOESS was junked and the civilian and military weather satellites once again split up, NASA (as NOAA’s procurement arm for the newly created JPSS program) managed to right the ship for the future polar-orbiting weather satellite system. Meanwhile, the Air Force is still flailing around trying to figure out how they are going to move forward from DMSP.
So, despite the problems NASA has in terms of project management, I’ll take it over the military in in a heart beat.
I don’t think “military” is a useful term in this case. As you point out, the current DoD practices are very different from those of the late Second World War and immediate post-war era. That’s an American tradition. Our peace time military has generally been inefficient and, honestly, a political and botched job. In major wars, after a year or two, a the concept of getting the job done and dealing with problems efficiently comes to the surface. So we can’t really talk about using the military as a model for NASA without saying what sort of military.
Somebody put it together short and sweet for me the other day. NASA showed up at Stennis in 1962 with 7 NASA personnel and a bunch of contractors. They cut the first tree in 63 and were testing Saturn 5 V LESS THAN 3 years later. Today, there are 300 NASA personnel there.
Too many cooks, at every level. And email seems to be the enabler of this, bringing way too many people into every decision.
This is why they have private, no-press conferences. It presumably allows them to talk with slides without having everything vetted by the NASA PR and Legal offices.
This was not a private no press conference. Gerst said what he said – to a large audience, on the record, at an event being webcast live – globally – with media in attendance
Which makes the whole thing a bit archaic. If everything he says is recorded and broadcast, what he says is part of the record. In the last century, only the words on the slides counted in that way. But when people can also download what someone actually said, this emphasis on reviewing the slides seems absurd.
“How is an agency that can’t easily approve meeting slides going to make itself lean enough to send humans on #JourneyToMars ?”
It’s going to do what it’s already doing…help as many commercial space startups as it possibly can…in every way that it can…and then buy products and services from them at commercial prices.
I heard an interview with Dr. Zubrin recently. Of course he was going on and on about Mars, but he’s convinced that eventually the smart people in Congress will see the folly of SLS. The first task being, of course, to find those smart people in Congress. Most of them are staff, I suppose.
He also pointed out that including Sierra in the latest rounds gives NASA four options to orbit, all different to a greater or lesser extent.
Well, while some NASA initiatives have moved to take advantage of a service (commercial) approach, with more efficient partnering (vs. cost-plus contracting and it’s bloat), we still have a battle raging to do more along these lines.
I agree whole-heartedly with your summary – a simple point about helping to grow healthy, competitive markets from which NASA can later buy significantly more affordable services as elements of it’s space exploration.
Keith, With all due respect to the good work you do here. These kind of posts are the ‘bad’ of your creation. Let it go. Nothing constructive here…I sympathize as a co-former NASA center employee. Have a great week, Neal
1. Gerst said what he said – to a large audience, on the record, at an event being webcast live – globally – with media in attendance 2. I am a former NASA civil servant too.
I don’t agree with your conclusion saying that due to NASAs constraining slide approval process, NASA can’t get to Mars. In my opinion, that undermines your valid point that NASA should overhaul that slide approval process. I believe in you, and I think you can do better than that. Thanks for the comments Gentle/Michael/Spacegaucho.
I think I agree with Keith. Let me fill in the steps in the logic. Sending astronauts to Mars requires clear, efficient communication between the people involved. Presenting information at various meetings is an important part of that. If such presentations require an impractical review process, the necessary communications can become disfunctional. That could keep NASA from sending astronauts to Mars.
NASA is doing exactly what congress wants. Do you think the congressional members want to see streamlining? Cost savings? LESS SPENDING in their district?
I disagree. This is NASA Watch holding a government agency responsible for how it operates, which is exactly what the press should be doing. While slide review is not the most important issue with NASA, Keith’s point is that the bureaucracy involved is symbolic of agency-wide issues.
I don’t think I realized that approvals of slides was necessary. Is this something that every NASA personage must do? Obtain PAO and Legal approval before using a PP set publicly?
The details vary, but yes. Some sort of approval is typically expected. That could be about ITAR issues (everything must be checked to make sure there are no violations), that no contractor-propriatary is included, etc. The rules may be applied to presentations which are clearly not relevant, or they may not. The approval can take a day or a month. As far as I can tell, there is little coordination or consistency between centers, and things change, apparently at random, every few years.
There is a requirement for review and approval of scientific or technical papers. I pretty much stopped writing them when people who had no relevant experience or expertise were put into the review cycle. Presentation charts in my experience were at your own risk. The key to making them noncontroversial was to use more images and fewer words.
I think Gerst and the current NASA leadership screwed up in their decision making-not in their presentation charts.
They and their immediate predecessors were the ones who supported, without any discussion, shutting down Shuttle because, after all, every one wanted to go somewhere instead of going in circles. These same people started out on a Constellation plan that never made any sense and which was unaffordable and unsupportable. These were the same people who put some inexperienced sycophants in charge first of Constellation and later of Orion so that the development process devolved into an interminable delay yet with major milestones being achieved on a daily basis. We are on the way to Mars (just not in anyone’s lifetime who is conscious today). These are the same guys who made their ISS organization so convoluted that they lost sight of its purpose, lost their user-base, and now want to get out from under this burden.
While Orion and SLS were foisted on NASA, this happenned because there was no plan and there was no plan because there was no NASA leadership.
I’m glad KC caught this introduction by Gerst and put it in the context of just how NASA expects to get to Mars when it’s own leader admits that even getting talking slides approved is a matter of thousands of reviewers. An exaggeration, but still on point.
Recently someone in our Mars groups asked how we (NASA) expect to make progress towards Mars when we can’t even integrate handfuls of people across centers, or their analysis tools and software, or their contractors, for even the simplest of tasks without useless meetings, huge cost estimates for the analysis, and the usual endless bickering over just what to analyze in the first place. Any doing things turns into Vulture’s fighting over the resources to do the thing!
Teams that can’t even agree that costs, or reliability and safety are important, or that are just trigger shy all around about what they do and say are the best sign no one is going to Mars anytime soon.
Teams that wordsmith endlessly about how results will be presented, or what conclusions are acceptable are all part of parcel of the problem of Gerst’s “thousand reviewers” statement.
That said, Gerst is partly to blame himself for this situation, as I have seen him go out of his way to assure that stirring up controversy or deviating from the SLS/Orion party line will not tolerated. No small wonder that in such an anti-innovation environment even he can’t just write down some public thoughts without reviews that are death by a thousand cuts.
You bring up some good points. Gerst has been too accepting of the status quo. He assumes the best people are doing the best job they can. Many of the people have had little or no expertise to apply and too many have been taking care of their own interests. But I’ve rarely seen Gerst take a strong hand in fixing people problems. Likewise with technical issues. He was lucky he had just gotten out of Shuttle when Columbia happened, otherwise he might have been forced to retire early. ISS today is largely a failure in its intended mission to host world class game changing science because of bureaucratic infighting with people who have no real knowledge and maybe no interest in its success and because this makes the process to get onboard so difficult, expensive and time consuming. And now the effort to try and make people believe that NASA is about to send people to Mars in an Orion capsule.
This is the core problem in every mature bureaucracy, and it goes in spades for government at every level.
As I and many others have pointed out here, early NASA — Apollo’s NASA — was a freak of circumstances that is unlikely ever to be repeated.
Short of burning down the whole place and starting over with a cadre of engineers and technologists with recent wartime experience in the military or industrial production, NASA will not and cannot move nimbly in any endeavor.
Military production? You mean the kind that spent more to procure and build the “next-generation” fighter than any previous military procurement, only to have that fighter thoroughly beaten (and out-classed) in a dog fight by a fighter from the previous generation?
Uh, thanks but no thanks….
basic straw man masquerading as snark….but I gotta say what the guy calling himself “Publius” said wasn’t worth repeating either
The F-16 was a work of genius, to a great extent the vision of one man, John Boyd, brought to reality by another, Robert H. Widmer
It is good to have a sense of history.
Actually, one of the main ingredients in Early NASA (to pin a label on an era) was the large cadre of people who had had experience in WW2 and Korea. Anyone of an age to contribute to Early NASA was used to getting big important things done within large organizations run under military discipline or its industrial equivalent.
For the industrial side of it, check out Maury Klein’s tome Call to Arms and you’ll understand the extent to which large industrial companies were put on wartime production regimes.
Early NASA was a direct inheritor of the mindset that technical people brought to the new agency — a mindset conditioned and trained by then-recent wartime experience. If you were 25 years old in 1944, you were 39 years in 1958 — approaching your peak ability to contribute.
My basic point is that The Right Stuff wasn’t just for the flyboy jet jockeys. There was a civilian managerial and engineering version of it that was just as important to making Early NASA perform.
The “military industrial complex” of today does not work that way. I only got a whiff of it through the NPOESS project; the Air Force was in charge of procurement (including the selection of contractors, etc) and, to my mind (as I was down in the trenches looking up), NPOESS was a failure largely due to the way Air Force (ie, the military), and the contractors it chose, handled the many problems that arose.
Rather than studying the issues and making difficult decisions to move forward, they were mired down in study after study after study (and PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation). The end result was pretty predictable, a skyrocketing price (those studies cost money) with not enough to show for it.
Now the NASA of today may have morphed away from the “Right Stuff” approach of yesterday as well. And lord knows NASA has problems with project management. But I will say that once NPOESS was junked and the civilian and military weather satellites once again split up, NASA (as NOAA’s procurement arm for the newly created JPSS program) managed to right the ship for the future polar-orbiting weather satellite system. Meanwhile, the Air Force is still flailing around trying to figure out how they are going to move forward from DMSP.
So, despite the problems NASA has in terms of project management, I’ll take it over the military in in a heart beat.
I don’t think “military” is a useful term in this case. As you point out, the current DoD practices are very different from those of the late Second World War and immediate post-war era. That’s an American tradition. Our peace time military has generally been inefficient and, honestly, a political and botched job. In major wars, after a year or two, a the concept of getting the job done and dealing with problems efficiently comes to the surface. So we can’t really talk about using the military as a model for NASA without saying what sort of military.
Somebody put it together short and sweet for me the other day. NASA showed up at Stennis in 1962 with 7 NASA personnel and a bunch of contractors. They cut the first tree in 63 and were testing Saturn 5 V LESS THAN 3 years later. Today, there are 300 NASA personnel there.
Too many cooks, at every level. And email seems to be the enabler of this, bringing way too many people into every decision.
Interesting example. In fairness they also had experienced rocketeers, all of whom had given a fair amount of thought towards building der Saturn 5.
This is why they have private, no-press conferences. It presumably allows them to talk with slides without having everything vetted by the NASA PR and Legal offices.
This was not a private no press conference. Gerst said what he said – to a large audience, on the record, at an event being webcast live – globally – with media in attendance
Which makes the whole thing a bit archaic. If everything he says is recorded and broadcast, what he says is part of the record. In the last century, only the words on the slides counted in that way. But when people can also download what someone actually said, this emphasis on reviewing the slides seems absurd.
Also explains why upwards of 80% of the slides NASA management show are the same from talk to talk over the years.
You got it!
“How is an agency that can’t easily approve meeting slides going to make itself lean enough to send humans on #JourneyToMars ?”
It’s going to do what it’s already doing…help as many commercial space startups as it possibly can…in every way that it can…and then buy products and services from them at commercial prices.
Yes.
I heard an interview with Dr. Zubrin recently. Of course he was going on and on about Mars, but he’s convinced that eventually the smart people in Congress will see the folly of SLS. The first task being, of course, to find those smart people in Congress. Most of them are staff, I suppose.
He also pointed out that including Sierra in the latest rounds gives NASA four options to orbit, all different to a greater or lesser extent.
Well, while some NASA initiatives have moved to take advantage of a service (commercial) approach, with more efficient partnering (vs. cost-plus contracting and it’s bloat), we still have a battle raging to do more along these lines.
I agree whole-heartedly with your summary – a simple point about helping to grow healthy, competitive markets from which NASA can later buy significantly more affordable services as elements of it’s space exploration.
Keith,
With all due respect to the good work you do here. These kind of posts are the ‘bad’ of your creation. Let it go. Nothing constructive here…I sympathize as a co-former NASA center employee.
Have a great week,
Neal
1. Gerst said what he said – to a large audience, on the record, at an event being webcast live – globally – with media in attendance 2. I am a former NASA civil servant too.
I don’t agree with your conclusion saying that due to NASAs constraining slide approval process, NASA can’t get to Mars. In my opinion, that undermines your valid point that NASA should overhaul that slide approval process. I believe in you, and I think you can do better than that. Thanks for the comments Gentle/Michael/Spacegaucho.
I think I agree with Keith. Let me fill in the steps in the logic. Sending astronauts to Mars requires clear, efficient communication between the people involved. Presenting information at various meetings is an important part of that. If such presentations require an impractical review process, the necessary communications can become disfunctional. That could keep NASA from sending astronauts to Mars.
I find it constructive. Maybe by shedding some light on this NASA will be shamed into reviewing their idiotic review policies.
NASA is doing exactly what congress wants. Do you think the congressional members want to see streamlining? Cost savings? LESS SPENDING in their district?
Interested citizens (like me) have no other window into NASA like this one.
I disagree. This is NASA Watch holding a government agency responsible for how it operates, which is exactly what the press should be doing. While slide review is not the most important issue with NASA, Keith’s point is that the bureaucracy involved is symbolic of agency-wide issues.
I don’t think I realized that approvals of slides was necessary. Is this something that every NASA personage must do? Obtain PAO and Legal approval before using a PP set publicly?
Its purely CYA by NASA managers. Happens all the time from the very bottom to the very top.
The details vary, but yes. Some sort of approval is typically expected. That could be about ITAR issues (everything must be checked to make sure there are no violations), that no contractor-propriatary is included, etc. The rules may be applied to presentations which are clearly not relevant, or they may not. The approval can take a day or a month. As far as I can tell, there is little coordination or consistency between centers, and things change, apparently at random, every few years.
There is a requirement for review and approval of scientific or technical papers. I pretty much stopped writing them when people who had no relevant experience or expertise were put into the review cycle. Presentation charts in my experience were at your own risk. The key to making them noncontroversial was to use more images and fewer words.
I think Gerst and the current NASA leadership screwed up in their decision making-not in their presentation charts.
They and their immediate predecessors were the ones who supported, without any discussion, shutting down Shuttle because, after all, every one wanted to go somewhere instead of going in circles. These same people started out on a Constellation plan that never made any sense and which was unaffordable and unsupportable. These were the same people who put some inexperienced sycophants in charge first of Constellation and later of Orion so that the development process devolved into an interminable delay yet with major milestones being achieved on a daily basis. We are on the way to Mars (just not in anyone’s lifetime who is conscious today). These are the same guys who made their ISS organization so convoluted that they lost sight of its purpose, lost their user-base, and now want to get out from under this burden.
While Orion and SLS were foisted on NASA, this happenned because there was no plan and there was no plan because there was no NASA leadership.
I’m glad KC caught this introduction by Gerst and put it in the context of just how NASA expects to get to Mars when it’s own leader admits that even getting talking slides approved is a matter of thousands of reviewers. An exaggeration, but still on point.
Recently someone in our Mars groups asked how we (NASA) expect to make progress towards Mars when we can’t even integrate handfuls of people across centers, or their analysis tools and software, or their contractors, for even the simplest of tasks without useless meetings, huge cost estimates for the analysis, and the usual endless bickering over just what to analyze in the first place. Any doing things turns into Vulture’s fighting over the resources to do the thing!
Teams that can’t even agree that costs, or reliability and safety are important, or that are just trigger shy all around about what they do and say are the best sign no one is going to Mars anytime soon.
Teams that wordsmith endlessly about how results will be presented, or what conclusions are acceptable are all part of parcel of the problem of Gerst’s “thousand reviewers” statement.
That said, Gerst is partly to blame himself for this situation, as I have seen him go out of his way to assure that stirring up controversy or deviating from the SLS/Orion party line will not tolerated. No small wonder that in such an anti-innovation environment even he can’t just write down some public thoughts without reviews that are death by a thousand cuts.
You bring up some good points.
Gerst has been too accepting of the status quo.
He assumes the best people are doing the best job they can. Many of the people have had little or no expertise to apply and too many have been taking care of their own interests. But I’ve rarely seen Gerst take a strong hand in fixing people problems. Likewise with technical issues.
He was lucky he had just gotten out of Shuttle when Columbia happened, otherwise he might have been forced to retire early.
ISS today is largely a failure in its intended mission to host world class game changing science because of bureaucratic infighting with people who have no real knowledge and maybe no interest in its success and because this makes the process to get onboard so difficult, expensive and time consuming.
And now the effort to try and make people believe that NASA is about to send people to Mars in an Orion capsule.
I guess I am surprised. I thought Gerst was close enough to the top that he was the final approver?
This thread is depressing. Read at your own risk.