ASAP: NASA Really Needs To Fix Its Human Spaceflight Program Management
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases 2021 Annual Report, ASAP
“… Funding such endeavors will obviously take considerable resources. However, history suggests (as shown in Figure 1) it is unlikely NASA’s budget will ever again exceed 1% of the federal budget, as it did during the lead-up to the Apollo Program. Consequently, it will not be possible for NASA to single-handedly carry out all of the missions now envisioned. Considering its ambitious goals and con- strained budget, for NASA–and hence the United States–to continue to play a strategic leadership role in space, the Agency must transform. While private industry efforts are an ever more important factor in the U.S. government’s future endeavors, the commercial sector alone has not, and will not, be the vehicle that drives national goals. Consequently, the Agency will need to operate differently–from strategic planning and how it approaches program management, to workforce development, facility maintenance, acquisition strategies, contract types, and partnerships.”
“… In adopting this disaggregated, decentralized program structure between SLS, EGS, and Orion, with the view that it is a manageable alternative to the familiar and effective program framework that served it well for the Apollo, STS, and ISS programs, NASA has seemed to overlook the negative impacts to cohesive integrated risk management. In essence, it appears that the cancellation of the Constellation program has led to a cautious stance among NASA leaders driven by the assumption that having an Apollo-like program now is a problematic political optic, and like Constellation, a possible target for cancellation by a future Administration. In effect, NASA has accepted the disaggregated program structure as normal, and is now propagating this structure as a preferred business and risk management model, even though it is essentially an untried approach for an integrated systems engineering effort of this magnitude and complexity. Thus, behavior that was instantiated as a coping mechanism for unstable political guidance has become institutionalized–as has the embedded uncertainty in risk management. Furthermore, the Agency is attempting to manage the risk in the structure it has adopted without deliberately assessing why the structure is at least equivalent to, if not an improvement to, a more familiar structure, and whether it should be advanced as a wholly new program approach.”
Keith is absolutely right as usual. What makes this worse is the absence of real leadership with NASA and both republican and democratic administrations has been going on for over half a century. I have a little more hope now with Musk and Space X, but wonder how far they can go mostly alone in vision and determination for human spaceflight.
‘Everyone’ has known this for decades…except NASA the institution (vs many individuals at NASA). What was that Jethro Tull song about Living in the Past? The O’Keefe-Steidle admin recognized this and tried to start changing things…but that didn’t get too far.
NASA HQ is not the problem. The Congressional Critters and their fiefdoms is why NASA structure is the way it is now.
While particular members of Congress have made their contributions, I would suggest that the situation is more complicated than “It’s Congress’s fault.” Some players at NASA HQ…including WH-chosen ones…during the past few decades have contributed their own muck and stilted thinking too.
What did the O’Keefe-Steidle admin do, and what stopped them ?
So sorry for the delay in responding.
Check out this interview with Adm. Steidle by Frank Sietzen, Jr from when he was still in office. He discusses what they were putting in place to revise things.
https://web.archive.org/web…
It is evident that they recognized that, for the sake of sustainability, the methods of managing ‘space’ would need to change. The introduction of doing a CEV fly-off was a serious re-think that offered much promise, but they were wise enough to know it (and their other innovative approaches) might not pan out and might require adjustment or revision. (CEV= Crew Exploration Vehicle; ultimately this became Orion, but the fly-off disappeared when O’Keefe & Steidle departed.)
O’Keefe & Steidle understood better than previous and later admins that what NASA (and especially NASA space flight) most needed was the installation of effective & sustainable (=financially sound) management practices driven by the technical requirements of the program objectives, not just shuffling of folks around into relabeled departments and divisions. They understood the nuts & bolts of organizational administration (it’s what they had done in their previous jobs) and were putting innovations (at least for NASA) into place…and things were looking up, especially to folks on the inside who witnessed the beginnings of streamlining.
Much of their effort came to naught when O’Keefe moved on to LSU to help pay for his children’s college tuition. O’Keefe’s departure led to Griffin’s arrival as Admin which did away with most if not all of O’ & S’s reform thinking and initiatives…and this begat ESAS and Ares I / Ares V (Apollo on Steroids), which financially doomed the original (vs ESAS-mutated) VSE and the muddled morass which followed.
Many thanks. Very interesting interview, and I appreciate your comments.
JSC human space management has been poor for 15-20 years. Its gotten progressively worse. Leadership is nonexistent. Factors were first the total reliance on astronauts and then a move towards reliance on flight directors. They forgot about engineers, scientists, and anyone with technical expertise. It has now gotten so bad that it is difficult to find anyone with technical expertise (read that as experience) in leadership. The move towards commercial providers like Space X is now needed because there is no one else to be relied upon. Constellation, Orion, SLS, Gateway, are good examples of how not to do the job. The young people come out of school trained and able to do more than ever before and yet the management bureaucracy shuts down any semblance of ability.
I have to agree. I remember several years ago there was a ‘lunch and learn’ in one of the cafeterias on the subject of human space science at JSC and what we’ve learned from ISS. The speakers were introduced-three ex-flight directors; introduced as “the executives in charge of human space life science”. I assume this meant they were all promoted to SES. I don’t know if it was humorous or tragic, that the audience was composed of PhDs, MDs and others in the program for decades, all heads of labs and departments that composed human space life sciences. Many had come in as GS-13s and 14s as lab heads and had never gotten a promotion in 20-30 years or longer in an organization known for giving all their promotions to MDs. The former flight directors by comparison had zero experience or education.
The government generally is happy with the “get well in the out years” approach where they get approval for a program that they know that they can’t do. Then they hope that they can delay it until they figure it out. They hope that more budget appears when it is needed.
So many programs are jobs programs, where Senators prevent new approaches from being tried – to keep their constituents employed on something.
Well and succinctly stated. I’m not sure what kind of disaster it will take for this reorganization and refocusing to occur but it has to or, if not, we’ll lose more decades. I wrote this paper on going back to the moon in 1993. It is still a more viable architecture to go back and stay than we’ve got now. https://homerhickamblog.blo…
Interesting you wrote South Pole as analogy. Get’s me thinking that place is regarded as a science base rather than a colony, also provides the country bragging rights to demonstrate capability. I think difference is to use moon part of economic development. At least in much of the report you don’t talk about Mars. I regard using that word in the same sentence when talking about the moon will stymie all efforts to go beyond LEO (Spiro Agnew’s call for Mars mission, SEI, VSE, etc.)
I thought was interesting of using the C-130 analogy as aircraft that has been in service for decades instead of building new aircraft to support South Pole Station. You wrote, “It is similarity suggested that the lunar base use space boosters already in the inventory for construction and resupply. [snip] No funds should be expended to build a new booster. It simply would drive up the costs of the program.”
However, it seems deriving boosters from existing technology hasn’t been cost or schedule effective. We have seen SpaceX go way beyond everyone else, they have had cost and schedule problems but appear much faster because everyone has yet to fly anything. I wonder if architecture or management structure has enabled Falcon, Dragon hardware to be regularly flown.
At its beginning, SpaceX used existing technology which was the smart thing to do, Their first Merlin engines were based on the FASTRAC engine developed by MSFC in the 1990s & adapted by Tom Mueller for Elon. They have evolved from there. My 1993 study predicted or at least hoped there would be companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin to partner with the federal government. My proposal was a consortium of government and such commercial organizations and I still think that would be the best way to go – a hybrid like TVA – to build the first moon base, a consortium that has to show results in science and commerce, has a board of directors, blah, blah. With such an anchor on Luna, commercial companies would be free to expand. The base illustrated in the paper could have been built with the existing technology of the time. Although the “Moonbeast” I theorized might be likened to the SLS, I thought it would be the last piece developed after the moon base was built and used for cargo, not astronauts. SLS, of course, is a disappointment for everyone paying attention to human spaceflight and is redundant and obsolete even as it sits quietly today in the VAB. We’ll see how it goes but if there’s a single glitch when launch fever takes over and they finally push the button, it will be years before we’ll ever see another one stacked. What will become of Artemis then? I have some ideas and so do a lot of folks and it may be best to have those ready to go…
” … While private industry efforts are an ever more important factor in
the U.S. government’s future endeavors, the commercial sector alone has not, and will not, be the vehicle that drives national goals.”
I am not at all in agreement with this. “National goals” spoken of are *political*goals*, first and foremost. I am still noting that the belief in this as something above and beyond politics is what lead to 50 years of stagnation for US human spaceflight. It is not surprising that stagnation happened, and NASA returned to pre-industrial artisanal levels of productivity, when you look at the competent definition of the continuing industrial revolution:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition (moderns read here, by politics) to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution” Arnold Toynbee-1884
By contrast, the ASAP complains:
“In effect, NASA has accepted the disaggregated program structure as
normal, and is now propagating this structure as a preferred business
and risk management model, even though it is essentially an untried
approach for an integrated systems engineering effort of this magnitude and complexity.”
That, In effect, is what the ASAP’s complaint and recommendation is. They want government hierarchies *LARGE*AND*IN*CHARGE* in US spaceflight. They want human spaceflight to remain under their purview. They want it to remain politically directed, with their own influence undiluted.
I do *not* want this.
Markets are *not* an “an untried approach for an integrated systems engineering effort”. They are simply one that does *not* hand power to the vassals of Congress members within the hierarchies of government. The idea that STS, ISS, Constellation and other programs in the last 50 years are any standard we should aspire to is risible!
The issue boils down to who is in charge of Artemis?
Who makes the integrated decisions and what are the long term goals of the program? Oh wait Artemis isn’t a program just a name and a logo while all the programs like SLS, orion’s, KSC ground ops and HLS all have their own budgets, their own manager and own goals. Without a clear course and person at the helm guiding the ship the rudderless Artemis is sure to hit every obstacle along the way. And now they just stood up lunar surface mobility program to cover xemu, LTV and Pressurized rovers. Another disjointed cog in the machine to crank through money, people without a clear plan or end state for what long term lunar surface should be. Between this disfunction and ISS going to swallow $3B a year until 2030 the ambitions of exploration are quickly fading away.
“a coping mechanism for unstable political guidance”
Wow, did a government body actually write that?