A couple months ago, I offered some advice to the Augustine panel:
Ignore the politics
Yes, of course Senator Shelby (R-AL) is going to want to see a new vehicle developed in Huntsville, Alabama, and Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) is going to want to ensure the maintenance of jobs at the Cape, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and various Houston-area congressmen are going to want to maintain jobs at Johnson Space Center. That will take priority in their minds over actual accomplishments in space.
But your job is to tell the policymakers how to give the taxpayers the best value for their money — and how to maximize our space-faring capabilities as soon as possible, so that if we do see something coming at us or find riches off the planet, we can take advantage of it.
Think of yourself like a Base Closing and Realignment Commission that provides recommendations for the nation as a whole, not local interests. Let the politicians argue about how to preserve jobs (while ignoring all of the jobs and wealth not being created due to the opportunity costs of their parochial decisions).
I don’t know whether he read it or not, but he seems to be following it:
A presidential space panel on Thursday challenged NASA’s vision of establishing a base on the moon and instead weighed other ambitious options that include free-ranging spaceships that could visit destinations throughout the inner solar system.
Noticeably absent, however, was discussion of NASA’s work force — despite a packed hotel ballroom filled with dozens of Kennedy Space Center workers worried about pink slips.
“We’re not designing any option with the idea in mind of preserving or not preserving the work force,” said Norm Augustine, the retired Lockheed Martin CEO who leads the 10-member panel named by the White House to evaluate NASA’s human spaceflight program.
…But even testimony from Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp did little to steer the conversation in that direction. He warned that Florida faces an “economic shock wave” during the time between the shuttle’s retirement and the first launch of its problem-plagued successor, which may not be ready until 2019.
“Due to the impending gap, Florida is bracing for a hardship — the magnitude of which the state has not seen for decades,” said Kottkamp, who estimated that the 7,000 job losses at KSC could ripple into 20,000 more unemployed workers on the Space Coast.
Defense has the same political problems, of course, with the fight in Congress to keep the F-22 funded being the latest example, and one in which the arguments are explicitly made that they have to do so to preserve jobs, with whether or not it actually helps us defend the country a second-tier issue at best. It’s even harder to fight this pork mentality when it comes to something as unimportant as space exploration and development, so we’ll see how long Augustine’s attitude remains once the politicians get involved. But I’m glad that we will at least make clear the difference between a program designed to explore and develop space, and one designed to make work for the politically connected.
During lunch on Wednesday while I was in Huntsville the conversation turned to just that: If you can’t fix this problem is it possible to give those workers something to do that isn’t so disruptive or dangerous?
If we absolutely have to keep MSFC going simply to keep Shelby from blocking it in the Senate then I think I’m comfortable with allocating several billion for a bribe. MSFC and its contractors get their current Constellation budget renewed but their task is to keep the grass around the rocket garden cut to within exact tolerances.
I say we wind down operations at Kennedy but keep all the engineers on full salary. Give them free reign to form their own groups (max size: 30), think up new ideas, test a little, build a little, and converse in hallways for a couple years. Send management to Disney World and transition the non-engineers who work on shuttle to machine shops where they can rapidly prototype whatever the engineers dream up.
Another road forward is to find revenue streams for space exploration that do not first pass through Uncle Sugar’s digestive tract.
There is waste and mismanagement in all government procurement programs and NASA is just a small subset of that and as Rand rightly points out in his New Atlantis piece space exploration just isn’t a national priority. So, what do you expect?
The challenge of course is not merely to design a robust efficient program of space exploration but also how to persuade 60 Senators (I’d say 51 but Harry Reid seems to think we need 60 for health care reform) to actually fund a robust efficient program of space exploration and not play politics with the money.
= = =
Another workforce issue is whether NASA is actually capable of executing a robust, efficient program of space exploration.
Since Team DIRECT (which proposes a far less radical course change than a depot centric EELV-only dry launch architecture) is worried about which managers can best execute their plan, the dry-launch people need to be double worried on this topic even if the A-Team signs on 100%.
Given civil service rules, the disruption that would come from firing everyone would mean NASA won’t be doing ANY human space exploration for ten years or fifteen years or even longer.
And thus we come full circle.
We need funding for space exploration that is not dependent on tax dollars. Although it does not appear easy to locate such sources, I believe it is needful.
PS — Senator Shelby’s antics with the COTS money does suggest that we do need 60 Senators to be safe and that 51 aren’t enough.
His ability to interfere with that supplemental money (as a minority party Senator) indicates the depth of the problem.
If we absolutely have to keep MSFC going simply to keep Shelby from blocking it in the Senate then I think I’m comfortable with allocating several billion for a bribe. MSFC and its contractors get their current Constellation budget renewed but their task is to keep the grass around the rocket garden cut to within exact tolerances.
I suspect the political reality is that if Ares I and V are cancelled, there will need to be some government project to keep MSFC busy. As appealing as the grass cutting option is, I wonder what face-saving projects they could take on that would not stand in the way of the private sector developing high-flight-rate LEO vehicles. Could they work on interplanetary probes? Lunar or Mars habitats? Asteroid tugs? Space based solar power demonstrations? Tethers?
Jim,
Pick the one you want to fail the most….
Maybe MSFC could work on a vehicle to launch Sen. Shelby into translunar orbit.
MSFC working on martian ships. Yes please. Let them uncover increasingly more difficult technical problems, complain about inadequate budget, declare it impossible. As long as they dont f*ck around in cislunar space, everyone will be happy.