Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Lure Of A Real Space Program

13 Comments

A long (I haven’t read the whole thing yet) article on SpaceX and other private companies versus NASA in terms of its appeal to employees:

SpaceX inspired Hoffman to reimagine a career with opportunities to work on her engineering projects even if the technicians were busy and not have it considered diverting work from contract labor. If she chose to work long hours at a commercial company, she wouldn’t be “punished for being an overachiever.” If she spent months on a project, she could be assured it would get launched into space.

For Hoffman, having her projects go unfinished at NASA may have been the personal foul that tipped her toward private industry, but she also suspected her own engineering frustrations were only the surface byproduct of more institutionalized problems. NASA’s financial insecurity, its lack of administrative direction and its bureaucracy had worn on her confidence in its future.

As the author notes, today’s NASA isn’t capable of doing what the 1960s NASA could.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ah, here it is:

“You can take safety overboard,” Leonce said. “I’ve sat in many meetings where we’re just arguing over the simplest things. It just becomes borderline ridiculous. I don’t think we could have ever gotten to the moon if the culture that now exists at NASA existed in the ’60s.”

Leonce said he understands the older generation’s anxieties considering they’ve worked through the deadly Challenger and Columbia disasters. Yet private launch companies will be more attractive for engineers fresh out of school, he said, because that culture of risk aversion is “a death in itself.”

Yes.

I would note that one of the reasons I left Rockwell over two decades ago was that in my decade and a half in the industry, virtually nothing that I worked on ever came to fruition (and many of the things I had to work on never should have). I also think that Bonnie Dunbar is deluding herself.

13 thoughts on “The Lure Of A Real Space Program”

  1. From the article ..

    According to a study by consulting firm Dittmar Associates, the average American taxpayer thinks NASA receives nearly a quarter of the federal budget. In reality, the agency gets less than 0.5 percent.

    This is incredible – NASA is cutting their own throat here, in failing miserably at their public relations job.

    1. Oh, please. May Dittmar has been hyping that poll for at least seven years.

      The average American taxpayer couldn’t tell you how much money the Federal government spends on NIH, Fish and Wildlife, NOAA, or BATF. So what?

      It isn’t reasonable to expect the average person on the street to know instantly how much money a random Federal agency spends each year. That’s why we have a Republic instead of direct democracy. The man on the street delegates those details to elected representatives.

      It is completely irrational to jump from this silly poll to Dittmar’s conclusion that NASA should receive a massive budget increase. Budget decisions should be made on the basis of rational analysis, not PR hype.

      1. Hey, that’s not what I said. My point is that if the average American thinks NASA has that big a portion of the national budget, then NASA has failed in their public information role. No wonder they can’t fund their big-ass rocket.

        You and Dittmar can go joust with your straw men. Leave me out of it.

  3. One error in the article: CCDev does not stipulate that contractors must fly their own people before NASA astronauts. SpaceX has said that all seats on its CCDev flights will go to NASA employees.

    Also, Bonnie Dunbar repeats the myth that NASA is “precluded” from advertising. Meanwhile, NASA produces a steady stream of videos, posters, Comic Con appearances, etc. promoting SLS/Orion. But don’t call it advertising.

  4. I recommend you read “This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury”. I can’t recall who said it but there is a quote from one of the first directors when they were forming NASA that they need to make any changes now (this is in 1959) because soon it will be very difficult and the arteries will harden. How prescient, and that was in ’59.

    Those guys knew they were taking risks, but they were calculated and everything was made a reliable as possible. Its funny when they talk about man rating the Atlas and get 75% reliability.

  5. This article is simply one more large and impressively researched and written piece of evidence to support a notion that began to suggest itself to me more than 20 years ago. There is, in engineering circles of all kinds, a long-standing war raging between people who think that by developing and applying the right algorithmic formula of institutionalized methods, procedures, reviews and certifications that human error can be eliminated and even human spark and creativity can be rendered unnecessary. According to this view, so long as the initial requirements are properly defined, then all one need do is feed them into this algorithmic process, turn the crank, and out will come a solution that is error-free.

    In aerospace, this sort of thinking leads to the bureaucratic, risk-averse – but also innovation-averse – proceduralist kudzu that strangles projects and inflates their costs by an order of magnitude or more, particularly at NASA. In software development, it leads to things like XML, UML and the yeasty profusion of “scripting languages” and other software underbrush that ceaselessly attempts, without any notable success to-date, to remove the requirement for human intelligence and competence from the construction of software systems. At NASA, this idiocy has brought us two shredded Shuttles and 14 shredded human beings. In software development it has brought us innumerable “software engineering death marches” in Ed Yourdon’s memorable phrase. The most recent high-profile examples of this are the thoroughgoing – and ongoing – software development disasters attendant to Obamacare.

    Elon Musk came from a background of successful software development. He understood that there is no set of institutional procedures that can completely purge risk and error from a project. So he concentrated on hiring the best people he could find and counted on their yeasty interactions to comb out errors, oversights and unworkabilities as projects progressed at top speed. The result has been a record of success with Falcon 9 that is superior to the early operational record of any other space launch system previously fielded.

    I think the question of which approach works better has been pretty definitively answered. But there are a lot of people out there who still attribute SpaceX’s successes to dumb luck. They have a near-religious reverence for tradition and ritual. Some of these people – too many – work for NASA. Most of the rest work for the legacy aerospace majors. There are even quite a few to be found in the ranks of self-described space “advocates.” Fortunately, these last are in no position to cause much trouble, but the first two categories are. Until the old guard entirely passeth away, they’re going to be out there, carrying on and attempting, wherever and whenever they think they can, tossing their wooden shoes into the machinery.

    1. No battle plan, it is said, survives its first encounter with the enemy. There is a certain futility in attempting overmuch to proceduralize projects on the leading edge of innovation.

  6. “NASA headquarters spokeswoman Sonja Alexander said NASA civil servants tend to stay with the agency until retirement, and talent retention is no issue.”

    I guess the talent is all long gone so it’s no longer an issue?

  7. Speaking from personal experience: I never considered a career in aerospace for the exact reasons detailed in this article. For me that changed in a little desert town on June 21, 2004.

Comments are closed.