Bob Zimmerman isn’t optimistic that NASA can break out of the status quo.
4 thoughts on “The Space Council Meeting”
There’s a funny demotivational product company at http://www.despair.com that has many good ones. One that applies here is Consulting. It reads, “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made prolonging the problem.” NASA isn’t a consulting firm but they make good money year after year without solving the problems of space flight.
(Repeat of comment left on Bob’s site)
Rearranging the decks chairs is one strong possibility, yes. If this new Moon-Mars Mission Directorate ends up mainly a matter of renaming the current moribund Human Exploration MD with some minor management shakeup, all it’ll accomplish is further proving that the core NASA human spaceflight organization has evolved over the decades from Apollo to unsalvageable.
If the idea is to completely bypass the current Apollo’s-degenerate-descendant HEMD, to (as some of us have advised for decades) turn it into a No-Output Division and pension it off while using much of its current funding to start a new greenfield organization elsewhere, there’s some hope.
If MMMD is allowed to cherry-pick talent while rejecting placeholders, if it is allowed to plan missions without regard to the existing pork arrangements, if it is allowed to contract out systems commercially on the insight-but-not-interference COTS model, then there’s some hope.
Mind, this White House would have to not only want to do that, but want to do that badly enough to fight and defeat the existing Congressional NASA Pork coalition. It should be quickly obvious if they’re serious or not.
I’d have to say the “leading indicator” of whether or not MMMD is a serious organization will be whether or not Bill Gerstenmaier has any role in its management. If he does, MMMD is a sham. If he doesn’t, then it’s at least possible MMMD will do some good. That would be especially true if someone like the long-suffering CC director Kathy Lueders is tapped to head it up.
Gerstenmaier has been running HEOMD since 2005. That’s pretty much the entirety of the serial Constellation, Orion and SLS disasters. Before that, he was busily making sure ISS would never do anything useful. He should long since have been fired from NASA for gross incompetence and spineless subservience to the Alabama Mafia, but I’d settle for just turning HEOMD into a powerless pretender and leave him in place to pretend to run it as he has for 14 years if that’s what it takes to put human spaceflight in the hands of someone actually looking to “get ‘er done.”
Figures. NASA wants us to believe they can get to the moon and mars. Didn’t they move ISS to a higher altitude, lower maintenance orbit when NASA quit launching supplies to the station? And didn’t their wardrobe malfunction quash the all-women spacewalk? And aren’t we coming up on 50 years trapped in LEO? Let’s put all NASA employees on a salary, strip them of all duties and responsibilities, and just give cash incentive awards for accomplishments in space. I believe this would get us farther, faster, and cheaper than our current course.
There’s a funny demotivational product company at http://www.despair.com that has many good ones. One that applies here is Consulting. It reads, “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made prolonging the problem.” NASA isn’t a consulting firm but they make good money year after year without solving the problems of space flight.
(Repeat of comment left on Bob’s site)
Rearranging the decks chairs is one strong possibility, yes. If this new Moon-Mars Mission Directorate ends up mainly a matter of renaming the current moribund Human Exploration MD with some minor management shakeup, all it’ll accomplish is further proving that the core NASA human spaceflight organization has evolved over the decades from Apollo to unsalvageable.
If the idea is to completely bypass the current Apollo’s-degenerate-descendant HEMD, to (as some of us have advised for decades) turn it into a No-Output Division and pension it off while using much of its current funding to start a new greenfield organization elsewhere, there’s some hope.
If MMMD is allowed to cherry-pick talent while rejecting placeholders, if it is allowed to plan missions without regard to the existing pork arrangements, if it is allowed to contract out systems commercially on the insight-but-not-interference COTS model, then there’s some hope.
Mind, this White House would have to not only want to do that, but want to do that badly enough to fight and defeat the existing Congressional NASA Pork coalition. It should be quickly obvious if they’re serious or not.
I’d have to say the “leading indicator” of whether or not MMMD is a serious organization will be whether or not Bill Gerstenmaier has any role in its management. If he does, MMMD is a sham. If he doesn’t, then it’s at least possible MMMD will do some good. That would be especially true if someone like the long-suffering CC director Kathy Lueders is tapped to head it up.
Gerstenmaier has been running HEOMD since 2005. That’s pretty much the entirety of the serial Constellation, Orion and SLS disasters. Before that, he was busily making sure ISS would never do anything useful. He should long since have been fired from NASA for gross incompetence and spineless subservience to the Alabama Mafia, but I’d settle for just turning HEOMD into a powerless pretender and leave him in place to pretend to run it as he has for 14 years if that’s what it takes to put human spaceflight in the hands of someone actually looking to “get ‘er done.”
Figures. NASA wants us to believe they can get to the moon and mars. Didn’t they move ISS to a higher altitude, lower maintenance orbit when NASA quit launching supplies to the station? And didn’t their wardrobe malfunction quash the all-women spacewalk? And aren’t we coming up on 50 years trapped in LEO? Let’s put all NASA employees on a salary, strip them of all duties and responsibilities, and just give cash incentive awards for accomplishments in space. I believe this would get us farther, faster, and cheaper than our current course.