Orion’s damaged heat shield after 2022 flight.
ASAP “Move along! Nothing to see here.”

NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) today released its annual report, and once again it demonstrated why I have been calling it corrupt and a waste of money for years.

The report can be read here [pdf], but let me warn you that its findings have nothing to do with ASAP’s original purpose (created after the 1967 Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts), to look at NASA projects to make sure the agency is not ignoring specific safety issues.

Instead, as it has done repeatedly in recent years, the panel focused on management goals and larger strategic issues, and as usual concluded that the best way to do things is to make NASA bigger with more control over the entire space industry.

NASA needs to better govern its contractors with respect to effective risk and safety management through appropriate contract mechanisms and consistent application of insight and oversight.

To come to this conclusion the report focused on the failures of Boeing in developing its Starliner manned capsule. To ASAP, those failures now justify taking control from the private sector. That SpaceX delivered as promised, under the same open contract terms, is barely mentioned. A normal American businessman would compare the two companies and simply continue to use SpaceX while searching for someone else besides Boeing.

ASAP instead wants to blame the entire private sector so that the government can once again rule.

Meanwhile, this corrupt panel sees nothing wrong or dangerous about the upcoming Artemis-2 mission, which will take four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon using an untested life support system and returning with a questionable heat shield.

Throughout 2025, the Agency continued progress towards flight readiness. Safety and technical risks have been identified and, as appropriate, effectively addressed.

When it comes to Artemis-3, the mission to land humans on the Moon, the panel does finally note the many technical and safety risks, and questions whether NASA is ready to fly it as scheduled. It also admits that while SpaceX’s Starship is not yet ready to land humans on the Moon, “at this time it is difficult to imagine another NASA contractor capable of meeting a challenge of this scale and pace as SpaceX.”

Thank you for small blessings!

Overall, ASAP continues to be a paper-pushing waste of money. Not once in the past two decades has its recommendations on safety correctly identified the real dangers and risks. During the development of Dragon and Starliner, it consistently poo-pooed Boeing’s problems, while lambasting SpaceX repeatedly. For years it has ignored the problems with Orion and SLS, making believe — as it does now with Artemis-2 — that NASA has everything under control.

The money NASA wastes on this panel would be far better used elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no one in Washington willing to face these facts. If anything, all signs suggest that Jared Isaacman agrees with ASAP’s findings, and intends to do exactly what it proposes, increase NASA power and control while squelching the independence and freedom of the newly reborn American private aerospace industry.