NASA begins search for new headquarters building
NASA yesterday announced that — because its present lease expires in August 2028 — it is seeking proposals for a new headquarters building in the Washington, DC region.
NASA is asking for responses from members of the development community, local and state jurisdictions, academia, other federal agencies, commercial aerospace partners, and other interested parties to help inform its decision.
Needs for a new headquarters includes approximately 375,000 to 525,000 square feet of office space to house NASA’s workforce. The desired location is within walking distance to a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority station. In addition, the new location also needs parking options, as well as convenient access to food establishments.
It seems to me that this is an ideal opportunity to reduce the size of NASA’s management structure. Since the agency has largely accepted the idea of capitalism in space, whereby it builds almost nothing but instead gets what it needs in the private sector, much of its large overhead and staffing that presently exists and was created when NASA attempted to do it all is now unneeded and is actually redundant. Rather than replace and expand NASA’s present headquarters, which appears to be the agency’s goal, the Trump administration should shrink its size, significantly.
Not only would the taxpayer save money, NASA would be further forced to use the private sector for its needs, thus fueling the growth of that aerospace industry. And for those laid off, they will likely have no trouble getting jobs in this new energized private sector.
All in all, such a reduction would be a win-win, for everyone.
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In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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NASA yesterday announced that — because its present lease expires in August 2028 — it is seeking proposals for a new headquarters building in the Washington, DC region.
NASA is asking for responses from members of the development community, local and state jurisdictions, academia, other federal agencies, commercial aerospace partners, and other interested parties to help inform its decision.
Needs for a new headquarters includes approximately 375,000 to 525,000 square feet of office space to house NASA’s workforce. The desired location is within walking distance to a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority station. In addition, the new location also needs parking options, as well as convenient access to food establishments.
It seems to me that this is an ideal opportunity to reduce the size of NASA’s management structure. Since the agency has largely accepted the idea of capitalism in space, whereby it builds almost nothing but instead gets what it needs in the private sector, much of its large overhead and staffing that presently exists and was created when NASA attempted to do it all is now unneeded and is actually redundant. Rather than replace and expand NASA’s present headquarters, which appears to be the agency’s goal, the Trump administration should shrink its size, significantly.
Not only would the taxpayer save money, NASA would be further forced to use the private sector for its needs, thus fueling the growth of that aerospace industry. And for those laid off, they will likely have no trouble getting jobs in this new energized private sector.
All in all, such a reduction would be a win-win, for everyone.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
I was watching a live stream on Nasaspaceflight.com of the stacking of Starship for the upcoming flight 6 on Mon, and the moderators have been hesitant to say it out loud because they know there are still a lot fans on there site and in the space community but they said that SLS really needs to be canceled. But they mentioned the big problem will be how do you go about canceling it programmatically and all that entails. But that it needs to happen before the second mobile launch tower is built and the next SLS flight, or your just wasting more money.
”But that it needs to happen before the second mobile launch tower is built and the next SLS flight…”
All components for the next SLS flight are all already at the Cape ready to go just waiting for the payload. It would probably be cheaper to launch it than to disassemble it at this point. It does not need the second launch tower. Neither does the SLS for Artemis III.
This is another agency that doesn’t NEED to be in DC.
Why is the NASA HQ not in Florida or Houston?
schwit,
Bingo.
NASA doesn’t need any DC footprint. Closing its DC HQ should be part of a larger project of closing useless or actively injurious agencies and relocating nearly all remaining federal agency HQs out of DC.
NASA also needs to prune its roster of regional centers.
The NASA Administrator and his senior deputies need to be at JSC. So does the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The Space Operations Mission Directorate should be at KSC. The Aeronautics Mission Directorate should be moved to Ames. The Science Mission Directorate should be moved to Johns Hopkins and the APL. SLS, Orion, Gateway and Mars Sample Return should be canceled. MSFC should be closed. So should JPL, Goddard, Langley and Glenn – except for the test facilities at Armstrong/Plum Brook. Anything still useful at Langley and Glenn should be moved to Ames. Anything still useful at JPL and Goddard should be moved to APL.
Dick Eagleson: While I agree with most of you suggestions, the ones regarding JPL and APL are likely not possible, or even advisable. Both JPL and APL are not government agencies. They belong to their respective universities (Caltech and Johns Hopkins). They get their NASA funding by bidding competitively on specific planetary missions. While JPL has won most of those competitions, APL has won some planetary mission contracts and done those missions well.
When the planetary program has run best, both compete aggressively for those contracts, forcing them to do the work well and efficiently. It appears that in recent years NASA has favored JPL and possibly not forced it to compete as well as it might, resulting in the sloppy management.
Rather than try to combine these entities (something that NASA really doesn’t have the legal power to do anyway), it would be better to encourage other universities to compete for these planetary missions. In this sense, more competition here would be similar to the competition to provide launch services. And the more competition the better.
ZimmerBob,
You are likely right about the institutional impediments to consolidating planetary and astrophysics missions in one place. Standing up at least one more institution capable of playing in the same league as APL, JPL and Goddard is an excellent idea. There are a number of universities that could probably do this. Two that come to mind are the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.
If evaluation of future proposals included a fairly heavy weight being assigned to adherence to budgets on past projects, I suspect both JPL and Goddard would find themselves at a severe disadvantage to APL and any notional new competitors – enough to perhaps even result in one or the other or both dying of starvation.
EagleDick: Another minor correction: Goddard IS a NASA agency, not an independent privately owned university institute. It CAN compete for projects like APL and JPL, but at the moment it is government. A good plan for the next administration would be to give it to a university so it functions more independently, competing for science projects and grants.
Both Arizona universities you mention have also competed for planetary projects and won contracts, especially UofA. I had forgotten this. Thus, we already have a considerable number of outside-NASA organizations capable of competing for this work.
ZimmerBob,
Yes, Goddard is one of NASA’s regional centers. It is also, seemingly, in a race with JPL to see how far over-budget it can make its projects. That’s why it needs to be closed.
Replace it with a bunch of university-affiliated probe design labs. With more partially and fully reusable launchers due to come on-line over the next two or three years, the cost of launching to deep space should plummet and the cadence of such launches should soar. APL and the new labs can exploit commercial sat buses to design probes more cheaply and that can be built in multiples for dispatch to multiple destinations. A new, mostly space-based Deep Space Network will also need to be deployed to handle all of the needed inbound data transmission.
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “<emThus, we already have a considerable number of outside-NASA organizations capable of competing for this work.”
Several of the heritage OldSpace companies have experience making deep space probes for NASA. They could join in the competition if NASA were to commercialize the ownership and operation, too, as they are currently doing with lunar missions run by NewSpace companies. Separating the relatively simple lunar probes from the relatively complex deep space probes can keep the big companies from overwhelming the startup companies. Once the startups get some successes under their belts, they can go up against the relatively expensive stalwarts.
I have an aversion to government-funded science, and I think that over time we should move away from that paradigm. It has stifled much technical advancement since World War II, ending the amazing advancements that helped define the Victorian Era. The modern world looks very similar to the 1950s, but the 1950s, Wernher von Braun’s world, looked nothing like the 1880s, Mark Twain’s world, which were way ahead of the 1810s, Jane Austin’s world.
Since WWII, when government controlled most scientific studies, we got mostly what government wanted. If We the People take back science, then we can study and develop technologies that we want.