A very interesting and revealing interview of NASA administrator Jared Issacman
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman
Link here. I found this interview with NASA administrator Jared Issacman to be very informative and worth reading, especially in regards to his comments on the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget.
First, he admits right off the bat that the heat shield was his biggest concern during the Artemis-2 mission. He also took a swipe at past NASA management over this issue. After noting that the initial inspection of the Artemis-2 shield after recovery showed it experienced little serious damage, he added this: “All that aside, if you’re going to wait three and a half years between missions, just replace the heat shield.” In other words, after Artemis-1 NASA management dithered when it saw the damaged heat shield. It should have immediately moved to replace it.
As for the proposed Trump budget cuts and the opposition to those cuts by many in Congress, Issacman said this:
There’s a lot of passionate people out here [referring I think to the space industry and its advocates]. They can do incredible things, from a scientific perspective. I don’t know how many of them have ever pulled together a financial model, and driven execution on some of these things to say what should or shouldn’t be the right budget.
Now, all that said, of course, we will maximize every dollar that Congress affords to the agency. But it is not healthy, for the agency, to get in this mindset that we have to spend our way out of every problem. And I don’t think it’s good for the country to think we have to print our way out of every problem. [emphasis mine]
This is not the first time Isaacman has indicated he thinks NASA can survive these cuts, and in fact can do as well if not better by using what it gets more wisely. It is however the first time he has put NASA’s budget in the context of the entire federal budget, which is badly out of control. Isaacman does not want more money from Congress because he thinks it is bad for the nation to spend itself into debt. He thinks he has enough to do the job.
The entire interview is worth reading. It indicates a very practical and honest mindset. Everyone might not agree with every proposal Isaacman has put forth, but he is clearly approaching things from a very good place.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman
Link here. I found this interview with NASA administrator Jared Issacman to be very informative and worth reading, especially in regards to his comments on the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget.
First, he admits right off the bat that the heat shield was his biggest concern during the Artemis-2 mission. He also took a swipe at past NASA management over this issue. After noting that the initial inspection of the Artemis-2 shield after recovery showed it experienced little serious damage, he added this: “All that aside, if you’re going to wait three and a half years between missions, just replace the heat shield.” In other words, after Artemis-1 NASA management dithered when it saw the damaged heat shield. It should have immediately moved to replace it.
As for the proposed Trump budget cuts and the opposition to those cuts by many in Congress, Issacman said this:
There’s a lot of passionate people out here [referring I think to the space industry and its advocates]. They can do incredible things, from a scientific perspective. I don’t know how many of them have ever pulled together a financial model, and driven execution on some of these things to say what should or shouldn’t be the right budget.
Now, all that said, of course, we will maximize every dollar that Congress affords to the agency. But it is not healthy, for the agency, to get in this mindset that we have to spend our way out of every problem. And I don’t think it’s good for the country to think we have to print our way out of every problem. [emphasis mine]
This is not the first time Isaacman has indicated he thinks NASA can survive these cuts, and in fact can do as well if not better by using what it gets more wisely. It is however the first time he has put NASA’s budget in the context of the entire federal budget, which is badly out of control. Isaacman does not want more money from Congress because he thinks it is bad for the nation to spend itself into debt. He thinks he has enough to do the job.
The entire interview is worth reading. It indicates a very practical and honest mindset. Everyone might not agree with every proposal Isaacman has put forth, but he is clearly approaching things from a very good place.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Bob Smith on NASA
General Jack D. Ripper everywhere else.
No thanks.
From the interview:
Perhaps a better way to phrase it: “What happened is we wound up waiting a decade to see whether or not the thing even works.” Past tense. Isaacman is doing the Moon in a way similar to the way companies do expansions. They spend a little money on a first phase, see how the customers react, move on to a second phase that adapts to the customers, see how the customers react, then move on to a third phase that should be what the customers want at the right production rate for the demand.
Vast is doing their space station project that way.
This attitude Isaacman criticizes has dominated the public sphere for many years now, and we’ve seen the results: growing corruption, poorer outcomes, and greater debt. Either we solve it or we go bankrupt.
Jeff,
Isaacman is already one of the best administrators we’ve ever had. I think he’ll do more to win popular support for space and the agency than any NASA higher-up has managed in decades, and he seems determined to see NASA’s budget buying useful hardware and getting skilled people into the agency.
Also, Bob Smith was infamous for throwing money around like it didn’t matter and spreading Blue Origin too thinly. Rather the opposite of Isaacman.
Mike Griffin is the best administrator we had because he wrote the book on spacecraft design.
https://www.amazon.com/Space-Vehicle-Design-AIAA-Education/dp/0930403908
Before you NewSpacers hated him, lefties hated him because he was In-Q-Tel.
Bob Smith was a tightwad…Limp was less so–and he got up in Bezos face and asked him flat–is this a hobby?
And now, SuperHeavy just sprayed debris around like it just didn’t matter.
The Great Galactic Ghoul called to remind you that April is Old Space month.
After SLS knocked him out, he’s back to his old tricks.
“Mike Griffin is the best administrator we had because he wrote the book on spacecraft design.”
He wrote *a* book on spacecraft design, and it is a good book. But that did not keep him from being one of the three worst administrators NASA has ever had.
Jeff Wright,
He wrote a book, but writing a book doesn’t make one great. He made a long string of poor decisions that spent many billions of dollars and went nowhere. His entire ‘Apollo on steroids’ plan was so bad that even a president who wasn’t much interested in space could see it was worth canceling.
Yes, Smith was such a tightwad he spent more than a billion dollars a year for years on end. Limp’s value is that he’s willing to focus on what Blue actually needed-such as getting a rocket into orbit-and sidelining programs that don’t align with the company’s broader goals.
Super Heavy is fine. If you’d like to engage in unreasoning panic, that’s your affair.
Isaacman is different from most – maybe all – past Administrators in that he keeps score based on accomplishments and not on how much budget he can cozen out of Congress each year. This is not only a far more rational metric but one that gives him a lot more bargaining power with the politicos. A man willing to take budget hits in the pursuit of rational program structure is a man who is harder to lean on.
Government space program is a typical government incompetency display . SpaceX will be on Mars while NASA is writing reports on improving their toilet design
Griffin wrote a book. Musk and Shotwell created SpaceX. During Griffin’s tenure, SpaceX designed and flew Falcon 1, while NASA sunset the Shuttle Program, created the Constellation program which would spend billions before cancelled, and without SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon, failed to establish a US based solution for operating ISS after the Shuttle Program ended. But if you still want to make foolish claims, I offer James Webb.
Hello Nate,
Bob Smith was a terrible CEO hire in more ways than most people realize. There is a comment in the Eric Berger Ars Technica story (I know, I know) yesterday from a former BO employee who had this to say about Smith — and Dave Limp:
As a fairly recent former Blue employee, I can tell you they actually pay pretty well, particularly compared to the likes of SpaceX. And surprise bonuses were not unheard of. But… morale was catastrophically, chronically low largely because pretty much every communication from the former CEO ended up being [deleted], and though I have hopes for friends still there, I have yet to see enough evidence that Limp is much different. Some would point to the New Glenn launches, but honestly we were headed that way anyway, and I’d argue he had little effect on the timeline besides getting some dead fish out of a critical position or two at the top.
That accords pretty well with just about everything I have heard second or third hand from people who were or still are there. And it only scratches the surface: Smith brought in mainly Honeywell alums and retired military for senior and much of junior management, and on all accounts, few were fit for purpose. Limp’s round of RIFs doesn’t seem to have addressed that much because the layoffs seemed random and took out some high performers.
It all goes to the top. Bezos hired Smith because that is what he wanted (or thought he wanted), and he was unwilling to pay close enough attention to Blue Origin to realize what a mistake it was until a couple years ago. And for all of his accelerator pedal-stomping, it’s still not clear that Dave Limp really understands his org culture on a deep level. That is what sets apart Elon: He may be a very spergy, demanding and unforgiving boss, but he has always understood his company from top to bottom, and he carefully shaped its org culture to be a healthy and productive one, from who he hired and how he structured its operations.
Which is a shame, because we should all want some genuine competition for SpaceX. Elon is not immortal, and the magic won’t last forever.
Hi Dick,
Well that, and the fact that he understands pretty well that Congress is going to restore the bulk of those proposed cuts anyway!
I think his choice of words in the excerpt Bob provides is telling: “Now, all that said, of course, we will maximize every dollar that Congress affords to the agency.” He understands that Russ Vought proposes, but Congress disposes, and he wants congressional leadership to know that he understands it. I think he’s better at this game than a lot of us expected.
Richard M: I have deleted the obscenity in the quote you provide and approved the comment.
It is a sad commentary on our present culture that you didn’t even notice the obscenity before quoting. People are now so crass that they curse in the most inappropriate ways, and don’t even realize it.
Please review quotes more carefully.
In this particular case, removing the obscenity didn’t affect the quote’s meaning, but it _is_ a quote. Like it or not, that’s what the guy said.
How do you de-abbreviate the HFY genre (on YouTube, if not elsewhere) without using an obscenity? It _is_ everywhere, unfortunate or not.
My personal opinion, which matters not on a forum not mine own, is that expletives should be very rare, although they do have their place. I worked next to someone who vehemently objected to swearing. I told him, “feel free to point it out every time I do it; I don’t even notice.” It took a while, but I got it out of my speaking. I have no desire whatsoever for it to return.
Unrelated to anything, I swear more when writing dialog than I do myself; mostly because more unexpected bad stuff happens to my characters than happens to me.
Hello Bob,
I missed that. I apologize.
I’ll make a better effort to look for that going forward.
Mark Sizer: What I have discovered in enforcing my rules on obscenities is that it automatically raises the quality of the discussion. Curse words are an emotional burst, devoid of thought. If you have to say what you wanted to in real words instead, you discover you have to think things through more carefully.
This is not to say that a curse is sometimes appropriate. Certainly they are, such as when you drop something heavy on your foot. In sane civilized discussion however they have no place at all. It is a shame so few people today wish to hold onto that sane civilization.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the Isaacman era. He is proposing far more realistic plans than we’ve seen from NASA for a long time, and the way he presents himself reminds me of the quietly competent guys in suits who ran NASA during its glory years. I could almost imagine him doing a Rod Serling intro to a Twilight Zone episode – “Case in point, four astronauts on a journey to nowhere…” – but maybe I’m just tilt.
Bob’s rule is a good one, and a lot more of our social media space could benefit from its application.
When I’ve gotten afoul of it, it’s always been copy-pasting a quote or passage from another source that included a curse word, in the middle of a posting done at speed such that I just missed it. But that is no excuse.
I’m going to start, going forward, by trying to avoid the speed-posting, so that I can catch these things more consistently.
On the question of obscenities, we can all choose what words we use ourselves, and seeking better ways to express our thoughts and feelings is a form of personal development.
The issue raised by Richard M’s comment is what to do with quotes from other people? It’s important to make a quote as accurate as possible to avoid any misrepresentation of what that person said, and that applies to the tone as well as the content. Perhaps the best option is to indicate what was said without actually saying it, e.g., Jones said [deleted] that, the policy is [deleted]”. If what the person actually said was “an emotional burst, devoid of thought” then that needs to be conveyed to the reader.
Mark Sizer raises the question of how to deal with it in fiction. There’s no easy answer to that, because a writer must deal with the expectations of the audience and of middlemen like publishers, editors, producers, etc. A professional must deliver what the customer wants in order to make a living.
I suspect that the answer is to reject literalism. Truth in dramatic art is to accurately represent the nature of the characters and their situation, and to show the audience both the objective facts of that situation and each character’s subjective experience of it. The words they speak must express those truths, so they only need to be suggestive of the time and place in which the action is set rather than a linguistic documentary.
AndrewZ wrote: “I’m cautiously optimistic about the Isaacman era. He is proposing far more realistic plans than we’ve seen from NASA for a long time, …”
I agree. It is as though Isaacman brings experience from his business ventures into his government position. Governments do not have to worry much about results, because the purpose is not revenue or profit — or, for that matter, the results themselves. NASA’s original purpose was the results. Later, the purpose changed to something else for Congress and presidents to play with.
What has me worried is whether or not the proposed lunar base location is a good choice. I am also worried whether a government lunar base is a worthwhile mission.
Government should be doing in space what government needs done. Does government need a lunar base? A better question: does it need one other than for prestige?
As one who has run afoul of The Rules, I appreciate the level of discourse demanded. I certainly don’t want to be mistaken for a Progressive. A good overview of expressing displeasure without resorting to vulgarity may be found in the BBC TV show Chef!. Mid 90’s, but the title character (Lenny Henry) gives a master course in creative commentary every episode.
AndrewZ: I deleted your attempt to include barely concealed obscenities in a quote. And the way I did it is more acceptable to me, though my preference is to not quote fools who fall to that level of discourse.
I however must tell you that I am very irritated that you would include these barely concealed obscenities, now, in this discussion, when I have very clear rules and just noted — in this discussion — how such things are unacceptable to me. Do you have so little respect for my rules?
This is a warning. I appreciate your comments, but I will not tolerate this kind of thing in the future.
We I make goof ups..mine are doozies.
“The Magic Goes Away”
More than a quote…and Elon is indeed mortal.
I learned to live my life wincing….deaths aplenty left me in a “waiting for the other shoe to drop” holding pattern.
This is my prediction:
SLS dies from Jared’s knife wound. Congress flips and goes after Boca similarly. ULA dies from its terminal case of Down’s Syndrome, with occasional Falcon launches picking up where boring old Delta II left off.
Bezos gets bored with Blue Origin because he hoped NASA would pay for New Glenn.
China wins.
Or Issacman can listen to Hillhouse and call a truce before this gets worse.
His move.
Bezos? He’s playing Baubles for Bubbles.
Richard M,
Isaacman is a lot better at this job than a lot of us expected – and I expected quite a bit from him. Even so, he has, IMHO, overdelivered thus far and the future looks even better.
Jeff Wright,
Jared hasn’t stabbed SLS, he’s just made it clear that the thing is going to have to pull its weight if it expects to stay around. As SLS suffers from an economic case of morbid obesity, I think pulling its own weight is an impossible job based on currently-known physics. When SLS has its inevitable massive coronary trying to keep up with its betters, Jared will say words over it and see that it gets a decent burial. I say this because I regard it as all but certain that SLS will die on Jared’s watch.
Jim Hillhouse is a guy who was emphatically on the record that Commercial Crew could not possibly work; and even that a commercial launch industry that wasn’t reliant on government contracts could not succeed, either.
I’m just curious what wisdom he could have to offer at this point that would justify the Administrator of NASA taking him as an advisor for space policy.
Richard M,
If you think Congress will kill SpaceX the moment Democrats control it again, you pay no attention to the rest of the space sector, you’re terrified that the SLS program ending means the death of NASA, and you think spaceflight’s enemies are using internal antagonisms to justify cutting spending, Hillhouse commenting NewSpace and OldSpace should promote each other will sound very attractive to you. That people who object to space spending don’t care about internal squabbles and never use them to justify their opposition is small potatoes.
Well that’s embarrassing. Sorry Richard, I meant to address that to Jeff.
And I’m still being dumb. I did mean to address it to Richard. Robert, save me from my foolishness and delete these two posts, please. :)
Nate P: It seemed to me that the comment was very clearly addressed to Jeff Wright, not Richard M. I will change the heading for you if you want.
Hi Nate,
I had already read it and kinda figured you meant it for Jeff. :)
The problems of a comment system with no edit function.
Richard M wrote: “Elon is not immortal, and the magic won’t last forever.”
Elon Musk may pass away as a Mars colonist, but he has already trained several people in how to do rapid development. Many have started their own space companies and are doing their own things in space. Many of the rest of us are already learning interesting lessons just from watching. Rather than just keeping it simple, we now know that the best part is no part. We have also learned that, during development phase, if we didn’t have to add back parts, then we didn’t remove enough.
These philosophies are why Starship has to be a hardware-rich development project. It made it necessary for Starship to be inexpensive to make. Fewer parts results in lower cost and lighter weight, results in more payload, results in lower price per pound of payload, results in more business for the rocket and more companies doing business in space.
SLS does the opposite. Less innovation, high manufacturing cost, fewer launches, no external customers, much slower expansion into space.
Musk taught us many lessons about reusability and shooting for Mars. We used to shoot for the Moon, but now our eyes are set even higher. We no longer need Musk to teach investors the advantages of investing in space.
The magic of the moving assembly line — high production rates at low cost — survived Ford, and space expansion will survive Musk.