Amy Shira Teitel has focused very heavily on the late 1950s to the early 1970s. That was the heyday for NASA, both in budget and accomplishment. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has gone native and would prefer the top-down/Soviet-model/cost-plus/NASA-ownership model to the modern, commercial method that is working well, right now.

The commercial method is making NASA look bad. It looks slow, expensive, and unskilled. That last word could suggest why NASA’s staff wants Isaacman to eliminate “restrictive clauses that prevent us from doing our own work and addressing intellectual property barriers that have tied our hands.” perhaps there are people who want to return to the old ways because those ways are in their comfort zone.

I believe that such a strategy would leave NASA far behind, as it continues to move slowly and commercial space companies expand rapidly. It most likely will become another useless government appendage rather than a resource for startup commercial space companies. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice if a commercial company were to create such an incubator instead, and government got out of that role.

“In terms of what NASA’s mission is and what it should do, two items it should remove from its agenda are lunar and Mars settlement/industrialization. Elon has called dibs on both and he’ll have them well along far earlier than NASA could.”

Once again, Elon is making NASA look bad. I would argue that NASA is making NASA look bad, but the agency is at the mercy of Congress, and Congress is not willing to fund NASA in the same way that investors are willing to fund commercial space. NASA is not going to make space very useful, so it should avoid those areas where commercial space will. It should avoid those areas where the free market has called dibs. NASA just cannot compete.

NASA has done its job, providing the Space Shuttle and the ISS so that companies could start up and use space for production for the benefit of mankind. Wait. Did NASA do that, or did the lower prices of access to space do that? And it wasn’t NASA that reduced those prices but commercial space itself that did that. So, has NASA done its job or has it been an obstacle to using space for the benefit of all mankind?

Huh. When NASA competes with commercial space, we all lose.

Oh, how two decades have changed fortunes. Getting investment in commercial space used to be a challenge because NASA was king of the hill, and investors were afraid to compete. These days, investors see that space can be a very productive place to operate in. Gerard K. O’Neill had thought that the Moon would be the place to get the material for space-based electrical power for use by earthlings, but Elon Musk thinks it is the place to get the material for space-based computer power for use by earthlings.

The majority of the clip is Teitel whining about likely being demonetized if she pursues certain subjects on YouTube. YouTube is part of Google/Alphabet whose founders and largest shareholders are a couple of billionaires who don’t happen to have any rockets for rent. Perhaps Teitel would find fewer worries about financial censorship by splitting from YouTube entirely in favor of a far less censorious platform like, say, X. Too bad X is part of that same billionaire’s empire who would be getting those payments from NASA for use of his rockets. Oh well, you can’t have everything.

In terms of what NASA’s mission is and what it should do, two items it should remove from its agenda are lunar and Mars settlement/industrialization. Elon has called dibs on both and he’ll have them well along far earlier than NASA could. Anent the Moon and Mars, NASA would be well-advised to figure out how it can make maximum use of infrastructure and logistics provided by SpaceX in order to support science activities of many types that won’t be on Elon’s to-do list.

Richard M: I admit that I am at times far more concerned about government overreach and power grabs than most. Then again, I have 60+ years watching it happen again and again, to the detriment of the American people and the future.

NASA might not “be in a position to afford to do much” in the future, but that has never stopped petty dictators from taking control, for their own sake. Consider what Chavez and Maduro did to Venezuela. They destroyed it, for the sake of power.

NASA has proven that they don’t have the capacity to solve the Artemis II WDR hydo leak. And yet they are controlling the mission. So what else do they not have the capacity to handle? […] When Apollo 13 happened there was a lot of in house NASA expertise which was used to analyze the situation and find solutions. At least that’s the impression I got.

1. Edward is correct, of course: Hydrogen is well known to be difficult to handle. The Shuttle program never really eliminated hydrogen leak-caused launch delays!

2. The extremely low launch cadence of SLS (noted very pointedly by Isaacman himself several days ago!) cannot be ignored in this discussion. By the time of Apollo 13, NASA had launched a) 16 Saturn rockets on uncrewed flight tests, b) 5 of these test launches had uncrewed Apollo CSM’s on them, and c) 6 crewed flghts on Apollo/Saturn stacks. All 6 of those crewed flights had been within the previous 18 months; all of the uncrewed flights had been within the previous 9 years, most of ’em within the previous 5 years. Contrast all that with Artemis, which right now has only a single test flight of an SLS/Orion stack under its belt, and is taking about 3.5 years between launches.

NASA’s teams simply haven’t had enough actual flight experience with SLS and Orion to have the level of expertise, or the operational data to have been able to make the fixes it needed to get these issues shaved down to acceptable parameters.

Edward:

Robert seems to be worried that NASA is once again going to insist upon owning the hardware that it uses rather than contract out its use, as it does now with Dragon, Starliner, and Cygnus.

I grok the concern, but I take what hope I have from the fact that NASA simply is not going to be in a position to afford to do much of that in the future. It was compelled to go the commercial route with HLS far more because it simply did not have anything remotely like the funding to do a traditional cost-plus procurement for a lunar lander than because of any great eagerness within NASA management to shift to commercial procurements.

Hydrogen is well known to be difficult to handle. It is one of the reasons that Falcon does not use hydrogen for its upper stage. The efficiency is excellent, so it is desirable to use, because it can get more mass to orbit. The difficulty makes the rocket less reliable for on-time launches. It is not unexpected that they are having difficulties controlling the hydrogen fuel.

“How much of the Starliner thruster issue was understood by NASA and how much was contractor expertise relied upon? Maybe this is the sort of expertise Isaacman wants to bring back.”

You are comparing different types of hardware. Unlike Apollo or Air Force hardware, Starliner is not owned by the government, it is owned and operated by the contractor, the vendor. In this case: Boeing. NASA need not know as much detail as they do when they own it, because they are not responsible for it. Starliner is much more like a rental car than a car owned by the customer.

Robert seems to be worried that NASA is once again going to insist upon owning the hardware that it uses rather than contract out its use, as it does now with Dragon, Starliner, and Cygnus. My guess is that was one of the major feedbacks Isaacman got from his town hall meetings.

If this happens, then I think that NASA will fall farther behind, technologically, because the more advanced companies will stop doing business with NASA so that their proprietary intellectual property stays as trade secrets within those companies. NASA was a monopsony; if you wanted to do business in space, you had to be hired by NASA or another government agency. This is rapidly changing. Government space is becoming less of a player in space, and commercial companies are becoming the major customer. Commercial space does not need the government as a customer in the same way that space contractors did.

When Apollo 13 happened there was a lot of in house NASA expertise which was used to analyze the situation and find solutions. At least that’s the impression I got. Yes contractor expertise was used but it seems as if NASA engineers knew how the thing worked in detail.

It seems that they don’t have that knowledge now. How much of the Starliner thruster issue was understood by NASA and how much was contractor expertise relied upon? Maybe this is the sort of expertise Isaacman wants to bring back.

When the military services buy an airplane they really have to know how it works in order to be able to maintain it. The expertise has to be at the airfield. They do rely on contractors to some degree but for day to day ops the mechanics have to know their stuff. NASA is not in that position. Maybe that’s what Isaacman means.

Amy Shira Teitel has a recent video in which she discusses that Artemis II is not the Apollo future we thought we had been promised. Toward the end, she comments that with NASA hiring out to NewSpace companies, NASA is moving money to billionaires. It seems that no matter what NASA does, people will be dissatisfied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd_PrgsoMbQ#t=2315 (last 3 minutes of 3/4 hour, but my point is in the first few seconds of this link)

Spending money efficiently makes some people rich, but it was inefficient for NASA to own everything that it contracted, and no one had anything left over to build a space economy. Government was the virtual monopsony for space companies, and it was the virtual monopoly for launch vehicles. They controlled pretty much everything, and there was very little space economy.

Is Teitel right? Should American billionaires and their efficient space vehicles be left out of NASA endeavors just because they are smart enough to make efficient systems that make a lot of money? Or should NASA’s budget go to the shareholders of large contractors who are smart enough to invest in NASA contractors? Or did Teitel not think through the ramifications of her comment?
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agimarc wrote: “Once that’s is settled, another good series of questions would be about the NASA centers.”

Isaacman already asked many of these questions in a personal document that was leaked, and that kicked up a lot of dust. He had to go around to all the NASA centers to have town-hall meetings and listen to employee concerns just to settle down the dust of their fears. There are powers within NASA that like the internal empires of the statue quo, and Isaacman wanted to make NASA a better, more efficient agency.

So NASA thinks it can keep engineers and skilled technicians longer than a corporation?
Issakman will need to get permission from congress to to have an unlimited pay scale for its employees.

NASA wants access to private companies IP? Or is it their big old school contractors who actually want access to that IP.

Once that’s is settled, another good series of questions would be about the NASA centers. How many do we need? What are they doing under the NASA owner – operator that they couldn’t do better as a stand-alone, commercial entity, questions which would spin up the discussion nicely. Cheers –

I fear we are already there and NASA hasn’t caught on yet. Spacecraft engineering has shifted its center of gravity to Southern California. Uplink/downlink communications is being taken over by commercial service providers. Launch is still centered around Canaveral and Vandenberg, but this too is starting to erode.

At the dawn of the “Space Age”, NASA was the sexiest thing going and could coax engineering hotshots to relocate to out-of-the-way locations (the same way SpaceX now convinces people to move to Boca Chica). Once there, cross-pollination resulted in contractors alongside civil servants with equivalent skills and experience. But as NASA becomes just another customer of space technology (and a less-profitable customer at that), then contractors will not co-locate major development near NASA centers, and it’ll be hard to hire people locally with hands-on knowledge of technologies being built for the rest of the space sector. NASA centers will atrophy from lack of in-house expertise.

The hydrogen leaks that stopped the Artemis II countdown existed in Artemis I. They had 3 years to fix it.

Wasn’t fixed.

Ok so whose job was it to fix it? NASA’s? A Contractor’s? Who was tasked to solve this problem?

Is it NASA’s job? Does NASA have the expertise to analyze and solve the problem? If no, maybe this is what Isaacman wants to bring back.
Maybe it’s NASA’s job but NASA doesn’t have the expertise, and/or money to analyze and fix it. Is that the case?

Or is it the contractor’s job to analyze and fix? If so why wasn’t it fixed? Contractor ineptitude? Contractor laziness? NASA not supplying enough money to the contractor for a thorough analysis and solution? Evil contractor wanting to delay solutions to extend the gravy train and maybe they waited too long and found the problem harder to solve than they thought?

During my Wright Pat days Air Force (Lt’s and Capt’s) officers managed projects. And they’d put an officer with some tech knowledge on the project but they really weren’t experts. They knew enough to understand what was being said but they weren’t skilled and practiced engineers. I think this is what NASA has turned into. They can present the Power Point slides but never get their hands dirty. Maybe Isaacman wants to change that.

Interesting timing for Musk’s X post 2/8/202 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2020640004628742577
“For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon”
“SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years”

Back in the ’60s “going into space” meant NASA because government money was critical for development of knowledge, skills, systems, training, everything. Now, 60 years later, has anything changed? Why did Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos not go to NASA and ask for NASA to take them into space? Why do the Musk and Bezos business models not orbit closely around NASA? Why does NASA consider itself a “technology island” rather than a partner?

I’m really curious what NASA thinks it’s supposed to be doing, if for no other reason than what I see with the Artemis project. I understand Congress, stunningly astute group of highly skilled engineers that it is, has mandated Artemis use what certainly appears to be older, more limited technology, when partnering with organizations like Blue Origin or SpaceX might offer more productive options; after all, some of that money they’re spending is mine, I’d like to see it spent as efficiently and productively as possible, preferably on a defined mission that’s part of a set of larger, long term accomplishment goals.

That sounds like ‘soft’ corruption; aka Human Nature.

Richard M: I often suspect we’ll end up with a sharply bifurcated space sector-military/commercial and civil, with the former two, having both real needs and plenty of support, grow by leaps and bounds, and everyone who is serious about spaceflight will be working in one of those two areas; while NASA will be stuck with the rejects and retreads, the people primarily interested in their own power or egos, and what little it can afford through parasitical cost-plus contracts.

I hope not, but this is a plausible outcome, I’m afraid.

Jared understands that now that he has met folks within NASA.

Eventually, you will all understand that the “NASA should buy rides” argument has the same weakness of horizontal integration:

“Elon should just buy whatever COPVs are made by other companies.”

Elon and Mike Griffin are closer in mindset than you may wish to believe.

The analogy doesn’t work, however, for this reason: SpaceX is very good at developing and operating rockets and crewed space vehicles. NASA is not good at it, and never will be again.

For example nuclear propulsion systems that might be beyond the means of any private firm, but would dramatically lower the transit times for solar system voyages. Or perhaps a payload to penetrate the ice of Europa and explore the expected ocean below?

We could wait forever for a private consortium to undertake such things, but NASA could make such a contribution, if the national will was determined to favor it.

Ps. The Moon seems to me to be destined to be the gateway spaceport and manufacturing hub for the vehicles to explore the solar system – launching from the bottom of Earth’s gravity well is prohibitively expensive. Only ultra-valuable resources unobtainable elsewhere should be lifted from the surface of the Earth, including of course, the people.

— what do we want NASA to do? What’s their mission(s)? All I see in NASA’s mission statement right now is word salad.

Is it a return to the moon? NASA could do that on its own (very expensive) or work with independent contractors (SpaceX, Blue Origin) to do so (expensive). Both will take longer than we think.

Return to the moon and stay? NASA has demonstrated no ability to do this; SpaceX is focused elsewhere, Blue Origin is a myth, and other startups only control their own part, not that of anyone else. No lunar orbital station or moon base for the foreseeable future.

Explore the solar system? NASA does that now and could keep doing it, purchasing lift capacity and designing its own probes. It’s one thing they do reasonably well.

Go to Mars? Good luck getting there before Elon does.

Remain a full-employment space agency for people who can’t get jobs at SpaceX, and full funding for Congressional pet projects? Finally, something NASA does well. Sorry to be cynical but I don’t see much more right now with all of Mr. Isaacman’s maneuvers.

What do we want NASA to do?

No, avoid Aerospace Engineering. Try retail food service.

Action 2 is what worries me most. Figuring out exactly what he means is where the rubber hits the amygdala. It sounded as though he wants NASA to know enough to repair the hardware that its vendors/contractors supply to it, but why does that require having greater access to intellectual property (IP)?

As Richard M noted with his choice of quote, the fixed price contracts tend to hire a company to use its own equipment to perform a task, but the cost-plus contracts tend to result in transfer of ownership of the equipment to the government. If the contractor on the cost-plus contract is not careful — all the way back to the bid-and-proposal process — his IP becomes the property of the government.
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John hare wrote: “If the in house work clearly demonstrates that the NASA staff is not capable of getting the job done, it seems possible that some departments can be trimmed for lack of performance.”

I would not be surprised if part of Isaacman’s complaint is that NASA is using contractors that should be employees or that were once employees but went independent-contractor in order to earn more money. The part of the video in the linked tweet (X?) in which Isaacman talks about “restore NASA’s core competencies” and about having lost those competencies likely refers to employees having become contractors. He may intend for the net result to be that some or many of these people will become NASA employees (again).

I do not think that Isaacman plans to trim departments. He has spent much of these weeks assuring the employees that their jobs are safe and assuring Congress that their favorite projects and programs are safe. That document that he had before his latest nomination congressional inquisition seems to have spooked plenty of people, which may be why he has done this weeks-long town hall with the NASA employees. He is assuring them that their jobs are safe, and he is taking a lot of their suggestions for improvement, and he needs to be sure to implement enough of them to make everyone feel good. He had a good idea, making plans for his tenure at NASA, but it seems to me that the reality of his tenure is different than his expectation.

“Reality betrays us all.” — Benjamin Hoffman, the movie Hoffman

The reason Mike Griffin wanted Arsenal method is the same reason SpaceX brought COPV production in-house. BTW there is a great “Hello From Space” episode that shows America would have been on the Moon NOW, had Ares V not been killed.

Jared understands that now that he has met folks within NASA.

Eventually, you will all understand that the “NASA should buy rides” argument has the same weakness of horizontal integration:

“Elon should just buy whatever COPVs are made by other companies.”

Elon and Mike Griffin are closer in mindset than you may wish to believe.

The IP thing seems all but certain to be a sticking point. Being too insistent on this matter is likely to find NASA with a decreasing number of firms – especially start-ups – willing to do business with it.

In fact, this has already been a growing concern among commercial space companies, who have become increasingly frustrated with how NASA has been doing its fixed cost contracts, not least because it has been steadily losing the handful of senior NASA managers who even halfway understood how commercial space startups actually work. Eric Berger had an article on this a little over a year ago. I was struck by one passage in this regard:

The stakes are high. If NASA fumbles this new era of commercial space, some of its key programs could fall by the wayside. Already, one of the space agency’s two providers of next-generation spacesuits, Collins Aerospace, has dropped out. Its private space station companies are struggling financially. With enough setbacks, the legacy aerospace contractors are waiting in the wings to return to an era of cost-plus contracts. Everything would slow down and get more expensive.

The opportunity costs are high as well. Under fixed-price contracts, private companies generally keep most or all of their intellectual property. This encourages innovation and competition, drawing the benefits of entrepreneurial spirit into the nation’s spaceflight enterprise.

“If you do cost-plus, you lose the IP,” an industry official said. “The company loses the IP, and the innovation cycle ends there because the government sucks at licensing.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/as-nasa-increasingly-relies-on-commercial-space-there-are-some-troubling-signs/

If the in house work clearly demonstrates that the NASA staff is not capable of getting the job done, it seems possible that some departments can be trimmed for lack of performance. I agree with most that this is likely a bad move. OTOH, the seen and the unseen.

The last 50 years did more than just putting NASA’s budgets completely in thrall to Congress members’ count of the number of voters their NASA contractor corporate vassals employed. It has left the NASA workforce old, depressed, and too familiar with fudging data sent to HQ that might harm their local Center in their competition with other Centers. Shipping work out to contractors also meant that Jared has become dependent on contractor personnel for the data he needs to make decisions, very possibly to an extent that has appalled Administrator Isaacman. The last several weeks spent on Artemis II may have underscored this dilemma.

Jared Isaacman cannot turn around 5 decades of growing rigidity in 5 weeks. He cannot tell Congress to “take a hike” on who gets the money. He needs good information for making critical decisions, when and from where, his own people have generated it, … not from contractors he cannot have had the time to know.

This constraint, on the quality of his own decisions, may be a strong motivator in putting his own employees back more intimately into the day-to-day activity of developments that he must repeatedly decide about in the future. This *will* slow the movement to market, specifically because leaving a gap between NASA having competence in doing it, and having a revived space industry do far more than NASA ever could, might be the downfall of both NASA *and* that oncoming future for space industry.