24 comments

• pzatchok

  March 4, 2026 at 5:15 pm

  I don’t think the best engineers will go to NASA.
  I good engineer knows he is a good engineer and knows he can get a better starting offer from the private sector.

  So NASA wants to make things worse for the space sector by hiring the good engineers away from all their old space companies? Like Boeing and Lockheed?

  If its only a 2 year contact it will not come with a good government retirement.
  Now that is something to add to your resume, I used to work for NASA but even they didn’t want me. Can you hire me for your next NASA project?
  The best they can learn from NASA is how to fill out the paperwork the government wants.
• Bill Buhler

  March 4, 2026 at 5:26 pm

  Let me play devil’s advocate here, but also state my bias. I really, really wanted to be an astronaut as a child / teenager, and NASA was the only ticket. I concluded in the end it wasn’t for me, but it was appealing, and I think I harbor a soft spot for NASA.

  Two things might help this program:

  1. If they recruit strong talent from commercial space companies they might be able to temporarily inject some of the culture and urgency of commercial space into NASA. I also bet such talent will only manage a two year contract and be headed back to commercial space.

  2. With all of the exciting things going on in commercial space, I doubt NASA will really attract the very top talent.

  I guess time will tell. We had a century in which we were raised and instructed to trust the experts, and that no experts were more expert than government experts. That dogma has fallen flat for many of us, but it was so universal I don’t believe most people have really considered how much better it would be if government constrained itself to being a referee with a thin and specific rule book in most cases.
• Ray Van Dune

  March 4, 2026 at 6:24 pm

  Totally incomprehensible.
• Richard M

  March 4, 2026 at 6:56 pm

  Yeah, if I were a hot young engineer just graduating from university, I’d still surely want to go to a place like SpaceX or Impulse regardless of the pay or how many jet rides or donuts Jared gave me — unless, possibly, I was married with a baby on the way. But I don’t think there are that many top young engineers in their early 20s in that position — it’s not 1962.

  NASA does need sharp, talented people to execute its mission (its true mission). Not sure this is the way that go about it.
• Jeff Wright

  March 4, 2026 at 7:41 pm

  You need in house expertise in case the companies go belly up.
• Edward

  March 4, 2026 at 8:16 pm

  pzatchok and Bill Buhler may be right that the best talent may be more interested in the exciting projects of the private sector rather than the regular projects that NASA has been doing these past couple of decades.

  The point, however, is that Isaacman is placing priority toward NASA rather than toward privately operated commercial space.

  My question is: Is this really a bad thing?

  Let me “think out loud” at you all. First, it seems to me that Isaacman’s priority should be for NASA. After all, he is the director, and that is his job. To quote Robert, NASA’s “job was to formulate the federal government’s needs in space, and then ask the private sector — the American people — to get the job done.” According to OPM Director Scott Kupor, in the linked press release, the intent of these two-year internships(?) is for NASA “to work on the most consequential technical challenges anywhere in the world,” which is a major reason why so many of us were enamored with NASA for decades.

  Second, the best engineers are unlikely to come straight out of college. It may be better for the talented ones to learn from the commercial world, as Robert suggested. However, the US Tech Force front page makes it sound as though this is a training program for two years. This may not be a bad thing for the “student,” as the promise is that “participants will receive technical training, engage with industry leaders, and work closely with senior managers from companies partnering with the Tech Force.” It sounds like impressing the industry leaders could result in an engineering job at their company.

  Third, I see NASA projects as needing engineers who are more like systems engineers than design engineers. Systems engineers would be better at seeing the overall project and how each part from the various vendors or contractors fits in with the rest, and they tend to have experience with the nuances of space engineering. I learned a lot from my systems engineers, but they had learned a lot before they became system engineers. This is practically the same reason as my previous paragraph, stating that the best engineers are likely the ones already in the commercial part of the industry.

  Fourth, there is no fourth.

  Fifth, I think it is clear that during his confirmation hearings Congress impressed upon Isaacman that they expect more than America to just beat the Chinese to the Moon but that America should dominate the space sector. That was NASA’s raison d’être, except against the Soviets. If we are going to spend tax money on space, we may as well be the best. NASA is the government’s only way to work that angle. To that end (and the reason there is no “fourth”), Isaacman needs managers who are better than the ones leading NASAs projects, these past couple of decades. The agency needs leaders that meet schedules and budgets. Without that kind of leadership, America will fall to the wayside, the same way that Russia did.

  Sixth, NASA was set adrift during the Obama years and has yet to recover. Bush tried to reboot the space sector by reenacting the Apollo project, but Obama thought that having “been there, done that” (his words), it was better for us to do something that we were not able to do. This could have been an advancement from Apollo, something similar to the Apollo Applications Program, but there was no funding to advance the state of the art in space. Therefore, the Obama asteroid rock redirect idea turned into an incomprehensible mess that no one wanted. Trump didn’t put the necessary resources into his own Artemis Project, and Biden may not have known that NASA exists, much less what to do with it.

  Seventh, It didn’t do so well with the Space Shuttle or the ISS, ending up with expensive projects that didn’t do what had been expected of them — largely because, as government projects, it was decided that they would not be the strong enablers of commerce that We the People had expected but would instead only facilitate research in order to avoid favoritism. Thus, we didn’t get any of the products from space that we had expected to get from either the Shuttle or the ISS.

  Eighth, Artemis is not going to reboot the space sector. NASA has lost that battle and will never recover it. However, it can continue to do the bidding of government in space. To do this, it needs talent that it is competing with the very successful commercial space industry.

  Ninth, this is an opportunity for Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA centers to make a comeback and be relevant to the space community again.

  In conclusion, I think that it is important for Isaacman to turn NASA away from being a jobs program for Congressional prestige and turn it back into something that more resembles the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) that was founded for the purpose of promoting American aviation through aeronautical research. NACA also provided research and development test facilities that American companies could not otherwise afford. NASA needs to promote American aerospace (aviation as well as space). I hope that Isaacman is doing this through his various ideas.

  Isaacman has been given a difficult task, to beat the Chinese to the Moon, with inadequate hardware and an agency that has not done well for the past two decades or so. He is making quite a few shakeups, and it is clear that shakeups are needed at NASA. Whether these are the right changes to make has yet to be seen, but I am still rooting for him to succeed in making NASA great again.
• Robert Zimmerman

  March 4, 2026 at 9:05 pm

  Maybe I wasn’t clear. My point really is about Isaacman and how his focus is misplaced. He wants to make NASA a powerhouse aerospace company. That is absurd. It will not happen.

  He should instead be focused on using NASA to help create a lot of private American powerhouse aerospace companies. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be his focus. He might use those companies, but the goal will be to enrich NASA, not them.
• Edward

  March 4, 2026 at 10:32 pm

  Robert Zimmerman,
  “Maybe I wasn’t clear. My point really is about Isaacman and how his focus is misplaced. He wants to make NASA a powerhouse aerospace company. That is absurd. It will not happen.”

  You were clear.

  My thinking out loud seems to have some amount of disagreement with your point. It may not be a bad thing. NASA can still be a powerhouse, as it was in the 1960s, but it should be powerful for the government’s needs. NASA has lost its way, these past two decades, and it needs to find the path again. This is a large task, since Congress is myopic about beating China to the Moon, and America needs to be far more active in space exploration than it has been for the past two decades. Too many large projects have sucked up too many resources due to poor management, preventing other planned projects from getting started.

  I do not see Isaacman as trying to make NASA into its own company, but he needs better supervision over the company that it has relied far too heavily on for its manned space program. Boeing led the ISS construction, which went OK, as the high cost and long schedule had much to do with politics rather than engineering. Boeing was heavily responsible for important aspects of SLS, which was not the best engineering. Boeing has flubbed its portion of manned transport to ISS, which is Boeing’s fault, but there is pressure to increase contractor oversight in the future.

  If it were just Boeing that messed up for NASA and didn’t include the stalwart Bechtel, then it could be harder to argue for a heavier oversight paradigm. But the Webb Telescope was a schedule and budget disaster, and Roman is turning into one, too. NASA must avoid further disasters like this.

  It is clear to me that the oversight that NASA gave to SpaceX was not too little, because we have good results from Dragon, Crew Dragon, and the Falcons. Cygnus has worked well, except for the Russian engines, so that amount of oversight was also not too little.

  One of the best ways to make positive changes to an organization is to make fundamental changes. Decentralize a centralized organization, and centralize a decentralized one. Clear out the deadwood and return to fundamentals.

  “He should instead be focused on using NASA to help create a lot of private American powerhouse aerospace companies. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be his focus. He might use those companies, but the goal will be to enrich NASA, not them.”

  I don’t think it is bad for NASA to become a great space agency, again, especially if it works similarly to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which helped to keep American aviation companies the leaders of the world. Until NACA was turned into NASA, which reduced its fealty to aviation. Since among the government’s needs is for American space to be dominant, revamping NASA into another NACA would be a good thing. To do this and to do the government’s space needs may take different talent than NASA has been hiring, lately.

  NASA is currently competing with commercial space companies for skills, talent, and knowledge, which could put a strain on some companies. Another question I should ponder is whether that competition and the NASA Force internship will result in engineers knowing more about working with other companies and then going back to — or out into — other companies and make them able to work closer together on partnerships, such as those created for the Commercial LEO Destinations program.

  NASA needs talent if it is to help create American powerhouse aerospace companies. Right now it does not have the talent to make itself into one, much less anyone else. If it does not know how to turn itself into a powerhouse, then how can it help anyone else turn into one?
• Robert Zimmerman

  March 4, 2026 at 10:52 pm

  Edward: Reading your comment made me think of the definition of insanity: You do the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result. You, like Isaacman, want a powerhouse NASA doing great things, and that is what we had for the last half of the 20th century, and we got diddly-squat from it.

  You ask, “If it does not know how to turn itself into a powerhouse, then how can it help anyone else turn into one?”

  The less power the government has over what the aerospace industry does, the more will get done. That is the entire point of the capitalism model. If you turn a government agency into a powerhouse, the only real thing government agencies understand is the “power” part of that word. They will exert power, and to use your terms, use it to do what they want, not what the American people want.

  In the past decade NASA increasingly shifted to that capitalism model, doing less and less by simply hiring private companies to do what it needed done. The result was a reborn American aerospace industry doing lots of new things for profit, much of it completely irrelevant to NASA.

  Isaacman should push harder in that direction. Shrink NASA. Get focused specifically in helping private companies make profits in space. Its present space station program is a perfect illustration of the right path. NASA is building nothing. It is issuing development contracts and tourist contracts (to ISS) and management contracts to help these private stations grow. It is however letting them do the work, and own the proceeds, including the stations themselves.

  Under such a program, NASA doesn’t need a lot of high level engineers. It needs a few, to assess the quality of the work in issuing contracts, but mostly what it needs is strategic managers to set the goals of the government in order to know what to buy from the private sector.

  That is what we need. A powerhouse NASA will only squelch innovation and development.

  But hey, government is always the answer. All we need is the right people in charge, and they’ll finally get it right!
• mkent

  March 4, 2026 at 11:37 pm

  ”NASA needs to look at older, experienced engineers who have worked in the Aerospace field… NASA Force, if it has the same age bias as the rest of the industry these days, will not get very far.”

  I agree with this. Taking college recruits and training them for two years is not going to be very useful to either NASA or industry. By the time engineers graduate with a four-year aerospace degree they have the theoretical knowledge to do most aerospace engineering jobs. They don’t need more theory. They need training in company-specific best practices, and those vary from company to company.

  NASA needs experienced engineers who know those best practices and have used them to solve actual problems on real-world projects. Those are the ones who will advance the state-of-the-art in useful nontrivial ways. This just sounds like an extended co-op program.
• mkent

  March 5, 2026 at 12:02 am

  ”…and Roman is turning into one, too.”

  Your comments on ISS, Starliner, Webb, Dragon, and Cygnus are spot on, but I’m going to take issue with your comment on Roman. When NASA inherited the FIA optical telescope assembly, it made a conscious decision to make a larger, more capable (and more expensive) telescope. Since that decision was made Roman has been largely on schedule and on budget. It is now in final pre-flight tests and currently scheduled for launch later this year.

  Perhaps use Dragonfly for your other example. It is years behind schedule, billions over budget, and has completely wiped out the New Frontiers *and* Discovery programs. Dragonfly and Mars Sample Return have all but destroyed the planetary science program that so many people use as the “exception” to NASA’s performance on the manned spacecraft side. Which kind of makes your overall point.
• mkent

  March 5, 2026 at 2:02 am

  ”I think that it is important for Isaacman to turn NASA away from being a jobs program for Congressional prestige and turn it back into something that more resembles the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) that was founded for the purpose of promoting American aviation through aeronautical research.”

  I don’t know that the aviation industry needs a NACA at this point. It was arguably useful in the 20s and 30s when the aviation industry was in its infancy. But by the 1960s the American aviation industry dominated the world across all fronts and was quite capable of sustaining that dominance on its own. At that point Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed (remember the Connie?) dominated commercial aviation; Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft, and Learjet dominated general aviation; and Bell, Hughes, and Sikorsky dominated commercial rotorcraft. The government really just needed to stay out of the way (and maybe combat foreign government subsidies).

  In the space field nowadays SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and (maybe?) ULA dominate launch; Boeing, Lockheed, and Space Systems Loral (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) dominate comsats; Planet Labs, Black Sky, and Maxar dominate Earth observation; and SpaceX, Amazon, L3 Harris, Terran Orbital, and Rocket Lab dominate LEO constellations. I’m not sure that if NASA got involved it could do anything except slow the industry down.

  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for the government, but it needs to focus on the long-term, not the short-term. The aeronautics and jet engine research the government did in the 1940s led to the jetliners of the 1960s, which in turn led to aviation replacing first the passenger train and then the Greyhound bus for passenger travel. The electronics research for ICBM (primarily) and Apollo (secondarily) guidance computers in the 50s and 60s led to the personal computer boom of the 70s and 80s. DARPA’s computer networking research in the 1970s led to the internet boom in the 1990s. NASA (primarily) and USAF (secondarily) SBIR and STTR grants in the 90s and 00s led to the cubesat revolution we’re experiencing today in the form of Starlink, Kuiper, Black Sky, and other LEO constellations.

  So I would argue against Robert, who seems to be saying we don’t need government, by pointing out that so much of modern life was derived from government research. But I would also argue against Edward in saying that I don’t think a space NACA is the way to go. Its time horizon is way too short. I think Isaacman wants to push NASA to focus on long-term advances such as nuclear propulsion and space nuclear power, so that’s good, but I don’t think his NASA Force idea will get us there.

  So in a way I’m arguing against Robert, Edward, and Isaacman all, which is weird because I largely agree with all three of them.
• Saville

  March 5, 2026 at 5:40 am

  You take a pile of hot young engineers and put them in a building what do you get? Nothing.

  What makes SpaceX so successful is that there was already a culture, a Plan, an attitude that directed those engineers. Just compare Blue Origin with SpaceX. Different cultures, attitudes and plans – different results.

  Just injecting hot young engineers into NASA isn’t going to do anything but dull those people because the culture, attitude and plan at NASA is one of a sluggard. A dullard.

  Now one might say that Isaacman represents a new culture, attitude and plan (CAP for short), and he does. And maybe he’s replaced a few people at the top with the same CAP that he has. But Musk started with a clean sheet of paper, so to speak. Isaacman has to turn the Titanic around – an organization that has 50 years of a lethargic CAP built into it. He’s not going to do that right away. Or maybe even in his lifetime. And he has to fight the government/grift machine every inch of the way.

  If Isaacman really wanted to remake NASA into a vibrant, cutting edge, racy organization, he’d have to get rid of most of it. Stop all new projects, start whole new organizations within NASA (which haven’t been infected with NASA-CAP) and imbue them with the right CAP. Maybe create a Skunk Works that’s outside of the normal NASA/government interaction. Get money to fund it but money with no strings.

  I can only see Isaacman having partial success in this and only if he essentially starts a new “company” He could start it next to the old decaying company, But it has to be separate.
• Milt

  March 5, 2026 at 8:19 am

  Some questions, based on this debate. Given these very different POVs, what role, if any, should NASA play in setting policy, making decisions, and exercising oversight in the context of our form of representative government? More succinctly, if NASA should exist at all, what should it “do?”

  Likewise, is it useful or desirable for the United States to have a “a national space policy” that identifies long term aspirational goals in space* (aside from the needs of the military), again in concert with our form of discerning the “will of the people” through an elected legislature? Or, as some might suggest — the Libertarian position — would a totally hands off, completely market-centered approach be better without any articulated national goals? In short, let *the market* completely decide what happens — or not — in space?

  *Including facilitating the role of the private sector to the maximum extent possible.

  In these terms, I am seeing *Capitalism in Space* at one pole of this discussion, and Felix Rohatyn’s *Bold Endeavors* on the other. Which approach is right? Or are there elements of wisdom and truth in both presentations? And, again, to what extent ought representative republics have policies about such things as exploring and utilizing space?

  PS — As for reforming NASA — should we wish to keep it — I think that Saville has it just about right. Turning the Titanic, ect.
• Milt

  March 5, 2026 at 8:47 am

  And this just in from John Michael Greer: https://www.ecosophia.net/the-end-of-the-bureaucratic-era/

  Toward the end of this post about the real nature of the AI “revolution,” he sounds a lot like Robert, and he even cites NASA as the poster kid for wasteful, unproductive bureaucracy:

  “In addition, these days our bureaucracies are not merely expensive and burdensome, they’re also stunningly incompetent. There’s a reason why NASA has to hire private contractors to put people into orbit; despite more than ample budgets, the bureaucracy that once put bootprints on the Moon hasn’t been able to design and build a working spacecraft in more than a quarter century.”

  Food for thought.
• Jeff Wright

  March 5, 2026 at 11:15 am

  That’s due to administrations coming in and giving NASA new marching orders.

  That can be the case with private takeovers.

  Stability is what is needed—public or private.
• Mike Borgelt

  March 5, 2026 at 2:54 pm

  mkent, with 5000+ Starlinks on orbit I’d say SpaceX dominates comsats.
  Jeff Wright, a rock at the bottom of the ocean is stable but does nothing.
  Aviation is pretty much a done deal. I don’t think government can do much there is the way of R&D. Jet airliners were crossing the Atlantic routinely in 1958, 68 years ago, only 55 years after the Wright brothers first powered flight. Jet airliners still look much the same.
  Light aircraft have seen little progress in 90+ years. Look up Messerschmitt 108. Designed 1934. Nice low wing 4 seat, all metal, retractable gear light aircraft with 240 hp. Put a Lycoming IO-540 in it and you have a perfectable acceptable modern aircraft. I don’t think there is much room for improvement.
• Cotour

  March 5, 2026 at 7:07 pm

  NASA space prank from 1973?

  https://youtube.com/shorts/aftjzrrsf8w?si=QzYgSV71cCjucUUG
• Robert Zimmerman

  March 5, 2026 at 8:30 pm

  Cotour: That is a true story, though mission control figured out what happened soon thereafter. They were not puzzled for decades.
• Edward

  March 5, 2026 at 9:04 pm

  Robert,
  “You, like Isaacman, want a powerhouse NASA doing great things, and that is what we had for the last half of the 20th century, and we got diddly-squat from it.”

  Actually, I keep saying that NASA should be more like the NACA, not doing the great things. At best, NASA should do space exploration that other companies do not want to do but that government wants to explore. NASA should assist American companies, as the NACA did, and it should be the government’s civil space arm, as it already is. If it does not do these two things, then what is the point of even having NASA?

  We only get from NASA what government wants, not what we want. For you, that is diddly-squat, which is not what We the People had expected to get. Congress keeps funding NASA because it does what they want it to do.

  “You ask, ‘If it does not know how to turn itself into a powerhouse, then how can it help anyone else turn into one?’”

  You are the one who thought NASA should turn American space companies into powerhouses. My question stands. If NASA does not know how to make a powerhouse, how can it help make powerhouses? How will it know that it is not doing harm rather than helping?

  If we make NASA too powerless, then it cannot make American powerhouses. It needs to be in a position to make a difference, to be relevant. Otherwise, what is the point of having NASA?

  “The result was a reborn American aerospace industry doing lots of new things for profit, much of it completely irrelevant to NASA.”

  As it should be, but that does not mean that NASA should not be doing things for the government. It also does not mean that it should be a tiny organization that is responsible for making American powerhouse space companies. It needs to know what it is doing — needs practical experience — in order to assist American space companies. The NACA knew what it was doing, but right now NASA is recovering from being adrift. It is pointed in the wrong direction, but at least it is pointed steadily in a direction. What it needs now is forward motion so that it can change direction for the better.

  American aerospace should be doing what We the People want. NASA should be doing what government wants, and if that means that NASA hires American aerospace to do it for them, so much the better.

  Right now, as has been made perfectly clear, government wants a manned mission to the Moon. It wants to do it on its own, except that it hires commercial companies to make the parts that NASA will own and hires commercial companies to make the parts that it will rent, in the same way that it rents transportation of cargo and astronauts to ISS. Government wants NASA to operate a manned space program. If that changes, then commercial space will be there to taxi NASA astronauts to and from commercial space stations, commercial lunar bases, and commercial/civilian Mars colonies.

  From what I see, the NASA Force internship, the topic of the original post, seems intended to train engineers in aerospace. Two years is enough time to give young engineers the basics, but any skilled engineers that come from industry may be able to train NASA’s workforce how to run projects without slipping schedules or going over budget.
  __________
  mkent,
  “Dragonfly and Mars Sample Return have all but destroyed the planetary science program that so many people use as the “exception” to NASA’s performance on the manned spacecraft side.”

  You are right. Those are much better examples.

  “But by the 1960s the American aviation industry dominated the world across all fronts and was quite capable of sustaining that dominance on its own.”

  That is kind of my point. Ever since then, aviation has stagnated, and we keep losing aviation companies. NASA tested a couple of interesting concepts, such as the slant wing and the forward swept wings, but these have not been incorporated into aviation. The aviation world considers the first “A” in NaSA to be a little “a.”

  The good news is that Boom is now working on a supersonic transport that will have no or a reduced sonic boom. I don’t know how much of that idea came from NASA research, if any, but this is an advance in aviation that we haven’t seen since the 1960s.

  “… and Space Systems Loral (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) …”

  I looked on a map website and it is labeled as “Lanteris Space Systems.”
  __________
  Saville wrote: “Just injecting hot young engineers into NASA isn’t going to do anything but dull those people because the culture, attitude and plan at NASA is one of a sluggard. A dullard.”

  So long as the young engineers don’t pick up the culture — two years should not deeply indoctrinate them — then they should get much practical experience that they can use in industry. I did a couple of years at NASA as a high school then as a college intern, and it helped immensely. If you put young engineers in with mentors, then you get some good engineers.

  “Now one might say that Isaacman represents a new culture …”

  NASA has a government culture, and that part is not going to change. NASA’s main customer is Congress, not the American people. The American people are Congress’s customers. There are a few places within NASA that cater to commercial work, but those places are not the majority of NASA’s income or cashflow. Changing the culture from a cost-plus customer to a fixed-price customer seems to be easier for NASA than for the stalwart heritage aerospace companies.
  ___________
  Milt wrote: “Likewise, is it useful or desirable for the United States to have a ‘a national space policy’ that identifies long term aspirational goals in space …”

  The U.S. government has such a policy with a long-term goal: A sustained lunar base, with a short-term goal of beating the Chinese. Another long-term — aspirational — goal has long been to land man on Mars.

  SpaceX has recently announced its intention of using the Moon to fabricate a million satellites, and I think that this company no longer has any qualms about beating NASA to the Moon. They seemed to have wanted to avoid showing up NASA’s SLS with the first Starship launch, but I think that SpaceX has become much more serious about making forward progress.
• Blair Ivey

  March 5, 2026 at 11:51 pm

  “You take a pile of hot young engineers and put them in a building what do you get? ”

  Babies?
• Saville

  March 6, 2026 at 3:51 pm

  Edward wrote:

  “So long as the young engineers don’t pick up the culture — two years should not deeply indoctrinate them — then they should get much practical experience that they can use in industry. I did a couple of years at NASA as a high school then as a college intern, and it helped immensely. If you put young engineers in with mentors, then you get some good engineers. ”

  What years did you do those internships?
• pawn

  March 7, 2026 at 12:57 am

  Most of my time that I spent with actual NASA Engineers as a NASA contractor was taken up with trying to explain basic engineering concepts to them. and how they interacted to produce reality. Somehow the NASA environment seemed to be propelled by things that had little to do with actual Engineering.

  NASA is no place for engineers to learn anything other than how to administrate.

  This is just a cool new way for NASA to justify spending more of your money and producing very little actual product.
• Dick Eagleson

  March 7, 2026 at 8:12 pm

  Jeff Wright,

  Short of a global nuclear war or a major asteroid strike there is nothing that is going to cause every space company extant to suddenly fail all at once.

  “Stability” as a virtue is a bureaucratic idea, not one that applies to business. Stasis always eventually results in death – usually from some outside force. That you think otherwise is probably why you are broadly suspicious of NewSpace and so enamored of decades-old ideas and institutions.

  All,

  I agree with all who have characterized this NASA Force idea as pretty much a glorified internship program. It isn’t going to teach anything useful to the recent engineering grads it targets because NASA has little it can teach them. Anything they do learn at NASA is likelier to diminish than enhance their prospects of making future contributions in the private sector once their two-year hitch at NASA is up.

  NASA is mostly an operations organization these days and one with less and less to actually operate. That started with the Shuttle and continued with ISS. The former is more than a decade dead and the latter is on its last legs. Most of NASA has no real work to do anymore. All new grads will learn there is how to appear busy while doing nothing.

  Nor will new grads, per se, reinvigorate NASA. First, as many here have accurately noted, the best new grads won’t be attracted to NASA, just those looking for a low-stress sinecure.

  Second, most new engineering grads don’t actually know much about the real practice of engineering. When Elon interviews potential engineering hires he pays no attention at all to their academic records, he wants to see what they have done outside of class.