Space Policy Edition: NASA at a Crossroads
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Hello and welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, the monthly show where we explore the politics and processes behind space exploration. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society.

In 2022, buried within the tens of thousands of lines of legislative text that comprise the Chips and Science Act was a request from Congress.

that the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and Medicine establish an independent committee tasked with evaluating the state of NASA's core capabilities, its workforce, its infrastructure, and its ability to develop technology. The committee that ultimately came to be

encompassed a broad swath of expertise in the space community, including space scientists, engineers, senior managers, space policy experts, and even veterans of the commercial space industry, including some from SpaceX. This committee of 13 people spent nearly two years visiting NASA facilities throughout the country,

interviewed hundreds of staff and contractors, including NASA's most senior leadership. What they found was disturbing, the essence of which is captured in the title of the report that came out of their evaluation, NASA at a Crossroads. This report, which I think is one of the most important reports to come out from the National Academies in recent years,

made seven core findings about what they saw, and then eight major recommendations for how the space agency and Congress and all of its supporters can help fix it. The key, though, I think, is this. The report committee found that for decades, NASA has underinvested in itself. It has underinvested in maintaining its infrastructure, which is unique,

It has underinvested in its workforce, which is under incredible competition, not just from commercial space companies, but from the growing tech industry that wants to siphon off some of NASA's most capable and successful and talented individuals to work in similarly hard problems, but with a lot more money. Additionally, the space agency itself has become more bureaucratic and concentrated of decision-making at NASA headquarters.

It has gone somewhat adrift and lacks an executable long-term strategy necessary to help prioritize limited resources in the present. And of course, it found that NASA is underfunded and has been underfunded for decades. These are all big problems. I'm not going to lie. But these are fixable problems. And the first step, of course, to fixing a problem is to recognize that it's there.

They recommend, ultimately, that the agency begin to better invest in itself, and even, and this is, I think, the most difficult choice, if it requires reducing the number of new missions that it takes on. That is a big ask for a space agency that likes to do things, and for a public that, frankly, expects an agency to do things. The chair of this committee knows what he's talking about, though. His name is Norm Augustine.

And he's probably the most, one of the most storied and influential members of the space community, having worked in both government and corporate capacities in aerospace since 1958. Most notably, he was the chairman and CEO of the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

And since his retirement in the late 1990s, he has led a number of very influential studies, including the 2009 Blue Ribbon Review of the United States Human Spaceflight Plans Committee for President Obama at the time, which led to the end of the Constellation Program, NASA's first effort to return to the moon in the 21st century, and helped set the direction of spaceflight policy under the Obama administration.

I am very excited that Norm Augustine can join us today to talk about the conclusions of this report and to talk about how NASA and Congress and the next administration can begin to address some of these. You will hear us talk a lot about the findings and some of the key aspects that he discovered and his committee discovered upon doing this work.

And really emphasizing again that NASA just has not had the resources it needs. And assuming that may not change how you can redirect and focus the resources that it does have to make the agency work better. There is one aspect of this report, though, that I find really interesting. And I think probably underappreciated and maybe the hardest thing to internalize because it goes against the...

inertia, excitement, opportunity that we're seeing with the embrace of commercial space partnerships at NASA. The finding is essentially that NASA has begun to depend too much on these commercial services contracting, not just for mature technologies and capabilities like sending cargo to the space station, but for early technology development projects like landing humans on the moon.

Now, obviously, we have seen incredible success with some of these companies. We have seen incredible cost savings, and we have seen the birth of a dynamic and bold and capable new commercial space economy and ecosystem, particularly in the United States, but triggering such similar investments around the world. And the report and norm you will hear makes an effort to say not all of these are bad.

but that NASA needs to be judicious about how and where it outsources its most basic technology development. Because, and this is the key subtlety that I think is so interesting, in the effort to reduce its risk of cost overruns by going to these public-private partnerships, NASA actually adds a ton of other types of risk that are more fundamental than

Maybe harder to quantify initially, but ultimately I think far more consequential to the direction of the agency. In this particular case, the committee found that by moving to these commercial services contracts, they're turning NASA from an agency that does things into an agency that just oversees the application of money to other companies, to other places that do do things.

That changes the tenor and it changes the soul, in a sense, of an organization. And that is the worry for this committee, that it ultimately undermines the capabilities of the workforce, the in-house expertise, the unique knowledge set carried by a public space agency with its own workforce of engineers and scientists and technicians.

Now, whether or not you think this is a good or bad thing, I think this is something that no one has really openly talked about in terms of the decision process that NASA goes through in deciding whether to give a commercial contract or do something in-house. And obviously, many of the big projects NASA has done in-house recently have not gone well.

And so there's no real, you know, motivating alternative to really keep things in house. But maybe thinking about it in terms of are we investing in the space agency writ large in a long term way helps offset maybe the cost or increased cost of doing it internally rather than externally.

These types of questions about what kind of space agency we want, what kind of capabilities we want in a public space agency versus in a commercial private sector, I think are going to be some of the most important questions we face as a nation in the next administration space policy and subsequently for the next maybe the next 10 years.

This report that Norm Augustine led addresses that and, again, some of these other real fundamental capabilities and problems facing our space agency that, again, are fixable, but will take leadership, commitment, and effort, not just by advocates, but by NASA itself, the administration, and the next Congress.

I hope that you enjoy this next conversation. Again, it's very fascinating, and I'm delighted to welcome Norm Augustine to the Space Policy Edition. Norm Augustine, welcome to the Space Policy Edition. I'm delighted to have you here. Well, thanks, Casey. It's good to be here. It's a topic of interest to me. And me too. As I was saying earlier, this report, NASA at a Crossroads, I found to be just very well-timed, first of all.

But also putting real analysis and numbers and thought into trends I feel that a lot of us have been witnessing in NASA's performance and struggles in the last few years. So it's, I think, one of the most important reports that we've had in a while. And I very much hope that it gets the consideration and course correction that you recommend in it.

Before we talk about those, though, let's talk about what you found. So you led a committee from the National Academies to study a series of issues around workforce infrastructure and performance at NASA. And I want to first talk about the title, which I think is quite provocative. What are the crossroads that NASA is standing at right now? What are the potential pathways that the agency is flirting with?

Okay, Casey, I'm happy to talk about that. If I might just preface it a little bit, I'm going to be describing a report that was put together by 13 people, of which I was only one. And this was a group of people with very broad backgrounds, some that worked for NASA, some from industry, some from academia, one astronaut, and so on down the line.

Among ourselves, we have over 500 years' experience, personal years of experience in the aerospace industry, which I guess tells you something about our age, too. But I'll let that go. We did a very extensive study. We visited all nine NASA sites, centers, plus the federally funded FFRDC.

Federal Refunded Research and Development Center. So we talked to over 400 NASA employers. We held over 25 meetings just among ourselves.

So we got a pretty good look at NASA. And the basic message that came out, I don't know that it would have been one that we expected to permeate each of the areas we were asked to investigate. Well, I sure said that the committee was set up at the request of the Congress in the Chips and Science Act and the FY22 Appropriations Act. And the Congress asked us to look at three areas, NASA,

infrastructure, personnel and human resources, if you will, and technology. And our work statement out of the fourth area

which we call systemics, that were those things that cut across those first three areas or outside influences on those three areas. And so to answer your question, the thing that really stood out to us was all four of those areas led us to the same issue that was the dominant issue, the lots of little issues, obviously, in the organization size of NASA. But there was a common thread.

The common thread was one that has been around for a long time. It is that NASA has almost every year for decades had more program than it had money. It was trying to do more than it could do. And that leads to a question of how has it done all the great things it's done the last couple of decades if it didn't have enough money to do it?

And the conclusion, no, we don't have that, but it's not unique to NASA. It's true of industry, certainly, and some universities, probably more industry. And the issue is that if you don't have enough money to do what you want to do in the near term, one thing you can do is don't invest in the long term. And I'm afraid, or I shouldn't say I am, our committee is afraid that NASA's been guilty of that. And the Congress has. The nation has.

But when decisions were made as to pursuing a given near-term program or to not maintain the infrastructure of NASA, the decision generally went in favor of let's do the near-term program. And of course, I've been seeing great successes there, but meanwhile...

And if you'd like, I can walk through the Air 4 areas and give you examples of what's happened in the business world. Wow, I've spent the deal of my time a lot.

The answer has generally been a case of going out of business strategy. And to put it bluntly, NASA's on a going out of business strategy. And to your very root question, which was the title of the report, NASA is at a crossroads. We consider more dramatic words even, but I decided we would avoid that.

But NASA is at a point, you can only do this for so long until it actually catches up with you. And NASA is getting off the coast to the point where it's going to catch up with it in the view of our committee. Well, I should also say that this was a consensus report, and it goes even further than that in terms of the words in the report itself, the 200 pages. The words in the report have unanimous support of our members.

I want to follow up with something core to this, and then I'd like to address some of the core findings and recommendations. And I'll look forward to those examples of the various areas in which we're seeing this. But I'm reading through this and some wonderful reports. We will link to it in the show notes.

Why now? I kept coming back to that. What has happened to make the crossroads basically present themselves now? You say correctly that NASA's had too much program for its budget, but I feel like that's effectively been true since the shuttle era. Is there something that changed recently or is this the slow degradation of a bureaucracy basically hitting the limit of how long you can do that?

Yes, I think Luke would say that it's been a slow degradation of bureaucracy. As I mentioned, this is not unique to the NSA industry. It does this sort of thing. This is a personal example of what I'm talking about. When I took my first job in the aerospace industry years ago, the average shareholder held their shares eight years ago.

Today, they hold them for months. They're interested in the next quarter. And so given that, sure, we don't want you investing in research at all, but don't fix the roof. Somebody else will worry about that. And NASA, this is one of those examples of a strategy that produced a, I shouldn't say unexpected quite because it's obvious it's going to happen.

But it's not obvious when it's going to happen. We've reached the point where this is not a problem for business as usual. That's an interesting follow-up. I mean, so just to hit on this one more time, and again, I know you're speaking for the unanimity of the committee. I was thinking back to when you led the presidential commission looking at Constellation in 2008 and 2009.

I see a lot of similarities, at least in some of the externalities of how it's being represented. And maybe, again, if it's a gradual decline, this is a function of

that kind of continuation of those trends. But I'd like to posit that one extra thing has fundamentally maybe changed in the last 15, in the years between your report and this current one, which is the growth and maturation of the commercial space sector, which is something that you talk about in this report. But basically, there are now alternatives to

NASA, both in capability, workforce, infrastructure, and dynamism. And not just NASA, but NASA and the classic prime contractors and this new class of space startups epitomized by SpaceX or Blue Origin. Does that

seem to be a core aspect of this, that there's now alternatives for people who want to work in space. They don't have to go through NASA or the classic contracting. It's an interesting question in the sense that the previous report you mentioned that I was involved in

I encourage NASA to support building an industrial, more self-capable and a commercial aerospace world, if you will. And NASA does great credit in that and helps SpaceX and others get started. And that, I think, is something that the members of the group encourage strongly.

We do raise a caveat, but it's a very narrow caveat. I want to emphasize that. When you're talking about early development work that involves very sensitive technologies, very high demand, very advanced technologies, with those conditions, we believe it's very important that NASA maintain internally a capability to do those things internally.

And we don't argue that it should do all that work internally at all, but it should keep the capability. And in our work, we ran across a great quotation from Werner Von Braun on the subject. He said that engineers quickly lose their skills if they don't keep their hands dirty. And we believe that's true. And if NASA becomes strictly an overseer, basically a contract monitor,

It's going to be very hard for NASA to keep very many good engineers around. Good engineers, you know, the most creative ones, don't want to be contracted on it. So the millions spent part of their time with that. So if NASA is to maintain a capability at all, and we happen to think it needs to, it's going to be essential that it maintain that in-house capability in certain areas.

NASA today puts out about 85% of its work funds out of the Alps anyway. And so I think one welcomes the growth of the commercial base. Well, at least you're a citizen of the country. I think we should. It could do a lot in conjunction with NASA, but it can't be at the total expense of NASA.

That is a whole conclusion from this report that I think is really important and interesting. Again, I'm going to put a pin in that and we'll come back to it because I think there's so much there.

And so if I could just I mean, if I could thematically put together what I took away from this report, again, kind of tying it into this idea is that maybe is NASA is acting like it has the monopoly in terms of if you want to work in space, you work for NASA or it's very close contractors. But it's no longer a monopoly and the agency has not adapted to that reality. That's how I see this. Does that resonate with you? Would you would you feel like the committee would agree with that framing?

You led right into one of the four areas of important human resources. NASA competes for human resources today in the same marketplace, not only as the traditional aerospace companies,

but also the commercial aerospace industry, but also because the technology today is more and more coming out of the commercial world. It's competing with Meta and Amazon and so on for talent. And that puts NASA in a very challenging position because NASA works under the government human resources rules and so on. I could talk about that, but anyway, just let me say this for a minute.

Look, NASA participated in a government-wide survey that was conducted by an outside organization that I've had some involvement with. And NASA, for the last 12 years, based on their employees' responses, has made it NASA as the best place to work, best to be large place to work, large employer within the federal government.

And when we asked a lot of these people we talked to when we conducted our tours, why do you work for NASA? The answer was invariably because the exciting work it does, the things you get to do, and you personally can be involved in. If we are to have a NASA, that is really important. Those are the kind of people you want.

I remember knowing people back when I lived in Los Angeles who worked at JPL and then got poached by Google or Apple to work on self-driving cars because of the connections to Rover, uptime, reliability, all sorts of things. And I realized not just you're paying salaries, but equity in the company. You can't buy, I guess you can buy treasury bills, but you don't get issued equity in the U.S. government by NASA to work there.

So I think this is one of the core ideas, is that to retain talent in NASA's workforce, NASA itself has to provide a motivation for them to work there. And that's with the opportunities. And that's where this idea that you can't just farm out all of your most interesting problems happens.

to external companies, that's ultimately a self-defeating measure, even if, and this is the short-termism, even if in the short-term you save money. When you add all this up, the bottom line concludes, I suppose, that we came to

Was there only two possible solutions to the dilemma NASA faces? One is to give NASA more money so they don't have to put off the future or shortchange the future as well. The other is for NASA to do less.

And either of those things is going to take an awful lot of courage on somebody's part. The circumstances have changed so much in NASA overall in many areas in the space program. You cited this one, and it's very critical. There are half a dozen that really changed the world that NASA competes in. And given that circumstance, NASA is going to have to be able to attract talent. It's going to have to have adequate funds.

But when you look at the federal government's funding, as we did in this committee, the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO for at least two decades, and I'm one of them, has put out periodically a graph, very interesting chart, maybe one of the most interesting I've ever seen. It shows the federal government's receipts versus time, divided income,

And on it, it shows the federal government's discretionary budget, the amount of money that could be spent on discretionary things. And the non-discretionary is, of course, those things that are not appropriated each year, but have long-term appropriation. Things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, so on, plus the interest on the federal debt, which you have to pay.

And what's left over is discretionary. Well, the bottom line is that the discretionary budget is headed not just to diminish, but to go to zero under current law. And not that far. When I first saw it, it was 2042. Today, it's in the early 2030s. And it's that budget, that discretionary budget, that funds NASA.

and competing with NASA for funds are the rest of the discretionary budget that includes things like national defense, homeland security, national infrastructure. And so the chances of getting much more money for NASA

is going to be very difficult. So then you turn to the other solution, which is cancel programs or don't stop programs, just decide one that would be very hard. Supposing the United States were to say, we can't afford to go back to the moon in 2026, as NASA is currently saying, and so we'll go in 2035. Well, you remember that China has been saying, we're going to go in 2030. And China's done a pretty good job of doing what it says it's going to do in this area.

And so it gets to 2030, and China puts people back on the moon, and the United States says, well, we couldn't afford to do that. Is that a signal we want to send to the world? So my whole point is that these are our choices. Let's talk about the other. We've been talking a little bit about workforce, but just very briefly, you also looked at technology, infrastructure, and then these systemic issues. What are some of the examples of challenges in technology and infrastructure at NASA?

Well, first of all, let me take a big picture look at technology. That is, the technology budget of NASA purchasing power parity, the line item for R&D, has decreased by 34% since 2010. And since that time, the share of the NASA budget that goes to that more basic research has declined by 54%.

And so this is again part of the same story, and it was starting the future, in this case it's technology. And that, of course, industry is doing less of the fundamental stuff now. They're doing a lot more of the applied work. But the space program is just not investing in the future in terms of technology. To take your question on the issue of one of the technologies that are particularly critical

We thought that if we asked NASA to put together that list for us, time-phased over time, critical technical milestones, we figured we'd spend a whole year working on that. Well, it turns out NASA really doesn't have such a chart. And as we talked to an awful lot of people at NASA, the reason that was unanimously, I guess, cited was that when you're working for the government,

that the longest range financial planning they do is five years. They have a one-year appropriation. That appropriation, about half the time, doesn't get done until well into the year that's the operating year.

It makes no sense to plant. And it's not a bad argument. We think there are things we could do better than we're doing today. But it's not a bad argument. So when you try to look at one of the specific technologies and when do we need them, we found there wasn't much to go on. We did find a report in the year 2014 that

We spent a lot of time studying, and it had 10 top issues we should be studying. And we put together our own rather abbreviated list, and it almost identically matched the same list which was put together in 2014. We added a couple of things, but...

It included things like nuclear propulsion in space. It included nuclear power on a planet. It included landing on a planet with large payloads of humans aboard. It included spacesuits for operations long-term and on a planet or in space. And the things of that type, none of them I think are huge surprises, but in our view, they're all underfunded today.

I just want to emphasize what you're saying here. I was stunned when I read that and the idea that NASA does not have, as you say, like we needed this technology by this date in order to achieve some goal. There's no master plan behind that, which after the initial shock wears off, as you point out, makes sense given the dramatic impact.

mismatch of long-term strategic planning on the scale of decades with what they're actually funded to do with also the political winds or elected officials changing every few years on top of that. But still, that makes it very difficult. And

Has there been, are there examples that NASA can look to about how to sustain long-term types of technology development or strategic planning like this that they can draw from? Because it's, I understand in the sense that technology development is a process and not a thing. And I always feel like that makes a big difference, particularly in

An elected representative democracy where you have you're making a case for something people I think resonate to the idea of an object you can picture it in your head It's a finished thing. You can see it launch into space like Europa Clipper. It's harder to its Technology development is an abstract concept. That's it. It's a thing that we do without a clear outcome though, you can have directed technology to investments and

And it just seems like it's a very difficult thing to implement consistently over time in the structures we have as a public agency. So is there an example of how this can work, or is it just always going to be a challenge? I put together that proposed approach.

That solves part of the problem that we're discussing. It does not solve the whole problem. And when you do long-term projects, development projects in particular, where you're doing things that have never been done before, you have to have funding margins for the unforeseen. Those are almost impossible to come by without funding. I've had

Sad personal experience in that area. Similarly, one needs to have an idea of what funds will be available when and count on it. That doesn't work in our government. We could obviously do better than we do, but when we solve that problem, as long as we have the current laws about appropriating each year and so on,

That's not going to get entirely solved. What we proposed, as I said, we were surprised, as you were, that NASA didn't have lots of this kind of planning. What we proposed is without tying to the year 2029 or something like that, it is possible to say that if in the year T0 we're going to put humans on Mars, then you can make a pretty good estimate of the year T0 minus X.

that you better have demonstrated full-scale nuclear thermal propulsion system than your T0 minus Y. You had better be able to demonstrate a prototype on the ground of that system. And then at T minus zero, you better have all the components available and the architecture agreed upon. Once you've done that,

You can start to break it down and say at T-Mind is why you need these various elements. And you need about this many people, we think, that we have on reserve because we don't know what problems we're going to run into. And so doing that, you can be much quicker on your feet, much more flexible. And I think we think you better plan it. But that's not a shortcut for a stable budget, though, without question.

We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Greetings, Bill Nye here. NASA's budget just had the largest downturn in 15 years, which means we need your help.

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Planning, I think, is maybe at the core of this because you also in the report, the committee noted that NASA doesn't have really a long term strategic plan either. And of course, you can't plan your technology needs if you don't know what you want to do. What kind of human capital do you need if you don't know what you're going to do and what type of infrastructure do you need?

This has been a persistent, I mean, we talk about a moon to Mars program. What is missing in that framework that provides ill definition for these needs? Well, today, of course, we talk about go back to the moon and on to Mars. Going back to the earlier two reports I worked on for NASA, we strongly emphasized that it would be awfully easy to go back to the moon and bog down there, and that would be the end of it.

So at least those two prior reports strongly urged to continue to focus on the Mars.

NASA has been very good about saying that the plan for Artemis is to go to the moon and on to Mars, which shows an indication of planning ahead. But there's not much planning behind the statement. Again, we think the reason for that is there's a lot of opportunities out there in the near term to do very important things.

And so inadvertently, maybe we aren't laying the groundwork in terms of technology, people and infrastructure, that's the whole story, to go to Mars and do the other things that we talk about, we want to do. That was, of course, exactly the question the Congress asked us to address. Are we ready to do these things? Sadly, our answer is no. And the same ever is the question, well, how have we been doing so well?

I said, we, I mean, NASA, our nation, how have we done so well? The answer is that we've taken money from the future and brought it forward and spent it on today. And we've done very well. We can be mighty proud of that. And all of us, I think, can be mighty proud of what NASA overall has done. What's the status of infrastructure, NASA's physical infrastructure right now?

Yeah, infrastructure is often overlooked, not only in NASA, but at universities and corporations and so on. And by NASA infrastructure, we mean not only buildings and roads and things like that, but also computers and test facilities and research support facilities and so on. So it's the backbone of NASA to some degree. I think the old backbone is human talent, but

This is a part of it. And if you look at the status of the infrastructure at NASA, I'll just quote a few statistics here from the back of my mind. Today, 83% of the infrastructure at NASA is past its design life. If we continue to modernize at the rate we have been for the last couple of decades,

The average piece of infrastructure at NASA will be 320 years old. And their goal is 60, incidentally. To have a buildable at 60, an industry would be far less than that. And of course, this is the leading edge of technology we're talking about. We're talking not only about the most advanced computers, but also we stood under leaking roofs. Literally, NASA facilities and factories and research and development facilities

The bad news is that the NASA budget isn't very big. The overall scale of things is part of the GDP.

The good news is it's not very big in the sense that you could double it without impacting the GDP much. And I'm not proposing doubling NASA's foot here, but there may be a little more flexibility than one would think. But it is a challenge, and it indeed is undergoing a business plan. Just another example, the NASA mission budget since 2010 has increased by 8%.

The mission support budget has declined by 33%, and that's all the purchasing power parity. And a little arithmetic will tell one that under that circumstance, today, each dollar of mission support has to support 50% more dollars of mission budget than it had to do in 2010, which, of course, is a very big challenge.

There are some things that can be done that will help. Basically, you set up a fund for infrastructure that you go and the users pay a charge for what they use. And it recycles the funds back into the evolving fund. We think that's something that should be looked at. And we've made a lot of lesser recommendations along the way that will help a lot. But they're not the total answer.

Has NASA management become too centralized in the last 10 years? The great question is whether NASA has become too centralized. If one goes back to the failure of the Columbia, the failure report has a couple of remarkable statements, one of which is the failure of Columbia aircraft.

had as much to do with NASA culture as it did with foam. Of course, remember, it was a piece of foam that hit the leading edge of the shuttle wing and caused the failure and the loss of several astronauts. That report also said that, and the current leadership is saying this, that more and more of the things that NASA does cut across centers. They're really interdisciplinary. They're not at one center.

And that raises the question of how you avoid duplication, how do you be efficient. And so given the boost of the failure reports from the Columbia, the NASA leadership has taken steps to put more responsibility on the mission programs, the mission side of the budget, and less responsibility in the side of the center, if you will.

Also, in doing this, more and more has migrated to the headquarters in terms of day-to-day control of ordinary activities. And our committee fully subscribes to the notion that ultimately the NASA leadership, NASA headquarters, is responsible for everything at NASA. But that doesn't mean it has to try to get involved in everything at NASA, that it has to delegate and delegate carefully and then monitor it.

And it's our belief that there are indications that there's an unintended consequence of what we tend to do is very constructive steps. The unintended consequences are doing things like putting more authority in the mission side to the expense of the center side, and that they're putting more authority for day-to-day things with the headquarters than out in the field.

I could quote examples for hours, but one that jumps in my mind is if a NASA center discovers that it needs a person with talent in a very specific area, some really critical area, and goes to headquarters and says, may we hire a person to work in this area?

And eventually it gets an answer back that yes, you may. Well, from that time of the yes, you may until NASA can make a conditional offer to a specific individual is 81 days. Well, your average outstanding engineer is going to sit around for 81 days to see if he's got a job or she's got a job.

And they'll get some other jobs offered from elsewhere in the industry during that period of time. And so that's very good by government-wide standards. NASA has some special treatment to make it very, we'll go a little faster. And so that's an example of the kind of situation we've run into in our committee on this issue. And I'm glad you raised it because it's a really important one.

Our committee takes the position that you can't put a management team in charge of NASA and then tell them how they have to organize and what the culture has to be and then hold them responsible. If you're going to hold them responsible, you can't tell them how to do their job. And so our committee was reluctant to go say, this is what you ought to do.

So our committee took the point, positioned NASA, we believe there's a lot of evidence that you have a problem of too much authority in headquarters for day-to-day matters and a drift of authority from the centers to the mission directorates that seems to have gotten out of balance. And we recommended that NASA set up a review committee.

Conducted by NASA that involves outsiders, maybe from industry, maybe from academia, that involves NASA retirees and current NASA people. And checks and sees if this concern we have doesn't deserve some change in the way business gets done.

There are a number of findings that your committee makes, seven findings and eight recommendations, I should say. And unfortunately, as much as I'd love to, we can't go through all of them. We talked about budget. That's an obvious one. We talked, we're kind of implying some of these kind of management improvements and efficiencies, things like this revolving fund for infrastructure improvements. How has NASA improved?

or other external entities responded, or members of Congress? Have you been finding a positive response to the recommendation?

Yes, I've given probably 15 briefings now. It's all in the public, of course. I've briefed the Senate side and the House side and OMB and OSTP and, of course, NASA headquarters, NASA writ large. And the response to me is very, very encouraging. My secretary told me the other day, since I retired, I've chaired a co-chair at 43 states.

committees and commissions on every subject you could think of and some you couldn't know, probably. But I've been encouraged, because a lot of those I worked on, nothing ever came of them, not much. But in this case, the NASA leadership, putting the people in the field, in fact, nobody has said, well, we think you're wrong, your data are wrong. They probably have nuances on what we have said, or that would be understandable.

But by and large, we're actually, we do have a problem that we've got to collectively figure out how to solve. And one of the things that makes this a particular challenge case is that NASA alone can't solve it. So that's going to take help from the Congress, from OMB, from industry, and you go down the list. And this is not just NASA's problem. This is a national problem.

Well, this is where I think to circle back a bit to this idea of commercial services contracts, which your report and committee highlight specifically as if misused. And I'll just emphasize that because I know you want to be cautious with how this is interpreted. But the idea of giving and as opposed to your classic cost plus contracting where NASA sets the requirements, contractors bid and then they get paid for delivering the product, no matter if it is more expensive or not.

Services, right, is what we've seen with commercial crew, commercial cargo, and now with human landing system, lunar landings, eclipse and other things are being all experimented on. This idea that maybe there are movements or people who don't want to see NASA return to that capability, but would rather have it outsourced. And I think

I think about this in terms of some of the critiques I've seen about the reporter responses, whereas should we want to go back to a NASA that created this in the first place, or is it time to move into this new system? Is there an appropriate level where NASA should just be a pass-through agency for commercial contractors who may be freed from some of the burdensome bureaucracies that we face with government agencies?

Do you see, was that ever under the consideration of the committee to radically reevaluate this particular role? Or is this fundamentally not what we talk about when we talk about NASA? Well, the question you raised did come up and it came up largely in the context of the areas we were asked to address. For example, could NASA maintain the human resources it needs to do this cooperative under change model?

in-house versus out-house. You should NASA provide facilities for industry. Should industry provide their facilities and so on? And the clear feeling is that in this country, the free enterprise system has been one of the factors. It's made the nation wealthy and strong. And that's true of NASA, which has put most of its wealth out into the free enterprise system. And so,

in terms of any principle about not doing what-- what is an interesting side is if you look in China, their big boom period came when they started to adopt the free enterprise system. When they turned the other direction, things had turned around. So there's no issue, I think, there. But there are issues that kind of you point to.

One has to do with the type of contracts you use, whether it be fixed-price contracts or cost-reversible contracts. And each has some horror stories to go with it. And I think it would be our view that each has its merits when it's properly applied. And that when you're doing development work, you get surprises. You're doing something that's never been done before by definition. That's probably not a good place for a fixed-price contract. And the history seems to overall suggest that.

On the other hand, when you're doing something like the Cargill and the West Bank station repeatedly,

With a developed system, an improvement system, very appropriate that it should be fixed price. So if it's something that you know how to do, you've done it before, then that's fine. And when you lend service contracts, and this is true of fixed price contracts, of course, particularly, you basically use the government, you use the person who's putting up the money to do the job, give up, you have very little control.

And if you have a mission that has six links, like in a chain, six links in a chain, and one of them is fixed price out as a service contract, which you have no control over the five links, that merits careful thought. It might be very appropriate. It depends on how much risk is involved in that six-link contract.

And so our bottom line would be that service contracts are fine when used properly. They're not very fine when they're used where there's uncertainty in what needs to be done. And so we don't take a strong yes or no position. We try to lay out the conditions under which each might be appropriate.

Right. And I think what I really took away from this, which is the bigger picture view and the short-termism versus long-term perspective for the agency and the health of the agency, is that you can see this is like a microcosm of the ideas we've been discussing in this report, which is this budget pressure selects for this cost. I would say somewhat myopia on cost savings and commercial services contracts have been

Proven successful and minimizing the risk of cost increases to NASA at least particularly individually I think you make an interesting point about a chain of causality there in a larger program But NASA is not on the hook for the money But by doing so you save the money you save that you lower the risk but what you've done is you've you've added

added risk to your workforce, talent retention. You've added risk to the utility of your infrastructure. You've added risk to management and changing mores and focuses of how and what NASA does. And you accept all this kind of, as you point out, this hands-off, more hands-off, more opaque approach that doesn't then feed back into the internal strength of the agency necessarily. And I think that's such an interesting idea and subtlety that

We really need to think more about in terms of how we deploy public funding, but also keep the strength of the space agency that the public that does all these other things that commercial companies generally do.

Well, that's a good summary. I think that I've spent 10 years in government and a lot of two years in academia and a lot of years in industry. And the thing that industry has out there, the magic word is competition. And boy, that's an awfully valuable asset. I think we ought to take advantage of that to the extent we can.

What does success look like and when do we start as observers, particularly our members or people on the outside? How do we know if NASA takes the right path from the options before it? Very difficult question at this point in time. I mean, two weeks from an election, we don't know who will be running the country, who will be running NASA two months from now. And we don't know what will happen to the overall federal budget.

And so I hate to say it, but I think it will be some time. The problem we're citing, we didn't get into these troubles overnight either, and so we won't solve them overnight. So if we, a year from now, could point to some positive steps, I think that would be encouraging. NASA today, they have a $3 billion deferred maintenance problem in the US.

That's a big problem, even for the government. That's $3 billion. That doesn't show up overnight. Well, Norm Augustine, we will reach out back to you if we start to see some progress or not in this role. I want to thank you again for joining us on the show today. Again, I cannot recommend the report enough. You and the other members of the committee, I think did a wonderful job and really hope we start seeing some progress in this matter. So thank you again. Casey, thank you. It's a pleasure to talk about it. It's time for action.

We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. But we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration.

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