I’ve worked with a few former NASA employees now.
They all said the same thing: There were some amazing, passionate people at NASA but they were all surrounded by people who were only there to attend meetings and collect paychecks. Getting anything done was impossible because you had to navigate webs of org structure and process that had been designed to make work and jobs for people, not to deliver results.
My one ex-NASA coworker got a lot of mileage out of telling people he worked for NASA, putting it on his LinkedIn, and mentioning it when he introduced himself to new people. People respect the name. It was a stark contrast to how he described his actual time there.
The national labs are also a lot like this.
Which do you think takes a severance package?
It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but it’s not their call how Congress allocates money.
Losing career managers, scientists and engineers isn’t going to fix any of the things you want to see fixed.
Another thing is, after next 3.5 years who remains in places of real power. Yes men, asslickers, career sociopaths with 0 empathy.
Anyway, good luck with that, I sure hope I am wrong.
Transitions of power in movements built around a cult of personality rarely keep the same momentum. There are a few exceptions, but in most of those the clear successor had their own charisma. That doesn’t appear to be the case here.
When he lost and left?
Stop trying to rewrite history for your cult leader.
* If the comment was about the mistyped 6.1.2020, that's just lame.
My dream outcome would be that they shrink down the bureaucracy massively, retire a lot of the career middle managers who make sure nothing ever moves too fast and no project is allowed to run lean, and then raise pay for the remaining people to attract some of the private sector talent that could infuse some new knowledge. The few people I know with SpaceX experience are not at all happy with the work environment there, but the pay and pace of a place like NASA aren’t an option for them.
And the normalisation of the language of totalitarianism continues.
I don’t disagree, but it’s grim.
I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X.
There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective: you need to restart every some years, to not stagnate.
From what I've seen, if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.
Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.
I disagree, fundamentally. Institutional knowledge is a set of "truths" that are respected, so necessarily prune the solution space. The only way to get those pruned branches back is to disregard it, by reconsidering, and re-traversing that solution space.
My time working with some of the brightest minds in my industry taught me that they aren't necessaily some visionary, nor super genius, nor even some workaholic putting 20+ hours a day into their craft (though I have met a few I would describe as such). The gap between me and them wasn't over some raw intellect. It was many times a matter of me thinking of an idea and them talking about how that was tried 5-20 years ago and why that lead down a huge rabbit hole.
Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true.
> to some extent
This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
As of now, this same mentality is used to push AI into everywhere. Not only is the intent bad, but the tech doesn't even work. That's not "resisting change". That's experimenting and realizing the hype was just that.
>This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
The comment itself definitely reveals more than a light suggestion.
This was precisely my point in [1]. It's fundamentally the same: a pruning of the solution space without re-traversal.
> why it's very similar to an old idea.
And, with diligence, you verify that the new context is exactly the same as the old. You do this by knowing that it might not be, in other words, you temporarily suspending your trust in that knowledge, and re-traverse it with the current context.
It's a thin line of wisdom and conservatism, but an important distinction. People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod. But that's exactly what tends to be proposed: big multi month initiatives, not some prototype to test over a sprint.
The important question I learned to ask was "what problem am I trying to solve". One aspect of this thin line tends to be a muddy answer to this question. When you can only suspect and make grand showings instead of showing pragmatic use case you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
Exactly, the ability to innovate ceases. Risk is most easily avoided by leaning on the existing institutional knowledge to direct new decisions even though they may be in new contexts.
> you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
By definition, iteration is not innovation. Innovation is new ideas. New ideas aren't possible without experimentation, otherwise they would be known ideas.
Most large companies move from innovation to acquisition for a reason: the risk of innovation is too great for a large company to stomach.
The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization. This is often much more than what is formally codified into the processes and training materials. As such, it can lead to loss of capability when there is too much turnover.
You seem to be conflating it with some other kind of bureaucratic conservatism or group-think. While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.
Yes, that't is my definition. But, that knowledge has very real practical effects and influence on the org. It has weight and momentum, especially when approaching new problems, or reconsidering old problems. The mechanism for that can be anywhere from "this is industry standard, lets not risk it" to "the director says we should focus on this approach".
That is quite the absolute statement. Could you share some data to back this up?
There's more to life than "innovation", but what you say tracks, I was part of an organization that became extremely innovative but went bust in the process.
> we have Space X.
Which is amazing for earth-orbit commercial launches, but doesn't move the needle for the many other things NASA concerns itself with, like research as mentioned elsewhere.
Jim Keller’s own biography kind of dispels this notion. He worked at DEC for 16 years when he was a young engineer (24-40 years old).
No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels.
But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.
Is the future going to be completely defunding science for 4 (or 8) years and then whipsawing back to normal levels once the republicans lose power?
It seems like as long as the parties are close to popularity of each other and one party is explicitly anti science there is no way to build anything sustainable. This is no way to run a country.
They don't call it the Senate Launch System for nothing
> It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul.
But there's a few programs that have these types of problems, not just NASA. IMO, there's probably more efficient ways to meet each goal, by decoupling the problem. But either way, we can't solve "the problem" unless we actually recognize what it is (and there's a lot more than what I've just mentioned)
Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget? I don't mean to be snarky, but level of inspiration is pretty subjective and difficult to put a price tag on. Honestly, I feel like the NASA budget needs to be considered in context relative to the DoD budget and then these cuts look much less convincing as being necessary.
It would be closer to 2%, but we could measure it by engagement. Ask people what their last positive interaction was with NASA vs the military. The military does all sorts of outreach with things like the Blue Angels, stadium flyovers, competitions at fairs, etc. Ask them what NASA has done over the past year vs what the military has done over the past year. Chances are many people couldn't name something NASA achieved in the past year. Would it be at the 2% number? I don't know.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think both should look for budget inefficiency, but until those are identified I wouldn't propose budget cuts. But it does seem that the NASA missions could be more inspiring recently.
US Military FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $842 billion
VS
NASA FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $24.9 billion
That is a ~35x multiplier. By bog-standard logical implication your question answers itself.
I dare say a great many people are very inspired by what the DoD does with their budget. Inspired to what... well, that's another subject. And the most inspired people are not the ones living in the US.
People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes. But quite a few are alive because of what global shipping enables.
Captain Phillips was a pretty good movie.
"Slicing at random" could actually outperform most other methods, as long as it's truly random. You can weasel your way out of a firing based on vibes or performance reviews - but you can't convince an RNG that its roll was wrong.
SLS. Orion. Gateway. Ambitionless Artemis. JPL's disaster of an MSR proposal. NASA reeks of rot and decay. It's not in a good place, and hasn't been in a long time now.
If you "just continue operating", it's only going to get worse.
Randomly firing and cutting funding isn’t a solution. Especially not to a perceived problem. If you think the spending is excessive you have to do the hard work of explaining why and then the even harder work of fixing it. If that seems too hard then yeah, it’s fine.
The entire space coast of Florida was built on this, from Kennedy Space Center down to Jupiter, FL.
The sad reality is in the US, too many towns were built around a very specific and niche business. Coal in the Appalachian mountains, NASA and the space coast, Pittsburgh Steel… it’s a community plan that failed and yet is still being used today. Woe to those that move/live there.
Money for SLS is separate part of the budget, its mismanagement causes reputational damage - MSR budget is part of NASA probe budget, mismanagement there causes stall, worse performances and cancellations for AWFUL amount of other projects
MSR is a fine enough concept though, I think Rocket Lab's proposal to get it done is sound and the government should take them up on the offer. If nothing else, the money to Rocket Lab for MSR development would help to make Rocket Lab a more viable SpaceX competitor, which should pay off for the US government in the long run.
Anyhoo, NASA letting so many people resign is good if your opinion is such that lowering government expenditure is a good thing. So long as the exit package is comparable to retirement package these government employees would have got otherwise. My guess is the resignation package has great near term performance but low long term (retirement) performance, making it a great option for younger workers able to pivot to new careers.
SLS isn't great but it does.. you know.. work.
Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't.
When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you.
There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).
I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.
If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon.
Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.
Had that happened on a crewed mission, they could have returned astronauts safely. Which is probably why they went ahead with Apollo 8
> Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware
The law that mandated that NASA built the SLS also required that they re-use that hardware. This wasn't a choice made by NASA designers but by a bipartisan congress and it wasn't designed so much to advance our space program so much as a way to keep funneling money to space contractors with the end of the Shuttle program.
Any article that proposed to discuss the "lunacy" of Artemis without ever mentioning Congress's role in that lunacy is pretty clearly rage bait.
Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works?
Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.
Well we don't have that. SLS isn't it and never will be. The most SLS can be is a heavy lift rocket that can be used once every few years with a lot of upfront notice. Certainly not "launch capable" at "any given time".
Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference, and you can't blame the first stage (which SLS is) for that if it did its job.
In the case of SLS, Block I can get 95 metric tons, Block I-B can get 105 tons and Block II 130 tons.
The Falcon Heavy in comparison can only get max 64 tons to LEO, less if you want to recover boosters and the core to save money
The real winner is the Saturn V which could get 140 tons to LEO. I know it was expensive per launch (about $1 billion in 2025 dollars) but given all the billions we've blown on trying to develop cheaper tech it seemed like we could have just stuck with what we know worked
It makes a difference because if you're designing a rocket for a mission then you'll have a rocket that's as close to optimal for the mission, given mission requirements, timelines and budgets as you can reasonably get it. That's not SLS, the Moon mission wasn't planned when SLS was designed and instead SLS is optimized to reuse Shuttle hardware.
Being stuck with a rocket that wasn't designed for the mission, as well as the political decision to use Orion, severely compromise the planning of Artemis. SLS lacks the power to get Orion into a proper lunar orbit, so instead they're going to use a highly elliptical NHRO lunar orbit with an orbital period of 7 days. This is extremely dangerous, it means that if there is any sort of emergency on the moon the astronauts may have to wait as long as a week to get back to Orion; which is probably a death sentence. It also means the lander has to be huge to make up for SLS's inadequacy, which means the Artemis program now relies on the success of Starship HLS and/or Blue Origin's HLS. This is going to delay Artemis and the entire reason this dependency exists is because Congress wanted a shuttle-derived rocket foremost, and then made the situation even worse by saddling it with their Boeing pork capsule.
What it comes down to is SLS is a rocket that ""works"" but isn't actually good at anything and therefore never should have been built.
Americans seem to expect lots of flag waving and spaceships. Less fundamental science.
Isn't the greater likelihood that delivery of service will drop as a result of the cuts and they'll point to this to justify nullifying the entire programme?
Science is great but launch vehicle innovation is where the problem is so that’s why I focused on SLS. We could easily have 100 JWSTs today if something like starship were operational. NASA dragging its feet for decades, building silly things likes SLS, trying to find token uses to justify it, doesn’t inspire me anymore.
Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.
I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.
Budget and schedule overruns are expected with any large project - it's just the nature of contracting. But there are limits, and SLS blew past them quite a while ago. I'm not sure how much of it is NASA's fault given how much congressional meddling has gone on, though.
Happens all the time.
Europe vs us east vs us west.
The bottleneck is actual manufacturing of JWST - the folding mirror was especially fraught; I think the sunshield as well.
NASA's science missions have been incredible.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a 6.5-meter-diameter infrared telescope at Lagrange Point 2 that can measure the atmospheric chemistry of planets orbiting other stars and measure the spectra of galaxies that were around 10 billion years ago.
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars by being lowered to the ground from a rocket-powered "sky-crane." It was powered by a radioactive battery, has been driving around and taking measurements for more than a decade, and has shown that Mars was likely habitable billions of years ago.
What kind of inspiration do you feel is lacking there?
The universe... what a concept. You know, the universe is a little bit like the human hand. For example, you have Grumann's center right here and then you have Undiscovered Worlds and uh, um and Sector 8 and up here is Tittleman's Crest so you can kinda picture it's a little bit like a leaf or uhh, umm, it's not a bowl. Do you know that when you look at a planet and you see that light, that planet's not even there! that's just a light, that's just your neighbor shining a flashlight right into your yard looking for coons, and he says "what are you doing in my backyard? with that flashlight?" and i told him "i'm shining, i'm shining in the window so I can teach your son about the universe" he said "get out of my yard and why are you communicating to my son? why are you in all black? behind my bushes shining a light into my house?" and i said "i'm teaching your son about the universe! i'm shining a light, shining a light right in there and exploring his room as he's looking out and exploring the universe!" i turn the light off and i see your son go to bed and i turn the light back on and i do swirls on his wall like a comet's tail. i do this every night with your son.
NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better. You can debate some of the specifics, sure, but if all this current state of uncertainty brings is a clean slate and new ways of thinking in 4 years, that’s better IMHO than looking back 4 years from now watching NASA brute force a token moon landing on the back of ancient technology. Which they may still do!