2024-11-01
56 分钟Norm Augustine, the distinguished aerospace industry veteran behind numerous influential studies, joins the show to discuss NASA at a Crossroads, the new report that raises alarm bells for NASA’s workforce, infrastructure, and technology capabilities.
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 Dreier, 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.