The Real Problem with NASA

Many years ago when I first went to work on a NASA facility I was amazed at the complexity of their testing programs. There is an old saying about rocket science that inversely describes the complexity of rocket design by claiming that (insert the field here) is “not rocket science.” It’s not unusual in Huntsville to see bumper stickers that proudly proclaim “Actually…. I AM a rocket scientist.” Putting things into space and maintaining them there is hard. It is complicated and the environment is unforgiving of mistakes.

NASA learned early that small mistakes and minor miscalculations lead to large disasters. Throughout the early years we learned at an accelerated pace that we must minimize the unknowns and maximize the testing to cover every possible variable. Vehicle designs are redundant for all critical failure possibilities. We simply can’t afford to lose a vehicle, more especially a vehicle with people on board because of one component failure especially when we understand that there are a vast number of components in each vehicle.

I was not working at NASA when the Challenger accident occurred but I was here when the Columbia accident occurred. One basic cultural problem led to both failures; schedule pressure overrode technical concerns. It really is that simple. NASA works off of an annually renewable budget that has to be approved by Congress. It is a special executive branch agency similar to the CIA in that the president appoints the director and largely controls its main directives. The head of the agency is approved by the Senate and the budget is controlled by Congress.

Both Shuttle disasters were caused by schedule pressure that was brought to bear based upon funding concerns. NASA’s funding is a political football that is regularly booted about when it comes time to pass a federal budget. At its funding peak during the Apollo buildup NASA received about 4% of the federal budget. In 1975 this fell to below 1% where it has remained since that time. In the early 2000’s it began falling again to the point where by 2012 it has fell below .5%. It has languished there since that time.

The schedule pressure that caused the accidents came from trying to meet projections that had been agreed to with Congress. NASA has learned by experience that delays and slips of projected schedules come at a dear expense. Congress regularly defunds programs that fall behind schedule. NASA reacts by doing the same thing on a smaller scale. When a large program falls behind projected schedule, small programs are defunded on a regular basis.

As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report that came out after Columbia crashed points out, it is this schedule pressure that led to this accident and the Challenger accident before. Unfortunately, we seem to have taken this report and concentrated on the technical aspects of what caused the actual vehicle to crash without fully comprehending that the larger budgetary concerns are what led to the decision making process that crashed Columbia. In other words, it wasn’t a technical issue that caused the accident; but rather a whole series of decisions before and after the technical issue that were overwhelmingly driven by budgetary concerns at the top levels of NASA.

There is a smoking gun involved but it was loaded, primed, and fired by a budgetary weakness at the heart of NASA’s existence. Annually renewable budgets based upon projections of research and development are inherently inaccurate entities. No amount of Congressional scrutiny is going to change that. If we intend on continuing to evolve our presence in space, and I would suggest that as a matter of national security we don’t really have a choice in that matter, we are going to have to understand that it is research and development. Research and development is by its very nature unpredictable.

Leaving that aside for a moment, I would like to point out that we have not changed the process that caused both accidents. As a matter of fact, budgetary concerns for every increasingly smaller amounts of funding have tended to sharpen and increase that pressure. In other words, we have not only not alleviated the problem, we have made it worse.

Currently, NASA is being redirected to concentrate on interplanetary exploration. Lower Earth Orbit space is being handed off to private industry. This includes satellite launch capabilities and Space Station access. Make no mistake about it, NASA is still tasked with funding the research and development necessary to accomplish this but the money is going to private industry. People seem to think a lot of private investors are ponying up the money for Space Ex, Orbital Sciences, and Boeing to handle these concerns but nothing could be further from the truth.

Developing launch vehicles and systems is still research and development. The only difference for private entities is that there is nothing to offset the schedule pressure. In other words, the competitive process wherein the winner takes all has led to even more schedule pressure. The prize is government funding. The loser gets to lose both their funding and their reputation. We have seen the results of this process, both at Wallops Island when the Antares rocket of Orbital Sciences blew up shortly after takeoff and at Cape Canaveral in June when a Space Ex Falcon exploded two minutes into its flight. We can add to that a Russian Progress 59 freighter that burned up in Earth’s atmosphere on May 7, 2015 to present a clear picture of just how hard space flight actually happens to be.

Private companies exist for one reason and one reason only; to make a profit. No other concern is even a close second. It is ludicrous to suppose that schedule pressure based upon budgetary concerns that have caused a government agency to make bad decisions will somehow be better handled by a private concern solely driven by profit. It is just not possible for a private company to react in any other way.

Having been intimately involved in this industry for thirty years now, I have seen a lot of NASA programs come and go. All of them were feasible. All of them were well thought out plans for getting to the next step, for continuing the process of astounding technological advancement that has been the hallmark of the US space program from its inception. All of them were killed by budgetary concerns.

Until we get a handle on how to fund research and development for long term goals I don’t see much possibility that things will change. Private space is not the answer now and it never will be. There is no profit in private space. There is a profit in the indirect and usually unknowable advancement that such technology produces but that is long term and unforeseeable.

The technological advancements that have come from NASA’s efforts are vast and quite astounding as to how they have affected the every-day life of every human on earth. I suspect this will continue for a long as NASA exists. It’s a shame that they are currently being limited by the narrowness of vision that doesn’t allow us to see the whole picture. We don’t seem to recognize the vast Forrest of opportunity that space exploration has produced because we are too concerned with what matchsticks cost.