8 ms·

It's official: NASA is a jobs program.

86 points by nebula 17y ago

arfrank 17y ago
I view the NASA spaceflight program nowadays as a monolithic company with so much bureaucracy that its impossible to make substantial changes without huge efforts. Going along with this analogy, back when they first started they were a startup, albeit one with a huge amount of funding, but one that could try and fail a lot cause the technology was new.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I like this analogy because it points out the critical factor that the people and the programs at NASA are overall fairly excellent. It's scope creep, being responsible to politics, and the inefficiencies of old, big organizations that's causing all of their problems. People act like that there is some sort of big populist movement to hate all big government. That's true, but you can be a big fan of NASA, the people who work there, and the stuff they do and still understand they need to shut the doors and turn the lights off. NASA is simply trying to be too much to too many people with too little money. Hell, manned spaceflight is lucky if they have the same mission for ten years in a row. The situation has just spun completely out of control.
Maciek416 17y ago
This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to discover anything but rather to give a large number of people jobs.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  For contrast with ITER, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 ("A Fusion Startup")
  - Maciek416 17y ago
    Thanks for that link. Relative to the story, this would also bring up examples of companies like Armadillo Aerospace and the other small-scale space startups. One thing that you might argue the space startups are not necessarily doing that NASA is doing is scientific research outside of spaceflight-related topics. General Fusion (the company in mnemonicsloth's link) would seem to be a sort of hybrid of these two extremes.. though extremely risky business-wise.
pmorici 17y ago
I'd be interested to know if there has ever been a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees. Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm FEMA claims they are under staffed. There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.
- Retric 17y ago
  There are significant incentives for doing more with less. However, there is also a constant stream of new things to do which cost more money. It's more a case where the government only looks for effecency in areas it has been doing for a while. So the Social Security Administration is lean. But, Nasa is a bloated cow.
  - solutionyogi 17y ago
    Would you care to point out few incentives for doing more with less? Government programs/departments are NEVER about doing more with less.
    - Retric 17y ago
      Geting promoted at the individual level is often related to standing out. The way you stand out in the government is to start a new project which either increases effecency or does something new. Unfortunatly starting a new program is far less risky at the professional level becuase it's harder to fail. Saving money requres an existing process with a well known goal and cost. EX: Saving money on toner cartigaes by changing the default faunt on a government document. PS: I was part of the EISP program which reduces the cost to create ISP documentation by half. The contractors where not happy about this, but the government loved it.
kurtosis 17y ago
Okay let's fantasize that the staff of NASA was willing to work for $1 / year - and that the cost per kg of sending stuff in to space converges to the energy cost of the chemical rocket fuel. I suspect that space flight is still pretty damn expensive. What happens in space to spacefaring humans that makes them cover the cost of going there plus a profit? Even something as obviously useful as launching communication sattelites is still very costly.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  From http://everything2.com/title/Costs+of+launching+to+orbit http://everything2.com/title/Costs+of+launching+to+orbit Therefore if we can get to the point where the fuel is the only thing we need to use up, a 140 lb (70kg) person can get launched for just a few tens of thousand of dollars- hardly any more than the cost of an airflight; a little bit more than a supersonic airflight.
altano 17y ago
Can everyone please leave their populist "oh my god everything the government does is so god damn innefficient and if only we dismantle it and let 6 smart people run it instead it would be SO great" yammmering at home for a few decades because the thought of a world without NASA makes me very depressed. It takes thousands of people BECAUSE of all the advances in technology and automation and robotics and computers and so on. I'm just a casual observer and fan, so I don't know if this is actually true, but the Mars rover mission seemed 10x more complicated than the Moon landings. And that's the last one... not the upcoming one that looks even more awesome. NASA is a poorly run, oversized govt agency, but give them credit for accomplishing some of the most amazing feats humanity has ever seen in recent years. And you know what... maybe that's what it takes.
- pmorici 17y ago
  I don't think that is what this article is talking about. It is discussing an aversion to any decrease in work force. Despite the fact that the option that would have potentially decreased the work force may have produced a more "amazing" result.
- gaius 17y ago
  That is not the point that the article is making. The evaluation criteria for the potential missions favours missions that increase NASA's headcount over missions that, y'know, actually do stuff in space. NASA has done some very impressive stuff it's true. But if you consider that it went from a standing start in 1958 to moon landing 11 years later, it ought to have done a lot more in the 40 years since then.
  - kingkawn 17y ago
    The moon landing was pushed by Cold War politics (and funding). Those projects take huge amounts of money, and NASA had them. After that, the interest tapered off.
    - gaius 17y ago
      I don't think that's true. Well, it is true that there is less funding now. But it's also true that in nearly every industry, the overwhelming trend is to do more in absolute terms with less in relative terms. E.g. what percentage of the average person's annual income would it cost for a transatlantic flight in 1969 compared to 2009, and how many people do it? (That will have to be rhetorical for now as I can't find the numbers with a quick Google). Yet in 1969 (50 years after the first non-stop transatlantic flight) transatlantic travel, while expensive, was unremarkable. By now shuttle flights ought not to be an "event" but routine... And the first 747 flew in 1969, now you can buy 'em off the shelf.
biohacker42 17y ago
1. Which government program isn't? 2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?
- marze 17y ago
  To those who feel that human exploration of the solar system is something they'd like to see near term, if a govt. agency tasked with the job is doing an incompetent job of it while spending billions to develop capability that already exists in the private sector (read: Atlas V), I could understand why they might focus on this particular "govt. jobs program".
  - jfoutz 17y ago
    I could be misunderstanding, but it looks to me like an Atlas V HLV has about 1/5 the lift capacity of a Saturn V. I know materials are better now, but I'm not convinced they are 500% better. Furthermore, the air, water, food and crew is a fixed mass. I doubt an atlas could take a person to the moon and back even if the structure and fuel are massless.
    - jfoutz 17y ago
      Oh, i am dumb. yeah, I guess an atlas would be fine. It would take a lot more trips to get the vehicle built but the reuse of existing tech is probably far cheaper that building something new. not enough coffee this morning i guess.
designtofly 17y ago
This slide is taken out of context to support the author's own ideology. First off, this slide describes only one of 13 criteria used when deciding on alternatives. This is certainly not the focus of the presentation. This presentation is showing the multitude of objectives that NASA decision makers must take into account when deciding on the future of their program. This is strictly an exercise in Multi Attribute Decision Making [1]. In general, with MADM techniques, you frame the objective as a weighted combination of criteria that you meet with appropriate weightings. We have no idea what "weights" (i.e. importance) were put to this criterion of maintaining workforce. What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets. As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do? [1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+decision+making http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+dec...
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  I agree that the article sensationalizes the point somewhat. But at the same time, your dismissal of the concern because of the need retain knowledge, and hence the people having that knowledge, misses an important aspect as well. The table shown in the article is tuned not only to weigh against losing people. It also -- and this is the really telling part -- is tuned to give preference to anything that increases the workforce. Surely preserving the existing set of experts is not fostered by hiring on additional ones. That sounds to me like nothing more than empire-building. And I think that in the big picture, accounting for the possibility of future lean times, making NASA more dependent on personnel expenses must increase the possibility of having to let go some of the pile of experts that these preferences are amassing.
mhb 17y ago
The single-payer model for space flight hasn't yielded cost savings, higher productivity and more innovation? Hmm.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  I think it has resulted in a great deal of innovation; just in the last couple of decades, there's been the space shuttle - a rather inefficient, expensive system but one which has nevertheless taught us a great deal (and there have been >130 shuttle launches - despite two catastrophes, it's the mark of a successful system that shuttle launches have become commonplace); the Hubble Space telescope, which has operated for far longer than expected; The Earth Observing Missions; we've successfully sent two robots on Mars which have kept functioning for 5 years; we've gathered samples from comets (subject of another HN thread today)...for a list of missions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_missions For context, here's a brief history of NASA budgets: it's really quite good value in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget Now, I don't think NASA is beyond criticism...but to say they haven't innovated or done a lot with the resources available is just BS. NASA is the most successful space agency in the world, by a very long way.
dasfsfd 17y ago
Why's this crap even on HN ? Take your politics to digg.
- movix 17y ago
  Isn't this getting more political than hacker-ical?
- bct 17y ago
  I was just thinking to myself today, the internet needs more places for American right-libertarians to talk about politics. Good to see that Hacker News is stepping up to fill that gap.
- morallybass 17y ago
  This seems to be political opinion masquerading as analysis.
maurycy 17y ago
On the side note about most of the goverenment's programs: If there is no demand for your work, you do not do what do you do for love but money and you do not enrich the society in the long term, you are a parasite.
- gjm11 17y ago
  Probably true. What's the relevance here? (Clearly there is a demand for what NASA's employees do, since someone gives them money to do it. I would guess that the love:money ratio is higher at NASA than at most companies. The most visible things NASA does are science and space exploration, and both seem to me like paradigmatic examples of things that enrich society (unless by "enrich" you mean "provide money to", I guess). Perhaps there are lots of people employed by other bits of the government who are parasites according to your criteria, but you've not exactly been specific about who. What exactly is your point?
anamax 17y ago
Did you ever wonder why NASA has facilities in Huntsville Alabama? How about the strange split of mission control between Texas and Florida? It's "odd" how NASA facilities are so often located in states that had politically powerful senators at the relevant time. The "Robert Byrd" effect is not new. I'm waiting for them to rename West Virginia after him.
- otto 17y ago
  There is a little bit more to it than that. NASA is not just a space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA also does a lot of aviation and other research besides just shooting people into space and playing golf on the moon. The reason for launching in Florida is because if something goes wrong they can initiate the termination system and anything that falls out of the sky will be in the ocean, opposed to a populated area. Other NASA centers in other states are useful for shuttle returns. Often when bad weather is occurring they send the shuttle to land at NASA Dryden.
  - anamax 17y ago
    Yes, Florida is a natural place to do launches. However, the question was why mission control is split between Florida and Texas. This split predates the shuttle by quite a while. Was Huntsville a hot-bed of technical expertise before NASA or its predecessors?
zeynel1 17y ago
The same is happening in scientific research, although, it is not as obvious: a standing army of PhD's are making progress very difficult by making research expensive.

86 points by nebula 17y ago

I view the NASA spaceflight program nowadays as a monolithic company with so much bureaucracy that its impossible to make substantial changes without huge efforts. Going along with this analogy, back when they first started they were a startup, albeit one with a huge amount of funding, but one that could try and fail a lot cause the technology was new.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I like this analogy because it points out the critical factor that the people and the programs at NASA are overall fairly excellent. It's scope creep, being responsible to politics, and the inefficiencies of old, big organizations that's causing all of their problems. People act like that there is some sort of big populist movement to hate all big government. That's true, but you can be a big fan of NASA, the people who work there, and the stuff they do and still understand they need to shut the doors and turn the lights off. NASA is simply trying to be too much to too many people with too little money. Hell, manned spaceflight is lucky if they have the same mission for ten years in a row. The situation has just spun completely out of control.

Maciek416 17y ago

This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to discover anything but rather to give a large number of people jobs.

mnemonicsloth 17y ago
For contrast with ITER, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 ("A Fusion Startup")
- Maciek416 17y ago
  Thanks for that link. Relative to the story, this would also bring up examples of companies like Armadillo Aerospace and the other small-scale space startups. One thing that you might argue the space startups are not necessarily doing that NASA is doing is scientific research outside of spaceflight-related topics. General Fusion (the company in mnemonicsloth's link) would seem to be a sort of hybrid of these two extremes.. though extremely risky business-wise.

pmorici 17y ago

I'd be interested to know if there has ever been a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees. Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm FEMA claims they are under staffed. There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.

Retric 17y ago
There are significant incentives for doing more with less. However, there is also a constant stream of new things to do which cost more money. It's more a case where the government only looks for effecency in areas it has been doing for a while. So the Social Security Administration is lean. But, Nasa is a bloated cow.
- solutionyogi 17y ago
  Would you care to point out few incentives for doing more with less? Government programs/departments are NEVER about doing more with less.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Geting promoted at the individual level is often related to standing out. The way you stand out in the government is to start a new project which either increases effecency or does something new. Unfortunatly starting a new program is far less risky at the professional level becuase it's harder to fail. Saving money requres an existing process with a well known goal and cost. EX: Saving money on toner cartigaes by changing the default faunt on a government document. PS: I was part of the EISP program which reduces the cost to create ISP documentation by half. The contractors where not happy about this, but the government loved it.

kurtosis 17y ago

Okay let's fantasize that the staff of NASA was willing to work for $1 / year - and that the cost per kg of sending stuff in to space converges to the energy cost of the chemical rocket fuel. I suspect that space flight is still pretty damn expensive. What happens in space to spacefaring humans that makes them cover the cost of going there plus a profit? Even something as obviously useful as launching communication sattelites is still very costly.

randallsquared 17y ago
From http://everything2.com/title/Costs+of+launching+to+orbit http://everything2.com/title/Costs+of+launching+to+orbit Therefore if we can get to the point where the fuel is the only thing we need to use up, a 140 lb (70kg) person can get launched for just a few tens of thousand of dollars- hardly any more than the cost of an airflight; a little bit more than a supersonic airflight.

altano 17y ago

Can everyone please leave their populist "oh my god everything the government does is so god damn innefficient and if only we dismantle it and let 6 smart people run it instead it would be SO great" yammmering at home for a few decades because the thought of a world without NASA makes me very depressed. It takes thousands of people BECAUSE of all the advances in technology and automation and robotics and computers and so on. I'm just a casual observer and fan, so I don't know if this is actually true, but the Mars rover mission seemed 10x more complicated than the Moon landings. And that's the last one... not the upcoming one that looks even more awesome. NASA is a poorly run, oversized govt agency, but give them credit for accomplishing some of the most amazing feats humanity has ever seen in recent years. And you know what... maybe that's what it takes.

pmorici 17y ago
I don't think that is what this article is talking about. It is discussing an aversion to any decrease in work force. Despite the fact that the option that would have potentially decreased the work force may have produced a more "amazing" result.
gaius 17y ago
That is not the point that the article is making. The evaluation criteria for the potential missions favours missions that increase NASA's headcount over missions that, y'know, actually do stuff in space. NASA has done some very impressive stuff it's true. But if you consider that it went from a standing start in 1958 to moon landing 11 years later, it ought to have done a lot more in the 40 years since then.
- kingkawn 17y ago
  The moon landing was pushed by Cold War politics (and funding). Those projects take huge amounts of money, and NASA had them. After that, the interest tapered off.
  - gaius 17y ago
    I don't think that's true. Well, it is true that there is less funding now. But it's also true that in nearly every industry, the overwhelming trend is to do more in absolute terms with less in relative terms. E.g. what percentage of the average person's annual income would it cost for a transatlantic flight in 1969 compared to 2009, and how many people do it? (That will have to be rhetorical for now as I can't find the numbers with a quick Google). Yet in 1969 (50 years after the first non-stop transatlantic flight) transatlantic travel, while expensive, was unremarkable. By now shuttle flights ought not to be an "event" but routine... And the first 747 flew in 1969, now you can buy 'em off the shelf.

biohacker42 17y ago

1. Which government program isn't? 2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?

marze 17y ago
To those who feel that human exploration of the solar system is something they'd like to see near term, if a govt. agency tasked with the job is doing an incompetent job of it while spending billions to develop capability that already exists in the private sector (read: Atlas V), I could understand why they might focus on this particular "govt. jobs program".
- jfoutz 17y ago
  I could be misunderstanding, but it looks to me like an Atlas V HLV has about 1/5 the lift capacity of a Saturn V. I know materials are better now, but I'm not convinced they are 500% better. Furthermore, the air, water, food and crew is a fixed mass. I doubt an atlas could take a person to the moon and back even if the structure and fuel are massless.
  - jfoutz 17y ago
    Oh, i am dumb. yeah, I guess an atlas would be fine. It would take a lot more trips to get the vehicle built but the reuse of existing tech is probably far cheaper that building something new. not enough coffee this morning i guess.

designtofly 17y ago

This slide is taken out of context to support the author's own ideology. First off, this slide describes only one of 13 criteria used when deciding on alternatives. This is certainly not the focus of the presentation. This presentation is showing the multitude of objectives that NASA decision makers must take into account when deciding on the future of their program. This is strictly an exercise in Multi Attribute Decision Making [1]. In general, with MADM techniques, you frame the objective as a weighted combination of criteria that you meet with appropriate weightings. We have no idea what "weights" (i.e. importance) were put to this criterion of maintaining workforce. What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets. As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do? [1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+decision+making http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=multi+attribute+dec...

CWuestefeld 17y ago
I agree that the article sensationalizes the point somewhat. But at the same time, your dismissal of the concern because of the need retain knowledge, and hence the people having that knowledge, misses an important aspect as well. The table shown in the article is tuned not only to weigh against losing people. It also -- and this is the really telling part -- is tuned to give preference to anything that increases the workforce. Surely preserving the existing set of experts is not fostered by hiring on additional ones. That sounds to me like nothing more than empire-building. And I think that in the big picture, accounting for the possibility of future lean times, making NASA more dependent on personnel expenses must increase the possibility of having to let go some of the pile of experts that these preferences are amassing.

mhb 17y ago

The single-payer model for space flight hasn't yielded cost savings, higher productivity and more innovation? Hmm.

anigbrowl 17y ago
I think it has resulted in a great deal of innovation; just in the last couple of decades, there's been the space shuttle - a rather inefficient, expensive system but one which has nevertheless taught us a great deal (and there have been >130 shuttle launches - despite two catastrophes, it's the mark of a successful system that shuttle launches have become commonplace); the Hubble Space telescope, which has operated for far longer than expected; The Earth Observing Missions; we've successfully sent two robots on Mars which have kept functioning for 5 years; we've gathered samples from comets (subject of another HN thread today)...for a list of missions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_missions For context, here's a brief history of NASA budgets: it's really quite good value in my opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget Now, I don't think NASA is beyond criticism...but to say they haven't innovated or done a lot with the resources available is just BS. NASA is the most successful space agency in the world, by a very long way.

dasfsfd 17y ago

Why's this crap even on HN ? Take your politics to digg.

movix 17y ago
Isn't this getting more political than hacker-ical?
bct 17y ago
I was just thinking to myself today, the internet needs more places for American right-libertarians to talk about politics. Good to see that Hacker News is stepping up to fill that gap.
morallybass 17y ago
This seems to be political opinion masquerading as analysis.

maurycy 17y ago

On the side note about most of the goverenment's programs: If there is no demand for your work, you do not do what do you do for love but money and you do not enrich the society in the long term, you are a parasite.

gjm11 17y ago
Probably true. What's the relevance here? (Clearly there is a demand for what NASA's employees do, since someone gives them money to do it. I would guess that the love:money ratio is higher at NASA than at most companies. The most visible things NASA does are science and space exploration, and both seem to me like paradigmatic examples of things that enrich society (unless by "enrich" you mean "provide money to", I guess). Perhaps there are lots of people employed by other bits of the government who are parasites according to your criteria, but you've not exactly been specific about who. What exactly is your point?

anamax 17y ago

Did you ever wonder why NASA has facilities in Huntsville Alabama? How about the strange split of mission control between Texas and Florida? It's "odd" how NASA facilities are so often located in states that had politically powerful senators at the relevant time. The "Robert Byrd" effect is not new. I'm waiting for them to rename West Virginia after him.

otto 17y ago
There is a little bit more to it than that. NASA is not just a space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA also does a lot of aviation and other research besides just shooting people into space and playing golf on the moon. The reason for launching in Florida is because if something goes wrong they can initiate the termination system and anything that falls out of the sky will be in the ocean, opposed to a populated area. Other NASA centers in other states are useful for shuttle returns. Often when bad weather is occurring they send the shuttle to land at NASA Dryden.
- anamax 17y ago
  Yes, Florida is a natural place to do launches. However, the question was why mission control is split between Florida and Texas. This split predates the shuttle by quite a while. Was Huntsville a hot-bed of technical expertise before NASA or its predecessors?

zeynel1 17y ago

The same is happening in scientific research, although, it is not as obvious: a standing army of PhD's are making progress very difficult by making research expensive.