Brains in Chains: NASA Engineering Today

There have been many reports of late outlining problems that NASA is having at recruiting new and retaining their existing engineering staff. I have had the distinct pleasure of working with many in the engineering ranks at NASA and want to offer my opinion of the state of NASA engineering and what can be done. As a disclosure, I do not have any contracts with NASA nor have had any direct support from NASA in over five years.

Indeed today NASA engineering is in trouble. This trouble is not new. It has been growing since at least the late 80's. I remember many papers on "The bi-modal age distribution curve in NASA engineering". This does not spring from any inadequacies on their part but from a culture of cancelled programs and deferred dreams. I worked with NASA engineers at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) who had been at the agency for over a decade and my student small satellite was the first real spaceflight hardware that they had been allowed to touch and contribute their skills for its success. This is a hardly unique occurrence or cause for joy.

I worked with many of the same people who put a great deal of time and effort in on projects like the Shuttle C, the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM), the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (OMV), as well as various incarnations and renaming of the original space station Freedom. The ASRM program was cancelled when it was 83 percent complete. Most of the hardware was built for the OMV. The Shuttle C was cheaper than both and would have resulted in a completed ISS today and far fewer Shuttle flights. This is fiscal responsibility? It is a morale killer for many engineers who put so much time and effort into projects just to see them get cancelled. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I have recently been exposed to some of the incredible work done at the NASA Langley Research Center (LARC) on the subject of orbital assembly. In the 1970's and 80's these talented, dedicated engineers worked to develop some very good concepts for the orbital assembly of large space structures. They built cranes, trusses (their ideas were incorporated into the original Freedom truss), and large space mirrors. Their work was validated in the Neutral Buoyancy Tank at MSFC was well as flown on the Shuttle and proven in space. Their reward? The whole project was summarily cancelled by NASA headquarters and they were forbidden any funding to continue even low level work. This is a motivation for excellence? This helps to retain them at the agency?

There are countless other examples of this at NASA. Take for example the Tethers in Space effort. This began with the Italian TSS missions where, even with problems encountered, incredible discoveries were made about the efficacy of using electrodynamic tethers for applications such as maintaining the Space Station's altitude without the use of chemical fuel. This fuel now has to be brought up either by the Shuttle or the Russian progress. Imagine how much less of a logistical burden the station would have if an e-tether had been implemented. It's impact on the microgravity environment would have been minimal or zero as the tether counteracts the effect of drag on the station.

Lets take another example. In the late 80's and early 90's an effort was underway at MSFC to replace the hydraulic systems of the space shuttle with electric motors powered by the fuel cells. Turn around of the orbiters would have been much faster and the reliability of the whole system would have been improved. Work was pretty far along in the effort. Data in the last couple of seconds of Columbia indicate that the hydraulics system was completely drained. This would have completely disabled the elevons which are essential for maintaining the Shuttle's attitude in the atmosphere. Could have Columbia survived to land with an all electrical system? One cannot be sure but we can be sure that without a working hydraulic system the orbiter was doomed. Can you imagine the feeling of the engineers who originally worked on these systems today?

I can only speak to the things that I know of and most of my knowledge comes from years of work with MSFC in Huntsville. However, from what I have heard this is a system wide problem. As part of the reinventing government fad the machine shops and technical labs at two centers that I know of were eliminated. This erased any chance of small in house projects that help train engineers and avoid the long drawn out process of selecting a contractor for even small projects. I know of a dear friend at NASA MSFC who knows that the NASA of today has little of the intellectual stimulation of the past that made it her life's goal to work there.

How can you retain the best and the brightest if you don't give them an atmosphere where they can exercise their talents? The serial cancellation of programs erodes morale. The shifting of talented engineers to contract supervisors erodes the spirit as well. There are still many of these people left at NASA because they do have the dream of what that agency can do to help mankind. However, if you merely raise their pay or raise the pay of the new blood without giving them purpose or projects that they can work on to completion, what does that tell them? It reinforces the perception that NASA is no more than a jobs program for the middle class. Unless you give these people jobs to do that are worthy of their talent, you will continue to lose them and the ones who could come in to the system to revitalize it will shun those jobs as the dead end that they most certainly will be.

A government agency of highly qualified technical people cannot be sustained on promises or inspired by paperwork. We have an incredible resource in orbit called ISS. It is our springboard to the stars. ISS is what Dr. Werner von Braun always wanted as a base from which to assemble the spacecraft that would travel to the Moon and Mars. World class science is just a string of words with no meaning anymore on ISS. We need to use it as a base, a base for the engineers to develop systems that can be used to reduce the risk to private industry of new spacecraft designs. Boeing could have saved a couple of billion dollars in lost revenue and the insurance industry could have saved a couple of billion more in claims simply by testing the solar arrays of the Boeing 702's at ISS. This would have found the fatal flaw in their design that has so crippled so much of the industry. New computers, robotics, propulsion systems, and software could be tested on ISS to reduce the risk of failure in other operational orbits. Billions upon billions of dollars are being lost by the insurance industry in on orbit failure claims that could be mitigated by such in orbit testing.

The point here is that NASA is an agency of scientists and engineers. Scientific exploration and discovery is not the be all and end all to the purpose of NASA. The academic environment is not necessarily the best arena for the exercise of engineering talent These suggestions above are exactly the kind of work that NACA and NASA used to do for the aviation industry. Unless you improve the climate for your engineering workforce and begin to recognize that NASA does not stand for the National Academic and Science Agency you will inevitably continue to have problems like the one that spread itself over the skies of Texas last February.

We must develop new policies that add value to the nation as a whole for the money that is being spent on NASA. An example of this is that the budget for the Education department has been increased by $30 billion dollars per year since the advent of the Bush administration. What is this money to be spent upon? What educational endeavors will it support? In the 1960's the space program was an incentive for a whole generation to go to school and to contribute to an effort that will be remembered as long as we exist as a civilization and beyond. I still meet them, now mostly retired, in my travels and they all swell with pride in describing their small part in making those footprints on the Moon. I submit that if that $30 billion per year increase had been instead shifted to NASA and other government supported space efforts that we would start to see a swelling of the rolls in colleges across the nation in the same way that we did in the 60's. However, money is not enough.

It was the space program that supplied the icon of the environmental movement in 1970. Our efforts in space have been absolutely essential in increasing our understanding of the globe. Without this space based knowledge we would be in a much deeper fog in trying to understand man's role in global change. I submit that $30 billion dollars per year would do more to help us understand and mitigate the problems associated with global warming than all the funding put together at other agencies. There are many other uses of that money at NASA including the return to the Moon and on to Mars. Recently a press release by the World Wildlife Federation exclaimed that we needed at least two more planets to support an American level of consumption on a global level. Well within the orbits of the Earth and Jupiter there are tens of thousands of mini-planets along with Mars and the Moon with resources orders of magnitude greater than the surface of the earth. This would come at a small fraction of the environmental damage of continuing to mine millions of tons of earth every year.

I watched in horror congressional testimony a few years ago where the previous head of NASA was asked by the congresspersons what he would do if the government increased his funding. After many tries the congresspersons gave up because the answer always was that NASA did not want or need any more funding and could get by with the resources it had. NASA deserved better, the nation deserved better, our future demands it.

Many would say today that the time is not right, that the pressing needs for funding for the war on terror, for global change, and for other worthy causes supersede that of space and that space will always be there. I cannot abide this and as an example I give place before you the efforts of Abraham Lincoln during the war between the states. During the most bitter fighting, when the north was losing on almost every battlefield, the Railroad Act of 1862 was passed. As the bodies were being buried a year later in Gettysburg PA work was underway to construct our national capital building. It is during these trying times that we must plan for a better tomorrow, for a brighter future. Space is our future, it is our birthright. However, without financial support that future will be stillborn and the birthright sold for a pot of porridge. Let us not make that mistake.

Very interesting article. I can relate somewhat - I was an aerodynamics engineer at a commercial aircraft component company. We used to have a robust R&D budget that supported new concepts and improved existing applications. Gradually, the R&D money was reduced in order to make the bottom line more profitable. But then there were no new concepts to develop and sell, so we started losing contracts to European competitors who were developing new concepts. It was a death spiral. I just retired and don't miss that part of it.

One of the things I remember from my Economics 101 class is that any entity (person, company, industry, government) must invest about 3% in pure R&D in order to thrive. For an individual, that would be continuing education and research; for a company it would be R&D money devoted to new products; for a government, that is NASA and NIH and other science centers. With a $2 trillion budget, 3% means about $60 billion for R&D. My guess is that the total pure science budget of the USG is about $5 billion, if that. You can't count the Shuttle and ISS - they are into operations, not research.

Oh well - the bottom line rules, but we are now paying the piper of false promises.

Good article. I would only dispute this one thing:
The point here is that NASA is an agency of scientists and engineers.

In the 1960s this was true. Today, NASA is an agency of politically correct bureaucrats. The engineering is performed mostly by the contractors, overseen by someone that the government is hoping has enough technical expertise to spot problems. Contractual haggling is performed by lawyers who don't have the first clue about the technical side of the work on the contract. Not that NASA doesn't have talented engineers in it employ, but they are far fewer than in NASAs heyday, overworked (especially the talented ones), and hamstrung by the bureaucracy. Three decades of consistent under-funding and an expanding mission, and a civil service hiring freeze, with every executive administration altering the demands on the agency, has led NASA to where it is.

I cant' let this one go uncommented, because the author is so right, but won't mention the name of the bonehead responsible.

I'm not so polite. --- Thank you, Dan Golden.

It looks like congress/klinton obliged Goldin's sentiment by giving NASA a series of budget cuts.

It was 93-95, with Golden kissing the Clintoon administration's @$$, and democRATs running the entire show in DC, NASA budget went uncontested from 14 bil to 11 bil over three years.

With every major disaster in the manned program the goals of returning to the Moon and on to Mars are delayed by ten years.

The US unmanned space program is healthy and much more tolerant of a reasonable expectation of failure, IMO.

The secret of the future program is to use unmanned technology to lay the groundwork for eventual manned exploration, which includes utilization of extraterrestrial resources in advance of manned expeditions.

IMHO, unmanned space exploration does not inspire widespread political support. (Human space flight may not, also. The US is moving into a period where social programs and immediate needs will consume the budget.) If the manned space program is terminated or abandoned for many years, NASA and all of government's role in space flight will attrit away. Private industry will not devote the necessary R & D funding to pick up the slack and efforts will be confined to narrow LEO projects with direct and economic benefits only.

ISS is what Dr. Werner von Braun always wanted as a base from which to assemble the spacecraft that would travel to the Moon and Mars.

While the ISS is an incredible challenge, especially to the beancounters, it is being used at a fraction of its capability. Imagine it as it could be. Or if imagination is too much trouble, watch the old movie 2001.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.