It's official: NASA is a jobs program.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2009-08/001174.html

by nebula • 17 years ago

86 83 17 years ago

arfrank• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

Maciek4162• 17 years 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.

mnemonicsloth3• 17 years ago

For contrast with ITER, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 ("A Fusion Startup")

Maciek4162• 17 years 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.

pmorici3• 17 years 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 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.

Retric5• 17 years 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.

solutionyogi6• 17 years ago

Would you care to point out few incentives for doing more with less? Government programs/departments are NEVER about doing more with less.

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

It's a simple fact that people will never be as careful spending other people's money as they would be spending their own...

pmorici3• 17 years ago

That doesn't go to explain the whole difference between business and government though. Presumably start-up owners don't view venture capital as their own money yet the good ones still spend it carefully.

umjames• 17 years ago

Not all of business believes in more efficiency as you describe it. I'd argue that most IT departments are just as much a jobs program as NASA, and probably for a lot of the same reasons.

gaius5• 17 years ago

I can remember 3 huge contractions in the IT industry (early 90s recession, NASDAQ meltdown, present day). When was there ever a comparable mass-layoff scenario in the government?

gaius5• 17 years ago

At the time he said it, it might have been true, that's the thing. A government department will be understaffed the few days of the year when they have to deal with a crisis, and they'll all be sitting around shuffling paperwork back and forth to each other the rest of the time. What's needed is a flexible structure with fewer people all of whom are capable of fulfilling whatever role is needed right now. Historically that has been prevented by "demarcation dispute", e.g. X union claiming only its members have the "right" to perform Y task.

jfoutz3• 17 years ago

Grover Cleveland did pretty well his first term.

Eliminated the spoils system, got rid of a bunch of time server type jobs.

ajscherer• 17 years ago

I with you that it is a problem of incentives, but I disagree that it has much to do with managers desiring more employees to increase their clout. Simpler explanations exist. If a government manager fires an employee, what does she gain? She doesn't get any of that employee's salary (the tax savings won't move the needle at all on a personal level), and won't appear to be doing a better job, since there is no profit with which to measure performance.

On the other hand this manager has a lot to lose. First, most people find putting others out of a job unpleasant. Second, that manager and her co-workers will now have to absorb the duties of the fired employee. So more work for her. Third, the department would probably be exposed to litigation by the fired employee. In my experience government agencies don't fare very well in court, and the government is scrutinized much more closely for things like nepotism and racism than the private sector.

There is another issue at work here, which is that legislators have much stronger incentives to add parts to the government than to remove them. Sure, there are plenty of voters who favor making the government smaller in general, but for any particular program the number of people who care deeply about preserving that program is always greater than the number of people who care deeply about removing it. People simply don't have the time to study all parts of the government and advocate against the existence of unnecessary but small programs. The people who are served by those programs (or sell things to the government in support of them) have all the reason in the world to care. Actual reform of the system (instead of general pouting at the size of government) would require removing a large number of small programs, and this is unlikely to happen for the reason I just mentioned.

dasil003• 17 years ago

but for any particular program the number of people who care deeply about preserving that program is always greater than the number of people who care deeply about removing it.

This strikes me as the most significant factor at work in the constant inflation of the government, and it's a really tricky problem.

fburnaby• 17 years ago

Very well put.

GHFigs• 17 years ago

It's Parkinson's Law in effect. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731683

callmeed• 17 years ago

"a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees"

While I totally agree with your point, I see a problem with this specific statement. The population as a whole is usually growing, so a government has to grow in order to support it (at least somewhat).

But, yes, efficiency is the problem.

ggchappell• 17 years 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.

I think right at the end of a major war would be a good place to look.

kurtosis• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

From 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• 17 years 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.

pmorici3• 17 years 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.

gaius5• 17 years 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.

kingkawn2• 17 years 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.

mnemonicsloth3• 17 years ago

The moon landing was all of the following things: a transcendent moment in the history of the human species; a crash program of mostly symbolic importance; undertaken with little thought about how to follow up; fantastically expensive; totally worth it; unsustainable in the long run.

In the years since its Big Funding Crash, NASA has gotten good at robotic exploration, planetary science, launching satellites, and other interplanetary odd jobs that are impressive and important but less epic than the moon landing. They should keep doing what they're good at -- robotic exploration, space science, propulsion technology, etc.

But designing manned spacecraft that are safe and efficient at scale is something they've never really been set up to do. That job should be left to groups of people with the right incentives built into their organizational DNA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

Hopefully, they'll have more competition soon.

JabavuAdams2• 17 years ago

Subscribe to the a-rocket mailing list. There's a renaissance happening in private space travel right now that should bear fruit over the next decade or two.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

1. Which government program isn't?

2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?

marze• 17 years 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".

jfoutz3• 17 years 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.

designtofly2• 17 years 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+dec...

solutionyogi6• 17 years ago

Yes, you are right, this is just one criteria out of 13 but it still boggles my mind that this criteria is even present in the list. Can you imagine a for profit corporation evaluating project based on such a criteria?

Even if I were to accept your point that it's important to retain existing people for the knowledge they have, it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10%.

gjm114• 17 years ago

Why yes, I can imagine that. Companies generally don't much like firing people. They quite reasonably prefer making better use of the people they've got.

Now, I doubt that any commercial enterprise would use the exact same criterion as (if we take this one out-of-context slide at face value) NASA is using here. So what we have is some evidence that one thing NASA tries to do is to provide jobs. Which is not remotely the same thing as "NASA is a jobs program", which is the idiotic claim being made by the originally cited blog entry.

jws• 17 years ago

Can you imagine a for profit corporation evaluating project based on such a criteria? Yes. Did it for years. It's either that or fire the people who work for you.

it still doesn't explain why your project would get 2 points if you increase the workforce by more than 10% If you create a stable environment by not treating your workforce like rented mules you will not have significant turnover. The only way to bring in new capabilities is by increasing the head count.

CWuestefeld2• 17 years 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.

SapphireSun2• 17 years ago

Not that anything can be decided based on this amount of knowledge, but isn't it also possible that they want to increase their workforce so that the remaining experts can pass on their knowledge while they are still there?

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce.

If someone is designing a car, and one of his criteria is that using more steel is better, is that a good thing? If someone is writing a novel, and wants to raise the word count, is that useful?

designtofly2• 17 years ago

That's not a fair comparison. If you looked at one of the early slides in the presentation that the slide in question came from, you can see that NASA decision makers are trying to balance three conflicting objectives: 1) Budget realities, 2) risks, and 3) benefit to stakeholders. This is no different than any corporate board. The stakeholders of NASA are the American people. As such, NASA has a duty (implicit or otherwise) to bring as much benefit to the American people as possible. It does this through several avenues. One of the biggest, and one that is often overlooked is the amount of knowledge that NASA has generated. You show me one for-profit company that has been as open as NASA at making all of their information public and available. [1] Secondly, it would be naive to think that NASA does not have an obligation to provide benefit to their stakeholders by providing jobs.

With this framework in mind, what objective is the car designer trying to balance when deciding to use more steel? If the writer decides to use more words, what objective are the trying to meet? The first case you bring up is ridiculous and I'm not going to address any further. The second case is more fair. The novel writer does have to balance clarity of writing and the amount of pleasure they bring to the reader. Someone buying a 50 page book is going to feel pretty ripped off if they read it in 30 minutes. Why are the Harry Potter books so damn long? Because people love to read them. She could have just as easily written the same story in a lot shorter format if she had so decided.

[1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp

JabavuAdams2• 17 years ago

Actually, if you look at the German car industry, you'll find more of a stake-holder driven culture rather than a share-holder driven culture as in the US.

I was just reading an economist piece on how the German people actually rate stake-holder interests above share-holder interests.

billswift• 17 years ago

The benefit of having knowledge embodied in a person rather than a book is skills; and skills deteriorate if not used; stockpiling human resources is a waste of time and money.

As for risk; show me the armies of those fired after the shuttle accidents. Even after Feynman exposed the dishonesty of the official reliability estimates, not a single bureaucrat lost his job for lying to Congress or the public about the risks (since the engineers had a good idea of the real risks, the management at NASA either knowingly lied or were effectively sticking their collective fingers in their ears and refusing to hear what the engineers said).

mhb• 17 years ago

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

anigbrowl• 17 years 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

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

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• 17 years ago

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

movix• 17 years ago

Isn't this getting more political than hacker-ical?

bct• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

This seems to be political opinion masquerading as analysis.

maurycy• 17 years 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.

gjm114• 17 years 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?

anamax4• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

anamax4• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

It's official: NASA is a jobs program.

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