NASA must bring its mission and funding into alignment

It’s the best placed to work in the federal government. It has its sights deep into the universe. Yet NASA has some big down-to-earth challenges. A National Academies team looked closely at NASA and found too much focus on the short term and mismatch of work and funding, among other things. The chairman of the Committee on NASA Mission Critical Workforce, Infrastructure and Technology, Norm Augustine, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in studio.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin Mr. Augustine, good to have you join us.

Norm Augustine Nice to be here. Thank you.

Tom Temin And actually, this is not the first time you’ve looked at NASA. About 15 years ago, a similar committee study was done. Are things better or worse, do you think, than 15 years ago?

Norm Augustine Well, actually, this is my third study of NASA that first of all, it was for President Bush senior, second one for President Obama, then this one for the Congress. And if I look back to those first two, they had the conclusion that if I were to make it very simplistic, that kind of leads to the result of this study that you just mentioned. If I were to, as I say over simplistically define the conclusions of those first two studies, it was that the problem NASA has had always seems to have about $3 billion a year more program than it has money, and the way it has kept conducting great missions and successful programs over the years has been shortchanging of the future of NASA. I have to put it bluntly, that’s happened by taking money and put it into missions that normally would have gone into laying the groundwork, the foundation for future missions. And obviously this is not something that is unique to NASA, is a hazard for all businesses. But do they come? As always, if you follow the going out of business strategy, eventually you go out of business. And NASA, as much as it’s accomplishing today is really rather hollow when you look to the future.

Tom Temin It sounds almost like what some reports recently have said of the U.S. military with the high pace of operations. The future is a big problem, as is the real lethality in the eyes of would be enemies.

Norm Augustine Absolutely true. And if you look back at the end of the Cold War, you recall we’re going to have the peace dividend. And the Pentagon began taking actions, as the industry did, to bring about a peace dividend. And so there is a parallel that has been extremely successful in the meantime. And that leads us all a more complacency. But I’ve been very encouraged when we spoke with and briefed the leadership of NASA that, I think they really have a constructive approach to this issue.

Tom Temin Well, before we get to that, I wanted to ask you how the research was done. Did you look at the books in the budgets or was it interviews with people?

Norm Augustine A great question. We asked NASA when we were assigned this job by the Congress, to let us not just read reports and go to briefings, but we want to go out in the field and touch things and see things. And our committee had 13 members. We went to all nine NASA centers and the FRDC, Federal Research Development Center. We spent two days at each and, we had a number of briefings. We talked to over 400 employees, from the center directors to the people who worked there two weeks. And we were up on top of towers, a rocket launch, rocket test towers. And we found ourselves down in tunnels underground that provided utilities. And so I think we had a pretty good scrub of what NASA has to offer. And, of course, the 13 members of the group all have backgrounds with national Health, from being an astronaut to working for NASA to, in my case, having been around House, a lot of the outside.

Tom Temin Sure. And these conclusions that the committee came to that NASA is living in the present and borrowing against the future and so forth. Would that conclusion be a surprise to the people you spoke with? Or pretty much they probably knew this all along, and it’s Congress and other elements of the government that need to know it.

Norm Augustine Well. I think it was lost the latter that, this is one of those things that has been going on all the way since the Columbia accident. And, if you trace back and, people have been shifting, attention and money, from mission support to missions, and you can only do that so long ago. Just to give you an example, Tom, of, if you look at the NASA infrastructure, the average piece of infrastructure in NASA, 83% of those pieces of infrastructure are beyond the design life of that piece. And. If you look at the balance between missions and mission support, since 2010, the mission budget has increased by 8% in real dollars. Cost of purchasing power. Whereas the mission support budget has decreased by 33%. Which if you do the arithmetic will show that, a dollar of mission support today has to go 50 prevent further than it did, 14 years ago.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Norm Augustine. He is, of course, the former chairman of Lockheed Martin and also chairman of the National Academies Committee studying NASA. And when you say mission support, that would include the infrastructure of things that are used over and over again by mission and also the information technology infrastructure.

Norm Augustine Exactly. It would be everything that kind of cuts across all missions at NASA. And we also looked at the, human resources at NASA. We looked at the technology circumstances, and we looked at something that, we chose to call systemic. Our charter that was given to us was to look at those first three areas, but it also said to look at things are cut across the various, those three ingredients or those three assets. And we looked at, organizational structure and things of that type under systemic.

Tom Temin Right. And just to talk about one example of infrastructure that you mentioned, and that is like the platforms, the towers, these bridge like structures that support those do age. In other words, just by simply being used to test rockets, they don’t last forever.

Norm Augustine Exactly. They not only age, but they cost more to maintain as they age. And, as we sit here today, you know, the the NASA, backlog for maintenance is $3.3 billion. That’s a fair sized piece of change. And if NASA’s stays in-house and the Congress and the OMB, I should say if they stay on the course that we built on the last decade or so, the average piece of NASA infrastructure will even out level out at 320 years old. And, that’s a their target is 60 years in industry. You’d be a lot less than that. And particularly in the high tech industry. So just to put it kind of simply, it’s been a case of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. And Peter’s about to run out of money to borrow.

Tom Temin Right. And I guess this is especially pressing at the time when the ability and the capacity to get into space is so diffuse among industry in the United States and also among rival nations.

Norm Augustine Absolutely. China today, as I’m sure you know, has put, mobile vehicles on Mars has landed on the back side of the moon, which nobody else has done yet. It’s got its own space station, and it’s said that it’s going to put people on the moon in 2030. And, China, whatever its faults, one of the things in the space program is pretty well done what it said it was going to do. So I think there’s reason to be concerned, about China and the problem with what NASA does, it’s so unforgiving that the slightest error could have dire consequences. And just a couple quick examples, of course. If you look at just a simple sales, that doesn’t function properly and is used out of its normal envelope, and where you do a poor job of communicating those problems through within the NASA’s system. That led to the failure of the challenger and several astronauts lost. Well, and you go to, the, Columbia were a little piece of foam, all the size of a small chair, maybe, a piece of foam comes loose and you lose seven more astronauts, and you lose a Columbia. My, most extreme example was, on the, mission to Venus Mariner one. Some years ago, a software writer left out a dash and one piece of thousands of lines of code. And it was a piece of backup code not even expected to be used. But as luck would have it, when flight, that piece was needed and the mission was lost, because of the missing dash. And that’s sort of every day. That’s a perfectionist. Got to be the lower standard.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Norm Augustine. He is the former chairman of Lockheed Martin and chairman of the National Academies Committee that is studying NASA. We were talking about infrastructure. I wanted to talk about the human capital issue. I think in one of the big findings is that you said NASA should exercise extreme caution with its dependance. Its growing dependance on commercial providers, lest NASA lose the very expertise that makes it great.

Norm Augustine Well, NASA has to do some pretty amazing things, and that requires awfully strong technical competence. And it, our concern that we raise is of considerable importance, we believe, but it’s also limited to a specific area and that areas early developmental work, that uses critical skills. And for that kind of work, we question NASA’s balance in terms of how much work it puts out in industry and takes away from its own employees. NASA has 17,600 employees, which is pretty steady for quite a while. And over two thirds of them are engineers and scientists. And if you ask really good, imaginative, creative engineers to simply be contract monitors to oversee other people’s work, you just aren’t gonna hire the quality of engineers in-house is famous for. And so our concern is not about putting work. That workout industry is putting too much out where NASA loses its capability and its own credibility. And, it appears to us we’re getting close to that tipping point.

Tom Temin Because if you look at something like the, telescope that just launched a few years ago to replace the Hubble, the Webb that was actually not just designed to weigh twice as long as they said it would take. I think they broke a lot of Augustine’s, Augustine’s rules there, your loss of business. But nevertheless, it did finally get launched. And it worked. But that was also constructed by NASA in a clean room. Maybe there were a lot of contractors in there doing the riveting and so forth, but that was highly it was almost like semiconductor manufacturing in its fineness and clean requirements. Does that capability also figure into the warning that you’ve issued?

Norm Augustine You know, without question. And, NASA today puts about 85% of its budget out to industry and academia, the latter for research, mostly for research. But the problem, if you start putting too much out, we applaud that. We believe this country is a free enterprise country. We believe in the strength of the free enterprise system. But if you take too much out of the government, you lose the talent that you just absolutely have to have to oversee this kind of work and perform some of it, and to make sure that industry is, doing what it ought to be doing. And so we do raise a number of issues in that area. The, there are other areas in the human resources that are worrisome. One is that NASA used to have a very vibrant training program to train people to take on more responsibility. That program over the years has been cut back such that, one of the things that we heard when we talked to those over 400 employees that we heard a lot was, would you like to have more opportunity for training? The encouraging thing and you you alluded to it in your opening remarks, was that, NASA is considered to be, by its employees, a great place to work. And. Well, we asked people, why do you work here? They invariably said, because it’s exciting things we do. And if, they stopped doing those exciting things, it’s going to be hard to hire talent. And, and one of the comments we often got was, the pay isn’t as good as it is at industry, which is everyone who has worked for the government, as I did for ten years. Those. That’s true.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Norm Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin and also chairman of the National Academies Committee that’s been studying NASA. And there’s another possibility, at least in my mind, of the of the erosion of that top notch engineering and science expertise. And that is the people in NASA could be more susceptible to simply being snowed by people that aren’t competent and yet are able to get contracts or research grants.

Norm Augustine Exactly. Are you want a smart bar or as the term is used in government, a lot, and but if you get people who are not up to staff you, it could have dire consequences. In the case of NASA, particularly the, also the the technology work that NASA does demands really innovative, creative, leading edge people. And just to give another example, the sort of problem we saw, if somebody out of a NASA center wants to have a needs to have a person with a particular expertise that they don’t have at NASA at the moment of they go to headquarters and say, we want to hire this person, and then headquarters decide whether it’s appropriate. And headquarters says, okay, you have permission to hire. Well from that. Half point until a preliminary offer is made to a person is 81 days, which is very good by federal standards. But outstanding engineers are going to wait around 81 days to see if they got a job offer or not. And so there are things that you could do. There’s a NASA Flexibility Act of 2004 that gives NASA a little extra flexibility in hiring. The problem is that, as I said, they’ve got 70,000 employees, and this flexibility applies to a few hundred. And it needs, in our committee’s opinion, to be extensively broadened.

Tom Temin Right. And the other point of warning that caught my eye was what you call the excessive use of certain types of contract that hobble the ability to get things done in some ways. Tell us more about that one.

Norm Augustine Well, we’re concerned about fixed price contract work for, for development. And the committee view fixed price work is very appropriate for some things. And development is not one of those things. And the reason, of course, is almost by definition, development means it’s never been done before. And if you’re doing things has never been done before, at least in my career, there are always surprises. And, that can, the long history of fixed price development work, and both the Defense Department and our view at NASA is a very troubled one. I first encountered that when I worked for Secretary McNamara in the Defense Department, way back when.

Tom Temin You were a whiz kid.

Norm Augustine Oh, no. No, I was one of the other ones. There were two groups. I was the other group. But, the, Secretary McNamara had the idea in his team. A part of his team that, you should have fixed price total contracts that include development and production and, that was like, problems on steroids. And, we all know the result.

Tom Temin Yeah, we’d have a Army and Navy and Air Force field, the Falcons, you know, instead of Thunderbirds. I guess it was up to McNamara. And well, we started you said something very early in the interview, and I said we’d come back to it that you said the leadership is aware of these issues and would like to take steps to address them to get that long term thinking into their way they operate in, to make me make those capital investments in the infrastructure. Are they making the case to Congress? Are they stating it in clear terms that this is what will happen if you don’t do this?

Norm Augustine I would say that, we of course, have briefed the leadership and, they have so many current problems, although they were aware of the trend that’s been going on for 20, 25 years. And, you sort of learn to live with it. And, I think that the thing that encouraged me, as I said, they were very open minded about it, about this problem. And I think I also need to point out that it’s not just the leadership of NASA, it’s OMB, it’s the Congress. And, they’re they’re really the behave overly simple here are simplistic. There are really two solutions to the problem. One is more money for NASA and the other is fewer programs for NASA and spend some money on maintenance on people, and so forth. But, that takes a lot of courage to say we’re not going to start this program. A worst case example I use is that, China says are going to land on the moon on 2030. We’re planning to get there before that, and have a permanent, base camp there. Are we willing to stand back and say, okay, we’re going to slip the schedule. We’ll get there in 2035, that the Chinese will get there 2030. Are we willing to do that? And, it gets to be a question of how much money you have. There are other programs you could slip, of course, but, that’s a tough decision. But would you look at the federal budget? Everybody knows a single thing that always strikes me is that the CBO, Congressional Budget Office has been saying for 20 years that the discretionary part of the budget is going to go to zero, and not too many years. And that’s where NASA gets its money.

Tom Temin Yes. Well, yeah, we see that in almost every domain now is the, is the interest piles up the interest payments on the debt that’s piling up increase. And any way to get back to your point, just a moment ago, to quote Norm Augustine, a new schedule to an engineer or program manager is like a blank canvas to an artist.

Norm Augustine Oh, you’ve made my day. You’ve read my book. You and my mother.

Tom Temin Well, then I know I’m in good company. Norm Augustine is the former chairman of Lockheed Martin and now chairman of the National Academies Committee studying NASA. Thank you so much for joining me.

Norm Augustine It’s been my privilege. Thank you, Tom.

Tom Temin And we’ll post this interview along with a link to the committee report at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts.

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