Conference 7.286::space

663.0. "Economist article on NASA" by 4347::GRIFFIN (Dave Griffin) Mon Oct 29 1990 20:31

From: [email protected] (Robert W Murphree)
Newsgroups: sci.astro
Subject: Space Politics and Institutions
Date: 27 Oct 90 03:59:30 GMT
Organization: Engineering Computer Network, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

 From the Economist September 29, l990 pp 95-98

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

STAR IN THE DESCENDANT
   
Nasa's problems are not all of its own making

( the first part of the article details NASA's current political woes.  
It details the struggle between a space friendly George Bush and a budget
cutting congress warring over the NASA budget)

(beginning somewhere on page 96)

NASA for NASA's sake

If NASA had a flawless record it would still need strong allies to weather
the budget storm.  The real, accident-prone NASA has very few.  During its
entrenchment in the 1970's and 1980's NASA became it own reason for being-
a self-fulfilling agency.  Government agencies always have a tendancy to get
too cosy with clients outside governent.  NASA has avoided this, to some 
extent, by becoming its own client.  
                 
     Consider the space shuttle.  When it was originally proposed, part of its
attraction was that it would be able to do almost everything that America
needed to do in space.  The idea was that a third of its flights would be
commercial, a third military, and a third pure NASA.  That dream is long gone.
After the loss of the Challenger it was decided that risking astronauts for the
launch of a commercial cargo was out.  The Air Force has developed a large
unmanned rocket, the Titan IV, to launch its spy satellites; the shuttle launch-
pad at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, the only launch site from which 
the shuttle can reach the polar orbits preferred for most spy satellites, was
mothballed before being used, and will probably be dismantled.  From now on, 
there is unlikely to be more than one defence-department shuttle-flight a year.

     So NASA now flies the shuttle for itself-providing space for laboratory
experiments, a platform for astronomers and launch services for planetary probes
Although scientific research directly accounts for only a fifth or so of NASA's
budget, according to Dr. Lennard Fisk who runs NASA's officd of space
science and applications, it accounts for around three-fifths if the indirect  
costs of the shuttle services are included.  Most of NASA's space-science  
probes, including those which journey to planets and those which sit close to
the earth watching galaxies and stars, have produced exciting results.  Few
if any, though, have really needed the shuttle.  If everything had had to be
launched on expendable rockets instead, many programmes would have achieved as
much for less money and much more quickly.

      If all goes according to plan, from 1995 the shuttle will have something
new to busy itself with:  28 flights to ferry the components of the space
station up to orbit, and a few more to take up crews and experimental material.
The station, too, is really of minimal concern to anyone in America other than
NASA.  There is little commercial interest in using it (there has been little
industrial interest in experiments on the space shuttle, either).  The military
is constrained by agreements with NASA's partners in the undertaking, Western
Europe and Japan.  So NASA is building a station for NASA to use.  Dr Fisk's
part of the organisation will be spending $200m a year on research that takes
place on the station-which will have cost almost 200 times that amount.

     Much of that money will be spent on microgravity reasearch, looking at
the properties of materials unwarped by the incessant pull of the earth. 
At present, this discipline has little to show for itself.  NASA is more or
less creating it to fill up the station.  That sounds bad, but NASA has not 
done badly in its creation of new sciences.  There were not many people 
interested
in planets (pretty dull through earth-based telescopes) or what stars look like
viewed in gamma rays (unknowable from the earth) before NASA, in search of  
smart things to do, revealed the new vistas of planetary science and high-energy
astrophysics to them.  


THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

The fact that people outside NASA have scant use for the station suggests that  
it is eminently cuttable.  But although there is little outside interest, 
NASA has made sure that plenty of people are involved.  The development and  
construction have been cut into four "work packages", each run by one of NASA's
large regional centres. Each centre has chosen a different company 
as the prime contractor for its package.  Thus the bits of the station that 
people will live
in are being designed by Boeing and the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama,
while the Truss that the crew modules are attached to is looked after by 
Johnson Space Centre in Houston and McDonnell Douglas.

       Dr James Beggs, the NASA chief who sold the station to President Reagan, 
recently told a newsletter, Space Station News, that he spread the work around
specifically for the political benefits it might bring.  Similar reasoning 
might explain the fact that the station is being build in concert with Japan, 
Europe and Canada, international obligation can keep budget-cutters at bay,
though they also mean that NASA has to work in partnership, something 
for which it has recently shown little flair. 

     Dr Begg's political wiliness may well have helped the space station get
going, but its legacy has hindered the station's progress. Two years ago the  
programme was in bad shape, in large part because the Washington headquarters
did not have enough control over the regional centres.  

PAGE 98 (last page)

Sorting that out was the biggest challenge that faced Admiral Richard Truly,
former shuttle pilot and commander, when he took over NASA a year and a half
ago.  The managment team he has assembled, all old NASA hands, commands 
respect for its competence, if not for its vision.  It realises that the
station's problems are managerial more than technological; NASA has not 
developed much large-scale, new technology since the space shuttle's engines.

     Under their stern supervision, Freedom has become more ship-shape.
Problems have been found, but the station is at just the right stage of its
development-moving from paper to metal, which acounts for NASA's increased
budget requests-for them to be dealt with.  Problems like too much weight,
and too much power needed for housekeeping, are scarcely new.  Most space
projects are at first too heavy to fly.  Solutions for such problems are
arrived at by looking at the designs with a clear head and a sharp red pencil-
just what is happening.

STARDUST MEMORIES

There are also less tractable snags.  The most pervasive criticism of NASA
is that it just ain't what it used to be; that compared with the NASA of the
Apollo years, it is a stodgy bureacracy.  The charges, which almost everyone
thinks contain some truth, stem from changes forced on NASA.

     Problems with Apollo-of which there were many, including the loss of
three astronauts in a launch-pad fire-ere solved not by ingenuity alone but
by ingenuity coupled with a lot of money and a lot of eager young engineers.
In the 1970's NASA lost its budgets and some of its staff, and those among the 
staff who stayed lost their youth.  Unsurprisingly, some the the eagerness went
by the wayside too.  Throughout the 1970's, with nobody hired, the agency's
average age wqent up by a year every year.  It is now beginning to fall-
as Admiral Truly is keen to point out-but age remains a problem.  Threequarters
of NASA's middle and senior managers are within five years of possible
retirement.  Almost everyone in a senior position has been in NASA for 20 years
or so.  The infrastructure at NASA's centres is also aging.  

     Age and continuity bring a settled way of doing things, expecially in a
rather isolated bureaucracy.  They naturally lead to a "not-invented-here"
dismissiveness of new ideas, as well as problems like sloppiness in overseeing
work done by contractors.  Consider the space agency's response to President
Bush's call for new explorations, which was widely seen as unimaginative.
There are lots of novel ideas outside NASA about how to get to Mars-
cobbled-together space ships, hibernating crews, inflatable crew capsules.
Some may deserve all the derision they get, but others may be good.

     NASA's own response showed that it had not been spending much time 
exploring new technologies, which is sad since its charter enjoins it
primarily to research and to explore.  Developing and operating the shuttle,
and now the station, has meant that research into future technologies has been
elbowed aside.  Nuclear propulsion, which may not be needed for the first
mission to Mars, but would make it much easier, and seems unavoidable if
travel beyond the moon becomes routine, has not advanced much since pilot
studies of it in the 1960's.

     The corporate culture of NASA will change as the Apollo generation 
retires, and the bureaucracy regains some of its lost youth.  but there are
doubts about the quality of NASA's recruits.  Admiral Truly claims that
NASA is getting the best of the bunch; if so, it is getting them at less
than the going rate.  Gifted yound engineers who want to design space craft
can go to an aerospace company and be paid much more than NASA can offer.
As the Space Council reaches out towards the aerospace industry, they might
even be able to have some influence over the design of missions, too.

     If they choose NASA instead, and expecially if they pick space-station
work, they will find themselves among frustrated colleagues.  When the
space-station budget for next year is fixed, the programme will more or less
halt to spend a few months trimming, chopping, changing, dropping, delaying,
and all the time knowing that they same may happen again next year.  It is a
dispiriting way to work.

THE WORST OF ALL WORLDS

With the new recruits and new purpose, as one part of a coherent exploration
policy, NASA might quite quickly recover its former glories.  It would require
shaking up, as all institutions do from time to time.  it might also need some
restructuring-scientific research could be further removed from the development
of flight technologies-and some new partners, including foreign ones.  But
although there is a clear need for innovation, there is also a need for 
expertise and experience.  To abolish NASA and replace it, rather than open it  
up, would be wastful.

     That is not a cheap fix.  If NASA is to stay healthy, it must keep moving.
That requires a goal to move towards and money to move with.  Without 
that money things will get worse-unless parts of NASA are amputated.  If the 
space station were cancelled, the shuttle programme cut back, and some of the 
regional centres closed, NASA would still be able to do a useful job, provided 
it survived the shock of such surgery.



     The centrepiece of such a NASA would be the earth-observing system (EOS)
now under development, a series of six satellites that would, as part of an
even larger international venture, study the workings of the earth in 
unprecedented detail.  EOS is expensive ($40 billion, spend over most of three
decades), but the idea of using space to analyse, if not solve, the world's
evironmental problems is extremely popular.  With EOS and a plethora of
smaller earth-oriented missions-19 are on the drawing board at the moment-
NASA could take the lead in monitoring global change. At the same time, it
could slowly continue its exploration of the planets and carry on scrutinising
the cosmos.  It would be a different agency, and a lesser one, but not a
useless one.  Indeed, such a space programme could provide better value for
money than do today's expensively underfunded ambitions.

     It would also signal retreat.  NASA, more than anything, once proclaimed
America's technological lead to the world.  To more or less close down its
manned programme would look like a renunciation of that lead, though the 
manned programme is not really at the forefront of technology.  That is not a
renunciation that President Bush or Congress are keen to make.  So NASA is 
unlikely to die, or to be transformed radically.  It is likely to stuggle on,
unable to do what is being asked of it with the money granted it, unable
to shed its burdens, even if willing, and blamed by everyone for manifesting
an indecision beyond its control.  If that is the way it goes, today's bruised
NASA will surely turn rotten.

END OF ARTICLE 

  For an economist his idea to down size NASA to improve it shows that he's out
of touch with a major economic reality having to do with Federal budgets.
Federal budgets are different in that they are not profit oriented. If a
corperation is having problems, reducing costs helps profitability. If a
federal department reduces cost, the federal money people just say "fine, now
let's debate what you have left". 

  In other words, the top 10 to 20 percent of NASA's budget will always be
questioned and people fighting for other programs or deficit reduction will
always be after that top 10 to 20 percent of what ever NASA has. An economist
would have to be pretty nieve to believe that if NASA closed a couple centers
and gave up the manned space program that all the remaining money would go into
other NASA projects. 

  It would not. It would all go into other Federal programs, payments on the
debt, and/or deficit reduction and next time around the bean counters would
start questioning other NASA functions and the money that remained.

  I'm not saying that's the way it should be but that's the way it is. NASA
should do everything they can to hang on to what they've got or they will
just lose more.

  George

    I agree with what .1 (George) said.
    
    Here in the UK, the present Government has spent the last 10 years
    haggling over various state-owned organisations, and their budget
    scales. There have been constant attempts to 'cut costs' (read 'reduce
    this year's budget') for organisations, the nature of whose business
    requires large expenditure. The result has been exactly what George
    says: these organisations have reduced costs in one year, only to have
    the bean counters tell them to do more cost-cutting the next year.
    
    All this leads to a reduction in the organisations' ability to carry
    out their appointed task, with no obvious benefit to the nation as a
    result.
    
    These economists should consider instead the less tangible benefits of
    the existence of an organisation like NASA. It carries out various
    research programs which no other organisation would have an interest in
    doing (and certainly no private company could afford to do), and which
    have the indirect effect of lifting the technological base of the
    nation as a whole. Thus, everyone benefits indirectly (though not
    necessarily instantly), in return for the taxes which they pay, which
    are used to pay for this kind of programme.
    
    Even third world nations like India have space programs, so they must
    have percieved some kind of benefit from following such research. After
    gaining such a primary position in space research of all kinds, the USA
    would be ill-advised to abandon parts of it for the sake of short term
    financial gains. Future research always builds on past research, so the
    nation which does the initial research is always better placed for
    future advances.
    
    
    Dave Hazel

Um, just to make a quick clarification.   The article was
take from "The Economist", a British magazine which deals with
financial matters I believe.  This does not imply that the
author was an economist - though I would have expected it to be
someone with a suitable background.


- dave

Re: .3

> Um, just to make a quick clarification.   The article was
> take from "The Economist", a British magazine which deals with
> financial matters I believe.  This does not imply that the
> author was an economist - though I would have expected it to be
> someone with a suitable background.

"The Economist" is officially a weekly newspaper.  It covers all kinds of
things, but has a business/finance bias in many articles.  The principal
sections things get published under are:

	Britain
	Europe
	America
	Asia
	International
	Business
	Finance
	Science and Technology
	Books, Films and Art

jb