SpaceflightMemes

The biggest problem is NASA's relationships with defense contractors, which is really politicians' relationships with defense contractors. We've seen NASA administrators with good ideas get hamstrung by politics, budget and unachievable mandates. The second biggest problem is congress every year telling NASA to do more with less.

I worked directly on Artemis hardware for two years. The big problems I saw were

• Massive internal communication failures. Budget people, compliance people and engineering people taking literally almost two years to figure out "Oh! We didn't budget enough to have what we're asking for and we are utterly unable to bend on the requirements (because our paperwork says so, and no one with the power to rework it has the courage to rework it). Guess we just literally gave $4,000,000 to figuring that out. was telling us that over and over and again, but we didn't hear because our budget people kept quitting or moving to other parts of the program and so the new budget people kept having to figure the situation out all over again. Guess we need to cancel this project instead of rethinking our requirements (which we've been handed multiple road maps on how to do." Instead of having a couple of internal meetings to figure this out and figure out how to fix it, our budget people and requirements people played ping pong with it for 18 months like: Budget people: "It's too expensive!" Vendor: "Here are new specifications with features cut (which are redundant with other hardware anyway)." Compliance people: "Nope, the paperwork says those features have to be there. Put them back in." Engineering people: "Yeah, we need the full deal, we care nothing about what that costs!" Vendor: "Ok, here's the new cost with the required specifications!" Engineering and compliance people: "Sweet, let us sign off on that! Budget people just quit anyway!" Defense Contractor: "Haha, let's muddy the waters a little and make communication between Vendor and New Budget People impossibly hard, just to keep the gravy train rolling!" New budget people: "Ahhhh! This is way too expensive! How did this happen!?? Stop work immediately!" Vendor (to engineering and compliance people): "Hey guys! Talk to your new budget people!" Engineering and compliance people: crickets. One engineering guy, three weeks later: "Ahhhh! Get them back to work! We're on a schedule! We need this hardware! What do I need to sign??"
• Too many cooks. And I'm not talking about NASA staff, I'm talking about subcontractors and consultants all lining up for their piece of the pie and NASA basically being required by politics to encourage this. This is how you end up with managers managing managers managing managers managing managers, with these complex chains of vendors and subcontractors and auditors. Some of the people involved make sense, but I can name 6 completely useless people who just had to be involved off the top of my head. Also known as "How to get $400,000 worth of engineering work done for $4,000,000, while making sure can pocket 45% of it.
• <big denfense contractor knowing project is probably doomed and leveraging the bad communication to draw it out as long as possible. Don't really need to say more about this. See paragraph one. These guys are professionals at this.
• Secrecy. All the players in this complex chain of vendors and subcontractors and auditors are fiercely and jealously guarding their petty IP. So we don't know what the real capabilities are of the systems we're supposed to integrate with. We treat everything like black boxes, with lists of inputs and outputs. It's only months into the process that we're able to learn what parts of our system are redundant with some related systems so we can say "Hey, we could cut this! Save you some money! Yeah?" (To which the requirements people say: "No, that's on the paperwork, put that back in!" I personally had a weird dinner meeting with a senior management guy from another small company involved, where he called me up said "Hey, I'm in town for completely unrelated reasons, let me take you to dinner!" We sit down and he immediately says "Let me tell you a bunch of stuff off the record because you want the project to succeed, I want the project to succeed and this is stupid! It's literally sabotaging our success." It ended up being too little too late and unheard anyway because even though we were able to say "Hey, we heard BusySpaceyTech's gizmo does something that our widget also does! Redundancy is great, but you guys are on a tight budget! Let us take that feature out!" But the requirements guys at NASA were like "But it's on the paperwork! Put it back in!" The iceing on that cake is we heard that nine months after our widget got cancelled, BusySpaceyTech's gizmo ALSO got cancelled.

So if I were NASA administrator, I'd say "Why are we having these massive, internal communication failures? Why do we have such high middle management turnover? What can we do to address that?" Then I'd say "Why are our vendor relationships full of all this opaque chaos? What can we do to fix that? Why can't our vendor relations encourage lean design and innovation and why don't managers have the courage and initiative to rethink requirements?" And that's the one that would get me in trouble, because I'd get a call from a congressmonster the next month saying "I just got off the phone with Lockheed Boeing Ryatheon Grumman and they're very unhappy with you!"