http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/107493.....t_summ.pdf

…and you’ll see that there is no “uncontrolled spending”. In fact, if you dig deeply enough, you’ll find out that not only did they not get the money promised to them by Congress, what they did get was loaded up with “earmarks” for Congress’ pet projects.

In the wake of the CAIB report, which included insufficient funding as an indirect cause of the accident, Washington made a whole host of empty promises. They did the same again after hurricanes blasted Michoud and Kennedy.

Keith has a favorite phrase that pretty much sums it all up…”no bucks, no Buck Rogers”.

Instead of keeping their promises, they put Griffin in a no-win position, having to rob Constellation to complete ISS. I have to give the man credit for having the discipline to complete ISS, because that’s what I would have done.

The next thing on my wish list would be for “stop-loss” to be applied to the workers at KSC, so that the skills are not wasted as the workers compete to be “Dopey” in Orlando.

I notice, for example, that no one here questions whether NASA is even doing the right things right now. The discussion seems to mimic, eg., what happened in the Bush Administration when faced with a hostile Arab/muslim world. Their answer was to appoint someone to improve PR to to the muslim world – without acknowldedging that it is our policies and implementation which are the the main problem, not how the message is sold.

2. “If recent history is an indication of the future, NASA’s budget will not change drastically.”
Actually, that’s the optimistic version.
At the recent Space Access Society conference in Phoenix, Charles Miller (space entrepreneur and advisor to the Air Force Research Lab), made a pitch that included his assessment of past NASA budget trends. He showed that in periods when balancing the budget is a priority, NASA always suffers, and loses budget in real terms. And I think 2009 will be the start of several years of more serious budget balancing than the un-controlled spending of the past several years.

I’ve been reading this thread, and from your last post, I get this impression of a semi-graybeard attempting to actually accomplish something. You know me, so you know what I mean.

Something that gets ignored is the fact that the wind direction changes every four years or so, based upon who is residing in the White House at any given time.

During the 1960s, NASA had a clear direction, but that direction lost momentum thanks to Richard Nixon. The program basically languished under Ford and Carter.

Through the 80s and early 90s, the program was content to go roundy-round the Earth, until the ISS was dreamed up. Now, there was something meaningful to do: construct a real outpost on the “final frontier”.

When it was less than halfway done, short attention spans reared their heads and calls to abandon the ISS and start on the “next best thing” began to be heard. Understanding the need to finish one’s meal before asking for dessert, the current NASA administration is pressing ahead to finish what it started…a good way to show discipline and earn budgetary allocations.

We all know that the current plan is to complete the ISS and retire the STS at the end of 2010, so that resources can be applied to Moon, Mars, and beyond. But wait!

There will be a new resident in the White House, and if their belief is that MMB is a foolish waste of money, then what will become of all of the work that was begun. Shelved, sold off, history repeats itself yet again.

In a sense, Keith, working at NASA is a lot like a “Dilbert” cartoon, in fact, I’d bet that Scott Adams gets a lot of his inspiration from there.

It reminds me of the cartoon where the pointy-haired boss calls Dilbert in to tell him that he’s changed the project’s requirements, and Dilbert responds by telling him that he’s done nothing but carry empty binders around for the past three months.

These “kids” could probably accomplish a lot, unfortunately, financial realities dictate NASA’s reality, such as it is at any given time.

WRT the “get real” tone – it is quite intentional.

Thinking of how the world will “function in 50 years is great” – but it is irrelevant to extant NASA management that has to deal with how to conduct programs in the here and now – or a decade or so at most in the future. NASA is already canceling programs of value now in FY 2008 in order to pay for the Ares and CEV. Why would they suddenly go for something that is relevant to FY 2058?

You guys need to pick something that is needed in the current time frame and show how you can fix it and/or make it much much better than the traditional approaches would do. “Good enough” is often all that NASA can afford, sadly. You need to show decision makers how “better” is preferable – and worth the investment – and you need metrics and deliverables whereby to prove this point. You only get that by DOING something.

If NASA cannot do the things currently on its collective plate why should anyone trust it to do things of future relevance?

You need to walk up and take something current and make it better. Only then will they trust you with the future. The fact that it is your future is irrelevant.

Keith (note spelling)

Notes:

1. When I came to my first NASA job at HQ in 1987 it was all I could do to get people to use email (NASAMail).

2. When I left my last NASA-funded job in 1996 it was all I could do to get people to use email (SSFPMail).

3. When most of you were in high school (1997) I was sitting in an auditorium at ARC at the first Astrobiology Institute planning meeting with a Mac laptop and a wireless (Richochet) Internet connection updating NASA Watch (this was before the word “blog”) live about what was happening in the meeting. I was live blogging. At one point I asked a question and held up my laptop, told them who I was and what I was doing, and all 200+ people were bewildered as to how such a thing was possible. I then coined the phrase “virtual institute” in asking how this new emerging technology was going to be used at NASA. More bewilderment.

My point: I know exactly where you folks are coming from. I have been waiting for you for more than a decade – in some cases, two.

I think what you bring up though is finding proper technological solutions. Solutions that aren’t superfluous and that aren’t distracting. How will the world function in 50 years? I imagine that to some degree (and I think a large one) we’ll be using groupware (project management) and social networks in all sort of ways to increase collaboration, creativity, competitiveness, and productivity. I don’t know how those things will be configured but I’m doubtless they’ll be employed in some fashion. If not by us, then by someone else. But it isn’t an “if” but a “when.”

So the challenge is finding the right tools for the job, looking through case studies, finding the right applications of technology, and also studying how groups such as NASA organize themselves and work.

The first phase I’d imagine would be to first augment existing workflows efficiently, next would be to to start experimenting with new workflows and interactions in non-mission critical areas. There are sites such as spacecollective.org that invite passionate users (you have to be invited to join) to contribute to projects. There are other models such as kluster.com that allow people to open up their projects to others for feedback and participation.

In these scenarios we can see that there is more than one way to construct a social hierarchy on the web, that not in all cases is it Myspace anarchy. Trust is the currency and I think there are ample ways to create dynamic and organized communities of passionate people collaborating with each other, private space ventures, and to public ones such as NASA.

In cases where this is already working is in regards to the galaxy identification project at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ which crowd-sourced the work on the internet. There’s also a number of projects designed to foster a community of home-grown planet hunters.

I also don’t believe that starting with JSC is necessarily a bad thing; change has to start somewhere, and it’s just more convenient for this to start with JSC because most of the Gen-Y people associated with the presentations are located at JSC.

Personally, I don’t believe any of us is looking to change only JSC; the point (from where I stand) of all of this is to just get our voice heard and our viewpoint considered during this time of monumental change at NASA.

You do know that people at HQ read all this stuff … including postings here ….

We have to start somewhere. It’s not going to happen overnight and we have to make our case that there is value in our ideas. That is a “political” reality that we have to roll with. You said yourself that we have an uphill battle. I’m not sure how you expect us to win it without the credibility that will come from being involved in the current process.

You are developing JSC’s vision – not NASA’s.

I think that proving the merit of this approach in developing the vision for JSC’s future will translate into more trust for making the necessary transformations at the agency level. We’ve got to make it work at a smaller scale first before we can ramp it up.