A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.
"NASA’s problem is it always seems to have $3 billion more program than it has of funds," said Norm Augustine, chair of the National Academies panel chartered to examine the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and objectives. Augustine said a similar statement could sum up two previous high-level reviews of NASA's space programs that he chaired in 1990 and 2009. But the report released Tuesday put NASA's predicament in stark terms.
Grumbling about crumbling infrastructure
Around 83 percent of NASA's facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance. When you consider NASA's $250 million estimate for normal year-to-year maintenance, it would take a $600 million uptick in NASA's annual budget for infrastructure repairs to catch up on the backlog within the next 10 years.
To members of Congress or the White House, backing a new NASA mission to the Moon or a space telescope to probe the deepest reaches of the Universe is often more attractive than investing in facility maintenance. The former initiatives grab headlines and create jobs. Most of NASA's facilities across the country are rated "marginal to poor" in condition, according to a presentation to the National Academies last year by Erik Weiser, NASA's director of facilities and real estate.
"In NASA’s case, the not-uncommon tendency in a constrained budget environment to prioritize initiating new missions as opposed to maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be viewed as acceptable under most industrial standards," the panel wrote in its report. "In fact, during its inspection tours, the committee saw some of the worst facilities many of its members have ever seen."
“Since the year 2010, the NASA budget for missions has gone up by 8 percent," Augustine said. "Meanwhile, the budget for mission support has dropped by 33 percent. If you do a little arithmetic, it shows that every dollar of mission support budget today has to support 50 percent more mission activity than was the case in 2010, not that long ago.”
NASA is dealing with these infrastructure shortfalls as the agency pursues the most challenging missions in its 66-year history.
“Viewed in terms of both the architectural complexity and the technical complexity, NASA today—for example, in the Artemis program to land on the Moon a few years from now—is taking on challenges that far surpass anything that was faced in the Apollo program," Augustine said.
All of NASA's centers have facilities the agency considers marginal, but Johnson Space Center in Houston has the facilities with the worst average score. Johnson oversees astronaut training and is home to NASA's Mission Control Center for the International Space Station and future Artemis lunar missions. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which develops and operates many of NASA's robotic interplanetary probes, and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, used for rocket engine testing, are the only centers without a poor infrastructure score.
These ratings cover things like buildings and utilities, not the specific test rigs or instruments inside them. "You can have a world-class microscope and materials lab, but if the building goes down, that microscope is useless to you," Weiser told the National Academies panel in a meeting last year.
The panel recommended that Congress direct NASA to establish an annually replenished revolving working capital fund to pay for maintenance and infrastructure upgrades. Other government agencies use similar funds for infrastructure support. “This is something that will require federal legislation," said Jill Dahlburg, a member of the National Academies panel and former superintendent of the space science division at the Naval Research Laboratory.
Thinking long-term
The panel also found that NASA lacks a specific long-term strategy to ensure that the agency develops the right technologies needed for future missions. In the panel's meetings with agency employees, "we often heard the comment that it doesn’t make any sense to try to do long-range planning for organizations like NASA," Augustine said. "Our committee takes exception to that.”
The federal government works on one-year budget cycles, and overall plans for government spending only go out every five years. This doesn't match up with the time NASA needs to see its missions through from concept to completion. "NASA’s activities, its missions, generally entail decades of work, or at least a decade of work," Augustine said.
While NASA officials can't do anything about the federal budget process, the panel urged the agency to determine "need dates" for mission-critical technologies and to prioritize technology development efforts.
Ed Crawley, a professor of engineering at MIT, said the review board identified 10 types of technologies NASA and its contractors must develop to achieve the agency's goal of a sustained human presence on the Moon and future crew expeditions to Mars. Most critical, Crawley said, are in-space power and propulsion to push large masses around Earth, the Moon, and Mars; entry, descent, and landing technologies for spacecraft traveling to the Red Planet; and radiation safety for humans.
"I call them the three miracles that we need to get to Mars," Crawley said. “Some progress has been made over the last decade... but there’s a lot of work to be done, and each of these can be viewed as a relatively expensive standalone project that has to be integrated into a larger set of missions.”
Competing for the best
The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency's workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA's commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.
This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. "Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions," the panel wrote.
“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor," said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.
NASA's commercial partners often rely on the agency's technical expertise and facilities. SpaceX launches rockets from a NASA-owned launch pad, tested its first Crew Dragon spacecraft inside a NASA vacuum chamber, and leaned on NASA experts to develop Dragon and design its astronaut-training program. NASA has numerous agreements with other commercial companies to provide expertise and assistance.
"Industry actually values having an agency like NASA that understands the technology, that’s not just going to sit back and dole out dollars," said Lester Lyles, a retired Air Force general.
Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's former vice president of build and flight reliability, said NASA's use of service contracts, like the agreement it has with SpaceX for crew and cargo transportation, has led to "some amazing progress... But it also leaves some of the NASA workforce a bit concerned about their future and how much hands-on work on NASA’s side itself will be done in the future."
The panel recommended that NASA set specific criteria for fixed-price service contracts to avoid using these kinds of agreements on programs involving immature, early-stage technologies. "Where such contracts have faced issues is where invention, significant development, one-of-a-kind situations, or uncertain requirements are involved," the panel wrote.
NASA is using fixed-price contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop the Human Landing System for the Artemis program. The human-rated landers will ferry astronauts between lunar orbit and the Moon's surface. SpaceX will provide a version of its powerful Starship rocket as a lunar lander, and Blue Origin is working on its own system called Blue Moon.
"Given the difficulty of this endeavor, it is likely the full capabilities of NASA and the contractors will be necessary for a national program of this complexity and importance to be assured of success," the National Academies panel wrote in its report.
