It's big news when a hurricane damages buildings at NASA's Kennedy Space Center or hits a rocket factory in New Orleans. There's damage that needs repairing immediately so missions can move forward to launch.
But there's a deeper problem with NASA's infrastructure. Erik Weiser, director of NASA's facilities and real estate division, told a blue-ribbon National Academies panel Thursday that the agency's budget for maintenance and construction is "wholly underfunded."
In his presentation to the National Academies committee, Weiser described NASA's infrastructure as in an "increasing state of decline." There's a mismatch between what NASA needs to maintain or upgrade its facilities and the dollars the agency devotes to those efforts. The maintenance gap is $259 million per year using NASA's most conservative estimate, or more than $600 million if NASA followed the maintenance practices of the commercial industry, Weiser said.
And the gap is growing. That has caused NASA's facilities to "deteriorate over time," Weiser said. "The majority of our facilities are beyond their useful life."
“The trend is not good”
Weiser said 83 percent of NASA's facilities are beyond their design life. That's well above the percentage of NASA's workers eligible for retirement, about 25 percent, which itself a significant worry for the space agency.
Funding for facility maintenance comes from disparate parts of NASA. Some of the money comes from specific mission directorates responsible for ensuring launch pads, test stands, and other facilities are in good shape for operations at NASA's field centers. Other resources come from a general overhead fund.
"Each center knows what their most important facilities are for success, so when they see an issue, it’s all hands on deck to fix that problem so they don’t impact the mission," Weiser said.
But triaging maintenance needs can't go on forever.
"We're deferring projects year in and year out, and over the last four years, we've had to defer 78 projects," Weiser said. "All that does is increase the risk on the maintenance side because a lot of those projects that were deferred were repair projects, whether it's horizontal infrastructure, such as your electrical distribution, potable water, sanitary sewer, or it could be some other projects, major renovations to buildings and things like that.
"Without doing those projects, there's more pressure on the maintenance side for unplanned failures that we have to take care of," he said. "And many of those unplanned failures could lead to mission risk and missed milestones, and we don't want that to happen."
Weiser briefed a National Academies panel chartered to examine the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and objectives. Thursday's briefing was one in a series of public meetings the committee will hold before issuing a final report with recommendations to improve the situation. NASA leadership, lawmakers, and White House budget officials are expected to review the report.
The majority of NASA's facilities across the country are rated "marginal to poor" in condition, Weiser said. "This is not the laser table or a test stand in a building. This is the building that supports that test capability inside. ... You can have a world-class microscope and materials lab, but if the building goes down, that microscope is useless to you."
NASA is seeking to reduce its maintenance burden in a few important ways. One is by demolishing structures that are no longer needed for future missions. The agency has identified more than 700 facilities that can be torn down, which will reduce NASA's maintenance requirements by several tens of millions of dollars, according to Weiser.
But NASA doesn't have the funding to quickly demolish all those facilities. It will likely take five to 10 years to get rid of them all, Weiser said.
NASA is also turning over surplus facilities to commercial companies and other users. A couple of high-profile examples include NASA's leasing of Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center to SpaceX, and the turning over of the old space shuttle runway to Space Florida, an enterprise aimed at luring aerospace businesses to the state. That shifts the cost of maintenance onto other entities.
Kelly Elliott, NASA's acting chief human capital officer, said about 60 percent of the agency's employees work in aging facilities rated as fair or worse. That will affect employee experience and work efficiency, and Elliott considers it a "significant risk" for NASA's workforce.
The National Academies panel is chaired by Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin who led two high-level reviews of NASA's space programs in 1990 and 2009. He said in Thursday's meeting that NASA's aging infrastructure could put off job candidates.
"You get people out of college that you’re trying to hire, and so are other companies trying to hire them, and they’ve been working at the leading edge of technology," Augustine said. "They go out to visit the site at NASA that they’ve been hired to work at, and it’s like going back 40 years in their field. In many cases that I’ve seen, that’s kind of a fatal circumstance.”
Weiser didn't disagree.
“I’ve been in some of the new facilities that SpaceX and Blue (Origin) have built, and others," he said. "I look at our facilities, and I love them all, but if I want to inspire the next generation of our workforce ... we need better facilities."
It's a trade-off with NASA's maintenance and construction funding. Does the agency repair its existing infrastructure or build new facilities?
In some cases, it's an easy decision. Alongside the state of Florida and the US Department of Transportation, NASA is co-funding the construction of a new bridge that serves as a primary access point for driving onto the Kennedy Space Center. Satellites, rockets, and other hardware regularly transit this road, which previously had a drawbridge dating to 1964.
NASA is also replacing a causeway that is the only access to launch pads at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, where Northrop Grumman and Rocket Lab launch their missions. In the not-so-distant future, NASA is interested in building a new payload processing facility in Florida for nuclear space missions.
"We have a goal to go to Mars," Weiser said. "Have we really thought about the infrastructure we need within the agency to ensure that we can get to Mars? It’s not just about building the rocket that can get there."
