NASA's Infrastructure Cross Roads

KSC An image, circa 2000, of key facilities at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA is grappling with aging infrastructure that hindres its ability to carry out future missions, a recent report concluded. (credit: NASA) NASA’s infrastructure crossroads by Jeff Foust Monday, November 4, 2024 Bookmark and Share The next administration will have its share of challenges involving NASA to deal with. There may be scrutiny of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration campaign, including both its technical approach and its schedule. It will have to examine if NASA’s plans to replace the International Space Station with commercial stations are feasible and on a schedule that will permit the ISS’s retirement in 2030. NASA’s science programs are also facing budget challenges, and the next administration could revisit whatever the agency decides in the coming months on a new approach to the Mars Sample Return program. Underlying all of those issues is problems with the agency’s infrastructure. Many of NASA’s field centers still rely on facilities built many decades ago, dating back to the original space race with the former Soviet Union if not earlier. That aging infrastructure is putting a strain on NASA’s ability to carry out its various missions independent of specific technical or budgetary challenges those missions face. “NASA’s solution to the problem has been to underinvest in infrastructure and so on in the future,” Augustine said. “That tactic, frankly, has run out of gas.” The problem with NASA’s infrastructure is not a new one, but is now an issue that can no longer be deferred. That was the overarching conclusion of a report issued in September by a National Academies committee chartered by Congress in the 2022 NASA authorization act and chaired by Norm Augustine, the retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin. The report, titled “NASA at a Crossroads,” got its name from the committee’s conclusion that the agency was at a crossroads regarding investment in its infrastructure. “The underpinnings of the unique and critical capabilities the agency provides to the United States are eroding and will be inevitably lost if certain trends are not reversed,” the report stated. In a webinar held by the National Academies to roll out the report, Augustine and other committee members said that NASA has underinvested in facilities because of budget pressures. The amount of the agency’s budget that went to “mission support,” a line that includes facility maintenance, fell from 20% of NASA’s overall budget in 2013 to 14% in 2023. “In an opportunity-rich environment, such as NASA has confronted over the years, the choice has too frequently been to pursue near-term missions at the expense of investing in the ostensibly invisible foundational assets of the organization,” the report stated. Augustine, at the webinar, offered a blunter explanation of that “opportunity-rich environment”: NASA was being asked to do more than its budget provided. “NASA’s solution to the problem has been to underinvest in infrastructure and so on in the future,” he said. “That tactic, frankly, has run out of gas.” The committee’s concerned ranged from specific infrastructure, like the Deep Space Network that is increasingly overtaxed trying to support a growing number of missions, to basic facilities like labs and offices. “In fact, during its inspection tours, the committee saw some of the worst facilities many of its members have ever seen,” the report stated. “The concerns that it faces are ones that have built up over decades,” Augustine said of the agency during the webinar. “NASA truly is, in our view, at a crossroads.” The infrastructure comments in the report got the most attention, but the committee also raised concerns about investment in enabling technologies, its workforce, as well as “systemic” issues like a shift in management authority from field centers to NASA headquarters. The committee came up with eight major recommendations included in the report. It called for sufficient funding for infrastructure “even if that requires a rebalancing of the relative allocations of funding between mission work versus institutional support,” as well as the establishment of a working capital fund for infrastructure upkeep. Others called for improving investment in technologies and development of a human capital strategy. The report did not prioritize those recommendations. However, in an interview after the release of the report, Augustine said he considered two of the eight recommendations the most important. One was the recommendation on increasing investment in mission support, which he said could be tackled in two ways. “The first solution is to give NASA more money,” he said, arguing that NASA is a “miniscule” part of the overall budget, even with the recent caps on discretionary spending. “Getting more money is something you can hope for but can’t bet on.” The second approach, he said, it to shift money from missions to mission support. “Just don’t so some of the missions,” he said. “That’s going to be really painful.” He added that neither he nor the committee attempted to identify what missions should be curtailed or cancelled to free up money for mission support. “What are the institutional transformation initiatives we need to implement starting today,” Swails said of the ANSA 2040 effort, “to make sure we’re set up for success in the future?” The other recommendation he considered the most important was what the report called a “priority assessment of its current mission management model,” which he said involves ensuring the “proper checks and balances” between center management and management of mission directorates at headquarters. “The belief of the committee is that this is out of balance and could have dire consequences,” he said in the interview. He added, though, that his committee was “very reluctant” to tell NASA what that balance should be. “That is something it will have to address on its own.” NASA 2040 The National Academies report comes as NASA is working on an internal effort to reshape the agency called NASA 2040. “It’s an agency transformation initiative to propel us into the future,” said Casey Swails, NASA deputy associate administrator, during a talk at the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium last week in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA has mentioned the NASA 2040 initiative from time to time but rarely discussed it in detail outside the agency. The effort has the goal of making NASA the “preeminent organization” in space science and engineering through various institutional reforms. Swails said the approach to NASA 2040 is modeled on other strategies, like its Moon to Mars architecture, that “start from the right” with a specific end state and work backwards to determine how to get there. “What are the institutional transformation initiatives we need to implement starting today,” she said, “to make sure we’re set up for success in the future?” That work has focused on what the initiative calls “workstreams” in seven areas: mission, structure, budget, people, infrastructure, technology, and process. Those efforts are led by personnel at both headquarters and the field centers with assistance from more than 200 “employee champions” that serve as liaisons between leadership and the overall workforce. “This is a whole-of-agency effort,” she said. “We’ve been focused on this as an entire leadership team.” She highlighted the work of the technology workstream, which is looking less at mission-specific technologies than those that enable agency operations, from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity. “This is more around the technology to help us do our jobs.” One example of the efforts coming out of those workstreams is the concept of a “NASA front door” for companies interested in working with the agency. “How many of you can say where NASA’s front door is?” Swails asked the audience, getting muted laughter in return. Even at a single center, she argued, there can be so many ways for companies to try to seek to do business with, or engage in partnerships with, the agency, that it can make it confusing for companies to figure out the best way to proceed. She said NASA is looking at ways through technology to create such a front door. An example she gave is a company looking for access to a wind tunnel going to this portal to find out what agency facilities and expertise could meet its needs. “It's not about creating this big organization you have to go through,” she said, “it’s about a technology platform to see what’s out there.” “If you don’t know NASA, it can be hard to partner with NASA,” said Joseph Pelfrey, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, of that “front door” initiative in an interview during last week’s conference. “We’re trying to make it easier for industry to be able to come in and identify where those capabilities are, where those test facilities are, and where they have capacity to support.” “Their response has been very encouraging,” Augustine said of NASA. “Many of the things we talked about they are addressing.” He said he was optimistic about the prospects of NASA 2040 making lasting, positive reform to the agency. “It's very committed to really looking at ourselves through the mirror to say, how can we be better as an agency, and what do we need to focus on to really enable the goals of the nation in space exploration, to enable commercial space, to be a good partner.” Pelfrey said the NASA 2040 effort identified the need for infrastructure investment would be a challenge. “The National Academies report validated that, in that we have not been able to invest in the infrastructure and somewhat in the workforce for at the level that we would like,” he said. Swails said that the NASA 2040 effort got underway just before the National Academies study started. “What it’s really shown us is that we’ve been on the right track with the things that we’ve been working on,” she said of the study. “A lot of their summary and the findings of their report are really well aligned with the things that we’ve been working on in the last year for 2040.” That includes, she said, the need for more infrastructure investment and a “complex matrix structure” for agency management. The efforts of the various workstreams are wrapping up, she said, providing recommendations to NASA management. Implementing recommendations will begin some time in 2025, although funding for specific efforts may have to wait until fiscal year 2026. Augustine said in September that his committee had briefed NASA on its report shortly before the public release. “Their response has been very encouraging,” he said. “Many of the things we talked about they are addressing.” That response, he said, was one reason he had a “fair amount of optimism” about NASA’s future as it grapples with infrastructure and other institutional challenges. Another, he said, is because “NASA is not going to have much of a choice.” Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.