Monday, April 1st Features a NASA Town Hall with Jim Bridenstine and You Won’t Believe the Questions That Are Being Asked

March 29, 2019 – As a follow up to the mid-course correction speech given by Vice-President Mike Pence last week, Jim Bridenstine has called for a Town Hall meeting next Monday in which he has encouraged NASA staff to submit questions for his response. There is an old saying that if you don’t want to know what people are thinking, then don’t ask them. Mr. Bridenstine may wish to remind himself of this because in visiting the question submission site I have found that NASA’s employees are pushing back with some very pointed observations as they address the Administrator with their concerns and a large dollop of cynicism.

One question asks:

“The VP indicated we’re in a space race with the Russians and Chinese. The Soviets/Russians have never had a manned flight beyond LEO, and the Chinese haven’t had a manned flight in years. How are we in a space race with them?”

This is a variation on the manufactured Border Crisis that has led to the declaration of a national emergency on the border and the circumventing of Congress’ constitutional budgetary authority by President Trump. If there is a space race today it is the one between SpaceX and NASA, not China, or Russia.

Another question asks:

“Over the past fifteen years, the Agency has been directed to go to Mars, then the Moon, then an Asteroid, then an Asteroid around the Moon, then Mars, then a space station around the Moon, and now the Moon again. What steps do you plan to take to reduce the programmatic whiplash that keeps us from actually accomplishing any of these grand plans?”

The human flight space program has always been driven by politics but with the building of the International Space Station, the rivalry that once drove the pace of human progress in space ended. U.S. administrations have come up with new programs and objectives only to be erased by succeeding administrations. You can certainly understand the cynicism that underlies this question. It speaks volumes about how many within NASA feel regarding the role of the Agency. In the U.S. presently only one space program has never veered from its objective. That is the one Elon Musk has proposed to establish a city on Mars by mid-century. Musk’s dream is shared with his employees at SpaceX who enthusiastically embrace the vision and have been working to achieve it through the development of a reusable space transportation technology. There is nothing in NASA that is anything like this.

Another asks should we be taking shortcuts to get to the Moon within the five-year deadline:

“Rockets in the late fifty’s were relatively simple. They fell over and blew up regularly. For every problem found – safety systems were created. As we learned more about getting men and women to space, every safety issue created more safety features. Now to man-rate the SLS we have so many safety features to stop the rocket from falling over and blowing up that modern computers have trouble keeping up. This rocket is being created in a much different safety environment than Apollo. Do we skip some tests and eliminate some quad redundant safety systems to get to the moon in 5 years?”

The problem is the Space Launch System (SLS) itself. A replacement for the successful Saturn V rocket, this giant didn’t need to be built in the first place, and now is years behind schedule and massively over budget. And NASA’s history of shortcuts in its human space program has produced two space shuttle disasters, causing the death of 14 astronauts. If something’s got to give when it comes to safety, it should be the timeline.

And a final very long question among the hundreds already submitted looks at current events in avionics, the SLS contractor Boeing, the recent Trump budget request, and the leadership of Bridenstine himself in what can only be described as a rant:

“Keeping in mind that the primary contractor for the SLS is Boeing, whose most popular airliner is grounded right now due to rushing and lack of oversight funding for the FAA leading to over 300 deaths, considering that the Trump budget proposal dramatically slashes NASA funding over the next 5 years and Boeing was just looking at a 2028 launch, four years later than what Pence just mandated, what are the chances the SLS will have a sensor malfunction and dive uncontrollably straight down to Earth, killing all of the astronauts onboard? Has anybody actually studied what agile development is really about? Really to pull off any real technical feat, you need effective, structured, multilateral communication with the good, bad, and ugly communicated, so solutions can be found and implemented. You can’t rely on the fly fixing these issues 300,000 miles from Earth by rushing out new, fixed hardware because what is onboard was never built right. Where is the real leadership? Why does it always seem to be “I am the hot stuff and I tell you what to do from the top down” and “my people handle this, not yours”, not let’s realistically coordinate a community of people to collectively get this thing figured out and built with all of the best minds effectively getting the best ideas out there and implemented so this thing will really work and work well? I haven’t seen this since Apollo when they let Wernher von Braun design the rocket and even at this they never allowed him to explore his particular ideas on reusing parts of the rocket, which he always wanted to do. So everything since has been sub-optimal, overly expensive, and even dangerous as evident by two whole shuttle crew loses and the shuttle ultimately canceled because the design could not be made safe nor could it be made cheaper like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which by the way why are we ignoring their efforts funding-wise in recent years as they actually do implement good ideas in their rockets. So it is like we gave them a chance, they proved themselves, now we are ignoring them and not funding them on their bigger effort to get to full re-usability. Again I don’t see leadership and I would like to know what you are going to do to really lead this agency?”

The author of this series of observations and questions is really asking a question about how NASA has lost its way and how its leadership has failed the Agency and its employees.

Want to see some of the other questions, then click here.