Doing More With Less

Sorry but this makes perfect sense. If we are no longer going to be launching 28-35 (7x4 or 5 shuttles) astronauts per year then there is no need for 80-100 astronauts. And since there is no mission, no shuttle mission control. Only ISS mission control will be needed and enough astronauts, maybe 20, to staff the ISS.

This is one of those unintended consequences of the decisions that Mike Griffin made. And for those of you who are going to blame Bush, Griffin should have known about the gap and fought extremely hard to have congress provide shuttle funding for an extension until a new spaceship was available. But he is so anti-shuttle, anti-ISS that he couldn't that instead of being an administrator and worrying about getting the necessary funding in the political arena he instead inserted himself into the next spacecraft design process.

This article, particularly the title, makes the assumption that the overall NASA, civilian space budget, is decreasing in some significant fashion. For the most part, dollars go to salaries and jobs.

If you are not doing your job, or cannot do your job, or if the nature (and location) of the job is changing, then people either need a chance to shape up, or move over. Only if the people cannot or will not do the job, should they be shipped out.

If the budget falls, then there should be a net decrease in jobs and therefore lay-offs.

If the budget increases, and the discussion is about a $3 billion increase, that translates to roughly 20000 additional people.

$3 billion is enough to continue ISS and start on a new development project like a heavy lift vehicle if Shuttle is terminated. To do ISS + Constellation, that is more like an additional $5-7 billion.

So the headlines are trying to scare people. From a marketing and saleability standpoint, they'd be far more effective in gaining support for the space program if they were honest and straightforward with Congress and the public and said that an increase of $3 billion means 20000 new jobs.

Of course if the goal is to kill one program or another, for example Griffin's goals of killing NASA science, Shuttle and ISS, then the intent is to eliminate one set of people in favor of a different set, but if the money is about the same, then the number of jobs is a relative constant.

As dbooker says, we won't need nearly the number of operations people, either Shuttle launch ops, flight crew or mission, but they ought to be trained to go to work on new development. People involved in systems management or development on Shuttle or ISS, should be able to move over to systems management or development on the next project.

It would also be far more effective if similar technical disciplines remained in the appropriate technical organization, rather than every time a new program starts up, they try to establish a new technical organization with new technical specialists. Its duplicative and needlessly expensive, but a trend started under ISS 15 years ago.

Within NASA, for some reason each new management group thinks and says they will do things in new, different and better ways, but actually all they wind up doing is eliminating trained and experienced personnel in favor of people who need to learn how to do the job all over.

So assuming the money is reasonably constant, the real issue is performance. We cannot afford to spend $ 3 billion a year with no results. Thats when program management needs to be changed.