NASA's Workforce Is Aging
NASA: Assessments of Major Projects, GAO
Pages 39-40: “Another trend, the aging of NASA’s workforce, has both negative and positive effects. About 56 percent of NASA’s workforce is 50 years old and over, an increase of about 7 percentage points over the past 5 years. Officials said that NASA’s workforce is aging because NASA has a low attrition rate – about 4 percent annually – and high numbers of staff stay several years past retirement. We also found that, as of the beginning of 2018, 21 percent of the workforce is retirement eligible, about another 23 percent will become eligible in less than 5 years, and the average number of years staff that stay past initial retirement eligibility varied by occupation. On average, individuals remain at NASA between 4-7 years past their initial retirement eligibility date, but staff in the engineering and science occupations stay on longer than other occupations, such as professional and administrative.
Officials said there are both advantages and disadvantages to having an aging workforce. For example, human capital officials noted that having an aging workforce is good for maintaining institutional knowledge due to experienced staff staying longer, but that having a low attrition rate makes it more difficult for the agency to make changes to its workforce skill mix as needed. Officials within the Office of the Chief Engineer and Mission Support Directorate said that they were looking at ways to be more strategic in hiring or using existing capabilities to meet their skills needs.”
Port of Los Angeles OKs SpaceX rocket plant on Terminal Island, Daily Breeze
“The median age of SpaceX’s 6,000 employees is 31.”
I have worked at NASa over 30 years, I have never seen a contractor propssl highlighting how many 22 year olds they jad
Amy boast of how many combined years of engoneeengi expertise.
Is this how you type up proposals?
Scarier, I largely reviewed proposals.That is what you get when I try to type on my cell without my glasses on. Fortunately, based on the responses, most were able to understand what I was trying to convey. Language and spelling, unlike mathematics, are not immutable. In a 1,000 years who knows maybe my post will be correctly spelled in the conventions of the time. Maybe in a 1,00 years this will be the correct spelling of what I would like to convey to you. @#$% *&^ !
I was kidding around and forgot the smiley ..
My reply was also tongue in cheek (including errors) and hope it was taken as such.
Musta been riding on a rocket while he typed…
C’mon, give the fellow a little slick…sleck…slack. 😉
Regrettably but understandably Mr Coming has declined to ost my reply to Vladislaw.
How about reading what you post before you post it.
This has become an issue for proposed planetary mission to the outer solar system. For example, a proposal for a Discovery mission to Jupiter, submitted for the expected AO with proposals due about a year from now, might easily operate past 2034. If key members of the team are over 50 today, they might be retired or even dead by the end of the mission. There is a growing expectation for proposals to say something about how the mission would deal with this (e.g. bringing in young people or transition plans for younger team members to take up the work of older ones as necessary.)
It is kind of a unique/interesting situation. What are the odds that a fifty something would die vs a twenty something leaving the company? That the company would still exist in its present form?
That’s why you need a balance of both – with a constant eye on new blood/new skills/new ideas.
There is no argument that NASA needs a rational HR policy and I know things got out of whack because NASA underwent long stretches where it couldn’t hire. I am cynical though that this is about getting new ideas into the Agency (more like getting salary costs down and getting more pliable employees) As someone pointed out before the average age of the workforce at NASA is about 5 years older than the national average. People are working longer than in the recent past and a technical organization probably should skew slightly older (little physical labor and experience should be highly valued).I would be more encouraged if the concern was with the age of SES employees,how long they have been SES, and how long they have stayed with the Agency or even their Center. I think it will be very hard for new employees to inject new ideas into an ossified bureaucracy
BTW. I did my part to help out with the “age” problem I retired at 57 from NASA..
There are a lot of people who truly love their work at NASA and never want to stop.
And there is one option which is, unfortunately, not allowed. At universities, it isn’t uncommon for someone to retire, take their pension, and continue to work as a professor emeritus. Some of them get a bit tedious by the time they are ninety but some of them don’t. That lets people continue working as long as they like and keeps their experience available, while still freeing up positions, and funding to hire younger people.
Unfortunately, that isn’t allowed at NASA. At least definitely not at JPL, and I think this is a NASA-wide policy. If they aren’t paying you, you can’t work on a project. That also applies if you win the lottery or inherit a fortune. Of course they can’t stop you from talking to people or from them taking your advice, but that’s different from officially working on the project. (E.g. being allowed to attend a meeting at a NASA center.)
And that is why you dont look to replace them just because they are getting older. There is an age bias in the work arena in this country and it needs to be stopped. The old adage “you cant teach an old dog new tricks” is only correct in that as you age motivations may change and people are less resistant to being lied to and cheated because they have learned from experience. And companies need to stop dropping older, experienced people just because they want to save money by hiring a new person for less. NASA and every company should seek to retain, motivate and teach everyone as long as they want to productively and happily work. With a population age the is only getting older on average and can live longer due to modern medicine this should be a key priority of our society.
Balance is important. Similarly, the idea NASA needs new blood can’t be taken as inherently good. Motivations matter. I see a short term check-to-check let’s just worry about today mentality throughout management. Often this drives the push for new blood, easily given marching orders for a time on the arbitrary task of the day. Good idea, bad motives.
As well, I’ve too often seen a NASA employee want to go do new things only to be told there is no money, for training, or time to divert from current chores. Or travel. Or dollars for that software. But a new hire, of course we’d have them get up to speed on that new thing!
A young worker hired in to NASA today should beware, that openness to ideas you will take all the way to expert level might just become the 15 years you invested only to be told the new fad is something else soon after you get that doctorate. I’ve seen it too often. Those experts? Ahh yes, the one’s being called obsolete…
it’s called succession planning. yes, mostly it’s an exercise in futility (when/why people leave/stay is indeterminable) but it still should be done, so you can at least see the oncoming train !?
For the people involved, I was talking about the Principal Investigator, the co-Investigators, and possibly the Project Manager. In a legal sense, NASA made a competitive selection for the mission (or the instrument, in the case of flagship or strategic missions), and part of that selection involved the ability of those people (and whoever they decide to hire) to do the job. Retiring and resigning is legal, as is shuffling responsibilities within the team. But adding or replacing those people is a really big deal. When Cassini did it, it went all the way up the Associate Administrator for approval (and got hung up for years because someone along the way was saying no.)
That sort of position is senior enough that I can’t see someone in their twenties being experienced enough (review boards would probably expect five or ten years of experience after finishing a PhD.) But people do change jobs. Frequently it’s someone working as a research scientist getting a professorship at a university. That can get complicated, since the actual contracts are to a person’s home institution not the person. That means contracts being renegotiated, often some money staying with the old institution (if the job involves facilities the new institution doesn’t have), etc. But it happens all the time. I’d be surprised if half the original Cassini PI’s and co-I’s ended the mission un-retired and at the same place they started.
For companies, if they’re bought out over the course of a long mission, the contracts just shift to the new owner (with lawyers getting fees for negotiating the shift, of course.) I can’t think of a case where a company flat-out closed its doors and disappeared. If it happened, I guess the contract would shift to whatever company hired the PI. (That, by the way, makes it very likely someone would hire him…)
Thanks. It is a very different world than R&D contracts. I once had a PI resign the day before the kick-off meeting!
That’s something which would be frowned on… It’s would be far too easy to put a famous and highly experienced person on the proposal as the PI, use that to help get the proposal funded, and then swap him out for a much less experienced person. That still happens, to some extent, with the famous PI retaining the title but delegating almost all of the work, starting on day one. But he’s still the one who’s on the hook when something goes wrong.
Yeah I wanted to kill it but the project office didn’t. I suspect it wasn’t planned but if I was a competing proposer I wouldn’t have been happy. The winning institution scrambled to find a replacement and the effort was fairly successful. When I was briefly in the private sector it was routine practice to use the.most senior personnel in proposals even though they had .no intention of staffing those efforts with those people if they won.
NASA’s retirement system changed and when it did it eliminated the incentive to leave before full Social Security retirement age, typically 66 or 67. Until 1985, once you retired, you do so with a significant fraction of your salary. If you started after 1985, your NASA retirement is a small fraction of the total retirement. If you have a spouse who is working you might be able to get by, but if you are the breadwinner, especially given that aerospace is not looking for people, and generally discriminate against those over 45, the older worker will usually lose and so will his family.
As far as institutional knowledge, because NASA also discriminates, there is little institutional knowledge anymore. The new programs do not generally promote those with experience in older programs. It definitely made a difference in human spaceflight where Orion and SLS are proving NASA no longer can do the job. Even in ISS, the only ‘real’ program, no one has designed or built anything in decades and the integration processes have never gotten to the efficiency of Shuttle or earlier programs had been in the 1980s and 90s. We are fortunate the internationals are taking care of the program. We are also fortunate that the technology is not too sophisticated and the environment is relatively benign, so that safety is not a huge issue.
Put some more astronauts and flight directors in charge of projects where you are trying to design or build things; you will wind up with the program you have today; the walking dead.
Just brand folks with a broad brush why don’t you?
Ha. I think he’s spot-on with his assessment. =)
NASA simply isn’t hiring very many people straight out of college. They really ought to be doing this and transferring the knowledge that the older generation has to the younger generation. There is so much knowledge that’s in people’s heads that never gets documented properly.
But exactly why would a engineer fresh out of college want to work at an organization buried in 60 years of bureaucratic rules with senior leaders trying to relive past glories with SLS/Orion/LOP-G, individuals that worked there for decades and decades because they didn’t rock the boat when they could work at SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow or another startup and actually help pioneer a new frontier for humanity? It’s like expecting the best and the brightest software engineers to go to work for IBM rather then make a beeline to Silicon Valley.
Yes, they do have experience that needs to be documented, but those new college engineers want to build things, not spend years more in “school”.
BTW this is another example of the difference between a market economy like the US and centrally planned ones like Russia or China. There the new graduates would be assigned to work in such “mature” organizations to gain “experience” where their drive and spirit would be quickly crushed by the weight of the organization structure. Have a new idea, submit it to the senior engineering board for approval, they will get back to you in a year or so…
Because they’re freaking NASA! Seriously. I tried to get a co-op job at NASA, but there were so many others who wanted to work for NASA that my one grade that wasn’t an “A” prevented me from getting the job. My roommate who had straight “A”s got a co-op job at JSC. That co-op job led to a permanent position when he graduated college. This was a while ago, but there are still a *huge* number of people who want to work for NASA.
Yes, but that will be changing as they see the success of the new space firms. NASA is still cruising on its past reputation.
Actually there’s some pretty good work being done in places, in spite of cries like yours that claim all people do is get trapped in bureaucratics.
And your actual, hands on experience workling with NASA to back up these claims is??????
None apparently. Another academic.
Funny how you dismiss someone who has a solid background in organization theory, then claim folks are anti-science when they question academics who do work in climate science because it is counter to their “experience” that the climate hasn’t changed. How many climate scientists have experience as farmers? Yet it seems to OK for them to lecture farmers about climate change and agriculture.
NASA is an organization, and may be analyzed and studied like any other organization. That is what Management Science does. NASA is not the same organization it was when it was young, your blog shows that by constantly highlighting all the symptoms of a mature organization bordering on decline. The SLS and Orion are good examples.
Just because some young folks contact you about wanting to work there doesn’t change that, especially given the lack of employment opportunities for STEM graduates. Really, how many employment opportunities are there for folks interested in planetary science or space science? At least Aerospace engineers have more options now, and are taking them.
What this thread highlights is that NASA has an age problem with no plan for talent development. You don’t need to work there to see that is a problem. And is probably a factor in their many other organizational problems.
“[H]ow many employment opportunities are there for folks interested in planetary science or space science?”
Actually, almost none in the context of this discussion. When it comes to science (rather than engineering) there are very few jobs for people who have just gotten their Bachelor’s degree. Or a Masters, for that matter. So, in those cases, we’re talking about people who probably have, as graduate students, had some opportunity to work NASA. Their career choices after finishing their PhD aren’t strongly in favor of NASA. It is a more secure position than soft money research. But I see more post-docs and early career scientists people working towards a professorship than a permanent position at Goddard or JPL.
Yup. Kind of like a theorist with no hardware background other than Lego experience critiquing a spectrometer design.
And exactly what is your knowledge of Organizational Theory, Organization Behavior and Talent Development? Could you even name the major names in the field?
I do not know who your are or where you worked but young people would give their eye teeth to work at NASA. I am constantly asked by young folks how to best position themselves for a chance to be chosen to work there.
I am easy to find, I have a Ph.D. In Business, did my dissertation on commercial spaceports and have been publishing academic articles on space policy since the 1990’s. I been invited to present to a couple tracks at the ISDC on space policy.
Yes, kids think NASA is cool. But then the time comes to make actual career decisions. How many of the bright young engineers at SpaceX or Blue Origin do think would quit those jobs, despite the long hours and tight schedules to work at NASA? I know a few and they wouldn’t trade it for all the money in Washington. To exchange actually flying rockets to just making viewgraphs of the SLS for the next committee meeting?
Now it’s launch vehicles, soon it will be the same for space stations and working on the Moon. As the Space Commerce economy grows so will the opportunity to work for those type of firms.
The world is changing and in a decade or so NASA won’t seem so cool unless it changes as well. NASA will become someplace their parents might have wanted to work for. It’s no different than the paradigm shift that took place with GM in the late 1980’s. Or the railroads in the 1950’s. You know that the UP has such a hard time finding folks to work as engineers they are offering a $25,000 hiring bonus? Yet there was a time every kid dreamed of being an railroad engineer. The world changes and NASA is on the downhill side of the curve with its clinging to SLS/Orion…
And how many of them leave SpaceX when they decide to have families or realize that there’s more to life than work?
NASA is not on the downhill side of the curve my man. You keep focusing on one or two things. There’s a lot of groundbreaking work being done, especially in aeronautics. It just doesn’t get the pub that throwing a car into space does.
Based on Organizational Theory it is clear that NASA is firmly in the Maturity Stage and rapidly approaching the Decline Stage. A few outliers is not going to change that.
https://www.inc.com/encyclo…
Organizational Life Cycle
“Historians and academics have observed that organizations, like living organisms, have life cycles. They are born (established or formed), they grow and develop, they reach maturity, they begin to decline and age, and finally, in many cases, they die. Study of the organizational life cycle (OLC) has resulted in various predictive models.”
You are letting your emotions get in the way. When analyzing an organization like NASA to help it adapt to a changing world you need to leave emotions at the door and just look at the metrics, like age. time to get projects done, hiring processes, etc. All are evidence of a organization in the late stages of the Maturity Stage getting ready to start its decline.
The engineers at SpaceX and Blue Origin aren’t going to trade the thrill of a youthful organization to work for a mature one. They will look for another start up or start their own.
Theory smeory. Do you have actual data to back this up?
Yes, dismiss any field of study that disagrees with your opinions. But the truth is you already supply most of the “data” with your news site. Your blog is an excellent series of case studies of an aging organization.
Examples of the red tape that usually occurs in a mature organization
Examples of leadership that is over cautious.
Example of projects that never seem to reach completion with repeated cost overruns. And seem disconnected from changes in the external environment
Failure to adapt to changes in the external environment
Examples of disconnect, where one part of the organization doesn’t know what the other is doing.
And the topic of this post, low retirement rates because everyone is comfortable at their job. From the post above…
“About 56 percent of NASA’s workforce is 50 years old and over, an increase of about 7 percentage points over the past 5 years. Officials said that NASA’s workforce is aging because NASA has a low attrition rate – about 4 percent annually – and high numbers of staff stay several years past retirement. “
An aged workforce is not only an indication of a mature organization, but evidence no one is taking steps to reinvigorate it. That is what hiring young graduates with fresh ideas is about. The post some one made about how NASA now prefers to hires from contractors is actually counter productive. Yes, they may be more seasoned, but they are so more likely to have the traits needed to reinvigorate NASA broken out of them. Which means they are less likely to rock the boat which is what made NASA great in the 1960’s. And is a sign of youth missing today at NASA.
What you are confusing is the idea of liking to work at an organization, or young workers in fields with limited career prospects seeking to work at NASA, with its organization life cycle stage and its future. Of course folks at NASA like it there, that is the only world many of them have known. And they started there because they liked space. And they like things at NASA staying the same. The workers at GM liked working there, until the bottom fell out. Indeed, many wished they could continue to work there.
But closing your eyes to the trouble NASA is in. and attacking folks who have the discipline specific knowledge to point it out and maybe offer somutions is not going to change things at NASA.
Another example is the recent interview with former Administrator Bolden. I commented on it a week or so ago:
When asked about his advice for the new Administrator, he said, “Don’t try to transform it, because it’s been around a long time. It may need some tweaks, but it does not need to be remade. That was the only thing I could tell him.”
Personal tendencies to not make waves aside, the fact that the head of an organization thinks that way says something. That it’s not an organization which is actively trying to grow and adapt, and that it has an organizational culture which holds its way of doing things is inherently good since it’s the way they have been doing things for a long time.
In the decades that I’ve been reading this news site, Keith has reported on several re-organizational efforts at NASA. Each time, the list of folks drafted to re-invigorate the Agency reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the American space world.
In the context of your comments, Dr. M., now I am wondering if the sort of organizational expertise you are describing was ever part of these efforts. Or has it been a case of self-reorganization?
While I know that the info is available after a few hours’ search on the web, I’m asking here thinking I might find direct knowledge so that my lazy (and busy) self can avoid the work…
I was never part of these efforts watching them with a professional eye from the outside. Although I do consulting I am not part of the Washington crowd which have attempted these efforts. I work more with New Space clients. NASA resistance to change, and failed efforts at it, is not surprising in a mature organization. GM made several attempts at reorganizing but the vested interests of the divisions, and unions, prevented them from being successful. Until you present the organization with a clear crisis they will resist, what I like to call the Pearl Harbor moment. The BFR, when it enters service, should create that moment for NASA.
I do however know a number of current and former folk who were managers and so know a bit about what goes on “under the hood”. They recognize the need to relaunch NASA, but see little hope for influencing the senior management. The latest effort will be interesting, trying to put NASA’s return to the Moon under a more commercial approach with PPP. But key to it will be ensuring young managers are selected to run it who are willing to take risks and it’s insulted from the older managers (in terms of thinking) who will resist it. It’s is telling how the Lunar Prospector was defunded just before Rep. Bridenstine took over, blind siding him.
“…ensuring young managers are selected to run it who are willing to take risks and it’s insul[a]ted from the older managers (in terms of thinking) who will resist it.”
That reminds me of an interesting comment from a workshop on CubeSat science (organized by the National Academies study on the subject.) Someone said it was odd that it’s the younger scientists willing to take greater risks of a mission failing, while the older scientists seem less willing to do so.
In terms of their careers, you’d think it was the other way around. If the tenured professor’s small satellite fails, it’s not like he’s going to lose his job. But if the young scientist who is still working as a soft-money researcher is in charge of a failed small satellite, he’s it could really hurt his career prospects. I think that’s an interesting point, even though it’s applying logic to a psychological issue.
This passionate reaction really surprises me, Keith. These comments represent a reasonable and mostly falsifiable hypothesis given the observed facts.
Right or wrong, I want to see ‘Big Picture’ criticism of NASA that are above the narrow comments I read (and post) here. The idea is to fix NASA’s HSF efforts, after having accurately identified the issues.
I’m with you Tiger Man! I worked at NASA JSC for over 30 years as a contractor to the Flight Ops directorate, much of that in management. I had zero problem finding highly qualified new and recent college grads to become flight controllers and/or instructors. We would get several hundreds of applicants for maybe a dozen openings, twice a year. The only reason SpaceX t-shirts are in vogue versus NASA wear is that SpaceX has actually been making headlines with all it’s outstanding successes lately. Way to go, SpaceX! NASA….not so much. That may be about to change, though, so don’t throw those NASA shirts out just yet. Another fact that many may not be aware of, is that NASA doesn’t hire much out of college partly because they prefer to ‘badge change’ the best contractors instead. Brilliant staffing strategy. Let the contractors hire the new kids, wait a few years to see who becomes the best of the best and then do a civil servant conversion. Average age of these NASA new hires: somewhere in the late 20’s to mid-30’s. Granted, this is just a narrow data set taken from one directorate at one NASA center, but it speaks to the fact that not ALL of NASA is, shall we say, mature and stodgy.
Have you ever actually worked at NASA? Are you a young person seeking a job or do you counsel them? If you answer these questions with a “no” then you are just guessing.
No. Why would I? Would an MD want to cut off their leg to see what it feels like?
I see NASA from the clinical perspective, a organization that was a role model when it was young that has reached the maturity stage, is approaching a crisis stage (SLS/ORION), and will either be renewed or will decline further.
I’ve worked as one sort of NASA contractor or another for almost twenty five years. If he’s just guessing, they aren’t bad guesses. He’s clearly over generalizing, and some parts of NASA are better than others. Even within the same directorates and centers, the difference between things like large and small missions is considerable.
Many of the things which would discourage young people from applying for NASA jobs aren’t obvious until you’ve already worked with them for a while. So the number of people applying for jobs, shortly after graduating from college, may not be as relevant as it may seem.
Yes I am generalizing. NASA is a very complex organization and there are pockets of good work being done.
One of the keys to fixing NASA is to protect these pockets and allow them to expand instead of ignoring or suppressing them.
Ames for one has been doing some good things with New Space. It’s a pity that DragonLab was lost in the focus on COTS/CCP, it had real potential to attract non-traditional customers for microgravity research, but the delays once again disappointed them.
Mentioning Ames is interesting in this context. Over the past couple decades, they have seen a significant number of scientists leave and take jobs at the SETI Institute. The close relation between the two institutions (physically and in terms of collaborations) makes that easy, but I have to think a fair number of scientists are voting with their feet.
When SpaceX et al. start flying their own science and exploration payloads to other planetary bodies, then you might have a point. As of now, if you want to participate in missions and be one of a few to see the first images of a place that no one has ever set eyes on, NASA is probably where you want to be. NASA is not monolithic… you say you’re an academic. Have you ever actually spent time at the various NASA centers studying how people work at each, and why they work for NASA? I’d imagine children in Europe still do dream of being railroad engineers… the trains there are pretty cool.
SpaceX is not going to fly their own payloads, what they will do is make it easier for small startups and universities to fly their own missions. Ones that won’t have to win the lottery of winning a RFP from NASA. This the difference between an industry.
When BFR drops the cost of delivering a rover to the Moon to $100/lb or is able to deliver a spacecraft to an escape orbit for the same price, you will see an explosion in space science.
Think of the world when IBM controlled the computer market, programming was on punch cards, and only large research universities had computers and strictly controlled access to them to today’s world of iPads and laptops.
If SpaceX is serious about Mr. Musk’s Mars aspirations, then they will be flying science and exploration missions. Or paying someone else to do so. They aren’t going to build cities on Mars without some significant prospecting and surveying. That may throw some people, who now build and/or operate planetary missions and instruments for NASA, for a loop. The selection process and entire way of doing things will probably be radically different.
This is suppose to be in response to fcrary below. I will try to move it later.
True, but remember that Elon Musk has always said his job is providing transportation, it’s up to others to figure out how to live there. So there is the potential for folks with the specialize knowledge to do startups, first just consulting as a sideline to teaching, then perhaps full time.
So folks with a knowledge of Mars geology, weather, etc.,will be in demand by the firms that emerge to solve those issue, assuming the planetary protection issues are worked out. But then that creates another level of specialize knowledge, and a new job market for folks that only had NASA or teaching as options.
And there is of course the Moon, again experts on it will be needed. This is how innovation creates new industries and changes employment patterns.
“SpaceX is not going to fly their own payloads” yes that was the point… and I was alluding to folks who work on and operate the rover/lander side of things across multiple missions, not science PIs. If you want to work on that side of things you probably still want to be at NASA/JPL not at SpaceX. Science instruments still need a spacecraft bus or rover or lander… Lower SpaceX launch costs don’t address that. For example, according to wikipedia, MSL was a $2.5 billion mission. I’d guess ~$150 million of that was launch cost, so not a large portion. At some point NASA or entities like NASA may no longer have a role in exploration, but I doubt we’ll see that in out lifetime.
I might be biased because of my experience with Cassini operations and working with people involved with heliophysics missions, but… Operating a spacecraft or instrument is not automatically a NASA/JPL role. Often, it’s done at the PI institution or a co-I institution. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has operated missions like NEAR and New Horizons. The University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics is operating Kepler and (with Lockheed Martin, MAVEN.) Instrument operations have been done from dozens of institutions.
So, no, if you want to work on the operations side, you don’t necessarily want to be at JPL or a NASA center. JPL’s near monopoly on Mars missions may make it seem that way, but that monopoly is neither an inherent fact of life nor unchangeable.
And, in terms of budget, $150 million for the launch cost of MSL/Curiosity is probably a fair guess. But out of the total $2.7 billion which sticks in my head, only about $200 million of that was for operations and science. For most planetary missions, the large majority of the cost is developing and building the spacecraft. Launch, operations and science aren’t where most of the money goes.
Interesting discussion… yes, of course, for science operations you don’t need to work for NASA or JPL. Even for Mars missions, science ops are not always at JPL (e.g., MPL and PHX). For missions with no surface component, science ops is likely where the interesting action is. However, for landed missions there’s typically a significant engineering operations component. I.e., the folks who drive the rovers and operate the robotic arms. Those aren’t folks on science instrument teams. Since MPF this has all been JPL. JPL does indeed have a monopoly on Mars missions within NASA, although it hasn’t always been that way, and may not be that way in the future. However, I imagine it’ll be that way for some time to come… which returns to the point I was making about working for NASA/JPL vs SpaceX. If you’re a propulsion engineer, or spacecraft structures guy/gal, or similar, you probably want to work at SpaceX. If you’re a roboticist with an interest in science and exploration NASA/JPL is probably where you want to be… at least currently.
Speaking of MPL and PHX, the latter was basically a re-fly of the former on the existing ’01 lander. There were some improvements to the cameras, but I don’t recall any major changes to the science instruments. The cost for PHX was $386 million (wikipedia). So ~$236 million not including launch costs, and minimal development costs. The point of this being that even discounting launch costs, and with reuse of an existing lander and previously developed instruments the cost of science and exploration missions is currently such that it will significantly limit the number of people who can be directly involved. This may change in the future of course, but lower launch costs is not the entire story.
Last time I checked, MAVEN is a Mars mission and it was selected long after Mars Pathfinder. Also, Discoveries are open to proposals for Mars missions, and that means institutions other than JPL can propose. So the JPL monopoly isn’t as complete as you suggest.
I’d also say that orbiters aren’t necessarily all science in terms of operations. At Mars, for a mapping mission, they might be. But flybys, with complicated pointing profiles and precise navigation, or orbiters with complicated, varying orbits, can involve a sizable amount of non-science spacecraft operations. In a number of cases, NASA wasn’t doing the driving.
If someone’s interested in piloting a robotic spacecraft through multiple asteroid encounters, that would be Southwest Research Institute or Lockheed Martin (or maybe Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.) If flying a drone on Titan strikes your fancy, and Dragonfly is the next New Frontiers mission, then you’d want to get a job at JHU/APL.
And when it comes to the costs, you are right to say that the _current_ costs of a Mars lander or rover are high. But that reflects high standards for reliability and highly optimized payloads which cram in every bit of performance they can. The need for such high reliability and performance is a direct result of the high launch costs. If the cost of launches were an order of magnitude lower, you might get rid of those constraints.
“So the JPL monopoly isn’t as complete as you suggest.”
In a previous post, you referred to JPL’s “monopoly”, and I was simply agreeing with you. The Mars Program Office is at JPL, and by 2020 (assuming Mars 2020 launches), even if we include orbiters, JPL will have had mission operations for 12 out of 13 spacecraft on 12 Mars missions over 25 years (if we are to believe wikipedia). That’s pretty darn close to a monopoly… I wasn’t making any value judgement on it.
Also, as I thought would have been apparent from the context, I made the comment with Mars surface missions in mind. I’m less familiar with orbital missions, but I assumed JPL had minimal operational involvement (navigation, DSN, etc) for most.
The positions you described are associated with specific missions. I believe I indicated that I was referring to robotic work across multiple Mars surface missions. In any case, my comments were in response to fairly broad brush assertions regarding the desirability of working at NASA vs SpaceX.
With regard to cost, it remains to be seen whether significantly lowered launch cost will result in much lower spacecraft design, development, and operations costs. I’m not a planetary scientist, but I could imagine there’d be some resistance to higher risk and lower performance, albeit with more opportunities. Ames’ proposed MESUR mission concept went along those lines, but that only resulted in a single mission: MPF (which ended up with a larger lander than in the original concept to support a rover). Then with the MPL failure we were back to flagship missions like MER and MSL.
I teach a class where senior aerospace engineering students conduct experiments on LOX-RP rocket engines. My students used to wear NASA shirts. Now they wear SpaceX shirts and they have no interest in working for NASA.
That is what I have been hearing from other aerospace faculty. I know my business students didn’t have any interest in space until they space the Tesla Roadster launched. Then they realized Space is not Dead, but may have a future. Several asked why NASA doesn’t do things anymore that are that “cool”. I expect this will become the norm when the BFR starts flying.
Really, if NASA wanted to capture the public’s imagination again they should just hire SpaceX to send some astronauts around the Moon in a Dragon2 using the Falcon Heavy. They won’t of course, instead they will continue to ask SpaceX to prove the Dragon2 is really, really safe to launch on a Falcon 9.
Ask them again in 10 years when they’re completely burned-out, don’t know their kids, and spend 12 hour days at the office. There is no better place to work than NASA. Maybe you should show your students the surveys.
You mean like NASA was like in the Apollo days when it was a young organization?
BTW SpaceX is also listed as a Best Place to work.
https://www.cmswire.com/dig…
NASA was listed in another survey as the best government agency.
https://www.usatoday.com/st…
But neither has anything to do with the life cycle stage of the respective organizations.
They all wear SpaceX t-shirts? They all used to wear NASA t-shirts?
~20% of them used to wear NASA T-shirts some of the time, now ~20% wear SpaceX T-shirts. When I ask the class if they want to work at NASA, the answer is silence. (Many are going to grad school) The students have all selected a class where they know they are going to spend a Saturday or two in the desert doing rocket tests, so they are more dedicated than most.
Actually, they are. But you have to come through the Pathways program. If you didn’t intern/co-op with NASA, your chances are getting in as a CS freshout are slim to none.
No kidding. It’s been this way for at least 30+ years (when I applied for a co-op position at three different NASA centers but didn’t get in). Consequently, I didn’t even bother applying when I graduated as I knew many NASA co-op students who said the only way to get a full time job straight out of college was to be a co-op student first.
Throughout the years when someone retires, their position is not replaced. Then there are early buyouts but those are to eliminate positions, not replace old people with young. These are all civil service (not sure about contractor workforce that makes up majority, they probably have similar bureaucratic traits).
Perhaps it is all a trend beginning in 1980s where “govt is the problem” to these days huge drive to reduce (and in many circles eliminate) govt which includes NASA.
We get what we voted for.
EDIT: Also there are proposals to eliminate FERS for new employees, other proposals to reduce benefits (CS have to pay more to medical but no increase in benefits) so NASA civil servant positions may not be that attractive. May as well take a gig job at private company as concept of a retirement plan will disappear.
Well, maybe if our economy was really winning, folks would be confident enough to retire…
I’m not sure if it’s the economy. I mentioned the title of professor emeritus in another comment. In many fields, I get the feeling retiring but staying involved isn’t a concept. For scientists, I know quite a few who saw retirement as an opportunity to pass on the administrative work they hated while still doing the research they enjoyed as a hobby. In other fields, how easy is it to step off the org chart while still being involved in the work?
My sense is this hump of people will be used to reduce the civil service workforce in half over the next 10 years. There may be some hiring to replace, but reducing the size of the civil service has been a goal of many administrations and this is an opportunity to do that without actually doing anything, actually by doing nothing. Not saying it is right or wrong, just is.