Moon Mission

You'd previously linked this video about Starliner in the Tactical Tanker thread, also from Ellie in Space. I'm not much for YouTube, but I found her reports to be comprehensive yet concise, and very well constructed.

That video focused on NASAs report of findings on the Starliner mission, released in February, including a lot of NASA head Jared Isaacman presenting the results. He's pulling from his memo to the entire NASA workforce last month, worth a read here.

The report itself is linked at the bottom of this NASA press release. 311 total pages, including 9 appendices, but a good Executive Summary on page 3-5.

In short, just kind of an all around shitshow, with NASA and Boeing both being incredibly inept. Many echoes of Challenger and Columbia.

One bright spot of the whole affair was Isaacman. I was skeptical of his appointment as NASA head. I'd previously figured you'd want a politician in that spot; someone who was adept at going to Congress and battling for money.

Isaacman seems to be the leader NASA needs. Doing a lot of saying the quiet part out loud, even after only being in the position since December. Couple examples below. Both are from only the past couple weeks, which is exciting to me. After watching NASA falter for so long, are we finally witnessing some real change with the agency?

Does NASA need more money? Isaacman: No, the answer isn't more money. We have enough money. We need to focus on the needle-moving objectives. Execute with urgency, in iterative and safe way, and empower the workforce and our partners to get the job done.

Then this bit below, which deserves to be quoted in it's entirety. NASA Watch article with the comments, originally pulled from this post on X. This should sound familiar to anyone who's had even a passing association with a NASA program. Layers upon layers of outsourcing, with every associated company taking a skim off the top.

@NASAAdmin Jared Isaacman on what he found after visiting every NASA center:

“You take a look at a program like America’s Return to the Moon with Artemis — five prime contractors, hundreds of subcontractors, and 75% of your workforce, not partners, not commercial partners, are contractors through staffing agencies.”

“They’re all using different software tools, collaboration tools, different HR systems, talking to different prime contract subcontractors. Is it a surprise to anyone that we’re a hundred billion deep into this, years behind schedule? No, I mean it’s right in front of you.”

“Mission control is outsourced. I gotta imagine that would shock most people — when the astronauts come over the radio and say ‘Houston,’ and the person responds back, it’s outsourced.”

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by Blue