NASA should stop relying on contractors to do all their project management, design, and manpower. Reagan fucked over most of government, but especially NASA by requiring that nearly all functions be bid out to commercial sources. Now congress not only fights over where the contact administration is located (aka the various Space Centers, scattered into as many congressional districts as possible regardless of efficiency) but which fat-cat, for profit entities will get those contracts. NASAs entire mission now is just wealth program for contractors.
SLS seems like it has 0 benefits of being public or private. NASA doesn’t own the full design anymore, so they can’t even take it to other manufacturers, but they also aren’t insulated from any cost issues, and the manufacturers have no incentive to improve anything. It really feels like the worst of both worlds.
As a side note, I’m still pretty new to the industry (as in, new to working in, but having followed it for a lot longer) and the program management and systems engineering contracting/outsourcing going on was mindboggling to me when I started to hear about it from former coworkers moving into those roles. Of all the things to outsource, those two things seem like the last two that really need to stay in house.
No sound bite does the system justice. I started my career with a decade at a NASA center, lucky beyond my stars to end up in a small group of ~30 engineers and scientists who did small satellites within a group (mech, elec, struct, avionics - everything) that shared an old high-bay facility with the in-house machine shop. Contractors augmented the civil service workforce by about a factor of 2-3 if I had to guess. None of the purported benefits of contracting existed - nobody was ever laid off during slow times, the same contractor was awarded a time-and-materials contract every year and when a “new bidder” technically won, it usually turned out to be an outfit who saved 1% and hired all the people from the old contractor. The private sector workers got paid a bit more, got a couple days fewer annual leave, and similar benefits. We paid an additional 60-80% overhead to the contractor for their side of management, accounting, and administrative costs, about a quarter to half of which we’d have saved if it were done in-house.
But I digress. The reality is that the SLS is essentially a private, for-profit operation run by contractors on a cost-plus basis to NASA internal technical standards with a heap of oversight and a 500% add-on for must-not-fail methodology. The system cannot be fixed because there are 535 people who have 435 competing requirements for the results of the organization. Specifically, the most important mission of NASA, to the people directing the spending, is that at least some of the money gets spend in their personal backyard. Space exploration and earth sciences are cool, but not a single of those 535 money managers keeps their job based on the technical success of NASA projects. Being beholden to a single contractor for services is a dangerous game, but “winning” a contract requires that someone beat out all other offers. Ironically, having a single big contractor, like the aggregation that was USA (United Space Alliance) was cheered for the efficiency of having a single entity, and yet the option of bringing all of that expertise into NASA itself was “inefficient government largess”.
Anyway, there are a lot of things wrong with the space program in general due to the way it is managed. Luckily, the people - scientists, engineers, technicians, etc. - are generally dedicated to their mission and the advancement of science so we still manage to do impossible things before they become commonplace to people on the outside. It’s easy to overlook the accomplishments of the past when viewed through the lens of MEMS and nearly unlimited processor power, but the things NASA did (well before I was there) with the technology at hand really is amazing.
As much of Artemis as possible is already manifested on Falcon Heavy, so they must be talking about Starship and New Glenn coming up. My money is on those being operational well before Block 1B.
I’m hoping that an Artemis program still relying on Orion but flying on something else would have most of the crazy political support of the SLS+Orion pair.