Main Engine Cut Off - T+126: The NASA Ousters

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

Two top NASA human exploration leaders—Bill Gerstenmaier and Bill Hill—have been ousted from their positions. I break down what this means for NASA and its plans, where things could go from here, and ponder whether these changes really matter. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, and six anonymous—and 244 other supporters. NASA administrator on recent personnel shakeup: ‘There’s no turmoil at all’ - The Verge Contractors continue to win award fees despite SLS and Orion delays - SpaceNews.com Artemis cost estimate won’t be ready until 2020 - SpaceNews.com Sirangelo leaves NASA after exploration reorganization scrapped - SpaceNews.com Main Engine Cut Off Shop — Apollo National Park Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Like the show? Support the show! Music by Max Justus

huge ousters at nasa this week we're gonna break that all down here on main engine cutoff i am anthony colangelo and uh it's been a couple of days since this news story broke but that does not mean that we will start this show without hitting our famous alarm. Hot drama. It is the hot drama alarm this week. We've got a couple of big ousters at NASA and a lot of talk about where this is going to go in the future.

So the top headline of last week was the fact that Bridenstine, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, has reassigned two very high up people within the Human Exploration Division of NASA. The actual head of that division, Bill Gerstenmaier, he was the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration of Operations. He's been there for decades at this point. And he was reassigned. And then as was Bill Hill, who was effectively the head of SLS Orion, both reassigned to special advisor, special assistant roles within NASA. But that means that

they've been fired. Basically, they're going to get reassigned to these spots, finish up some paperwork. And I would be shocked if it hit September and they were still around. They have been officially ousted from NASA. So with that, there's a couple of vacancies at the top. Those two positions, so head of human exploration of operations and head of effectively the exploration systems development division, which is SLS Orion. And then they've added a new position underneath what used to be Gerstenmaier's position. There's going to be a new position for moon to Mars. underneath what used to be Gerstenmaier's position, there's going to be a new position for Moon to Mars. So there are about a thousand different things to unpack here with this story.

But let's start with Gerstenmaier himself. He's been at NASA since 1977. He is nothing if not conservative. He is always very resistant to the big, bold plans. And that's kind of an effect of his position. Maybe not even his personal feelings, but his position at NASA. When you look at the leadership of NASA, the NASA administrator is a political appointee. So they are beholden to the White House, the current administration, and whatever their plans are. So in the Obama administration, that was Charlie Bolden. And in the Trump administration, that is Jim Bridenstine. They are the ones that typically have, they typically lead big, bold initiatives. And then everyone else under them, they are not appointed by the White House. They are people that have been at NASA for quite a long time.

Like I said, Gerstenmaier has been there since 77, not in his current position or former position. He's been in that since 2005. But they are, you know, longtime NASA workers. So in that kind of balance between powers, Gerson Meyer's position for the last 14 years has been to kind of protect NASA from any political thrashing that there would be. So he has to make sure that NASA can continue to be productive and make progress no matter what the current political environment is, whatever that consists of. So in the Obama era, Charlie Bolden and Lori Garver,

who was the deputy administrator, they pushed a big, bold new plan of commercial cargo and commercial crew. At the time, Gerstenmaier was very resistant to those plans. He eventually came around to it, but by a default setting, he was resistant to those plans. And then this administration comes along and they want to do this bold push for the moon by 2024, which I think we all kind of know is not going to happen, but that is the big, bold plan they're pushing. And by default, Gerstenmaier is resistant to that. He wants to work on projects that are able to span administrations, that are able to survive political turmoil. So those two things, as of right now, that have political support and can

span administrations, have proven to span administrations, are Gateway, Lunar Gateway, and the ISS. Those two things he was very much in favor of. In a lot of reporting, Gerst was one of, if not the biggest proponent of Gateway, because he sees it as a thing that has political support, that can survive any elections that may happen, can survive Senate turnovers or House turnovers or White House turnovers. Now, there's been a lot of reporting that the current administration, at least portions of it, really don't like the plan for Lunar Gateway and they'd rather go directly to the lunar surface or severely limit the expansion of Gateway to a later date and really focus on the surface in the current short term. And if that was really the only sole driving force behind

removing these two individuals, it might only have been Gerstenmaier, not the head of SLS Orion. have been Gerstenmaier, not the head of SLS Orion. I should also mention that these seemed like pretty abrupt departures. It was announced 8.30 p.m. on the East Coast on like a Wednesday or something like that. So this wasn't a very typical, you know, bury it in the Friday news cycle at 5 p.m. kind of thing or make an official announcement. This was an abrupt announcement that typically indicates severe disagreements and then an immediate decision being made. So anyway, if it was just the Lunar Gateway stuff that was motivating this,

I think it would have only been Gerstenmaier. But with also seeing the head of SLS heading out the door, it's hard not to connect this back to the recent stories about Boeing continuing to win award fees even as SLS and Orion get delayed and are way behind schedule at this point, way over cost. Boeing, I think it was like $270 million that they've won in award fees for excellent work. So, you know, I think it's hard not to see these two stories as related, as maybe some disagreements within NASA

that Gerstenmaier and Bill Hill in these positions were implicitly saying that Boeing was doing a good job and that they were explicitly saying continued delays are okay and are things that we will in fact award you for. That report was less than a month old, so it's still fairly recent news. I could see it being something that leads to several arguments within NASA. Not that people within NASA didn't know that those awards were going out the door, but it might kick up some dust. You know, reporters are asking questions about these award fees. Tension rises. Somebody within the White House catches wind of it that might not have been tied in on some of the stuff that was happening within NASA before that, and it could boil over from there. So this is a very interesting departure because of the stuff that was happening within NASA before that, and it could boil over from there.

So this is a very interesting departure because of the Lunar Gateway turmoil, because of SLS Orion turmoil, because of the fact that this administration is pushing a bold new plan that the, you know, the people of record within NASA are resistant to because of that political, you know, I don't really know how to phrase it, but the political resistance because they know of how much thrash is happening within our political environment. Now, we have a very ineffective political environment that isn't very good at achieving these big goals. And NASA has been a prime example of that for the past couple of decades, really, when you look at it. Now, among all this, Bridenstine's been giving a lot of interviews. He's appeared on Capitol Hill. Part of the reason

that this episode is about a week after the news is that I was waiting to hear some more announcements and some more talk from Bridenstine. He appeared on Capitol Hill just yesterday. I didn't really say much of anything. The only part of note is that in this week of talk about Gerstenmaier, about Bill Hill, he effectively announced that SLS is going to be delayed until 2021. And Eric Berger over at Ars Technica has a report that late 2021 would be the target. And that, you know, that kind of means there's a lot of little slim margin there to actually hit 2021. And it's more looking like 2022 or later. Now, I want to talk about why this matters and things, you know, directions that might go in the future, people that might come in,

and what we should be looking for from here. But before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 289 of you supporting this show every single month, and I could not thank you more for your support. This episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 39 executive producers, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike,

David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. And if you want to help support the show, mainenginecutoff.com slash support, or fun announcement this week, over on the shop, shop.mainenginecutoff.com, where you can buy some merch that I've designed. We've got a new shirt up this week. It's the Apollo National Park shirt. It's moderately politically polarizing because people have a lot of arguments about should Apollo sites be national parks or not at some point in the future. I've been doing a lot of national parks recently, so I've inspired by some of the graphics and design that I've seen there, and I wanted to put together a shirt to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. So head over to shop.manageandcutoff.com,

check it out. It is on sale for $19.69 up until July 24th. So hop on it now if you want the special Apollo 11 deal. And thank you all so much for your support. So where does this go from here? Where do these departures leave us? Well, there's two aspects to this that I've been thinking a lot about. Number one is the replacements. And number two is, you know, the effect of changes that we're seeing within NASA policy or lack thereof. So as far as replacements go, there's an interesting storyline that's kind of attached to this. A couple of months ago, Mark Serangelo, he came into NASA and he was going to head up a new Moon to Mars directorate. I thought at the time that what they were going to do, and I even have some email threads talking

to people about this, I thought what they were going to do was reassign as much of the Moon initiative away from Gerst and Meyer and to Mark Serangelo as they possibly could, effectively forcing Gerst to work on only the projects that he was really interested in and not have him head up the Moon department. It seems like I maybe had the intention right, but what happened was nobody really was going to go for the new directorate because Congress would have to assign line item budgets to these directorates and they weren't going to go for it. So the new directorate was kind of dead on arrival and Mark Sir Angelo left NASA after like less than a month on staff there. So it's interesting to think how much his departure was related. Now, that said, in the wake of the Gerstenmaier ouster, there is this new moon to Mars position

that's going to be under human exploration. Could he return to that moon to Mars position? That would be kind of interesting to see. It would be interesting to see who gets put above him as the new Gerstenmaier. But if Mark Serangelo does come back into the picture, that might say that these two storylines are linked a little. And it wasn't purely that he left once the new directorate was out. It was that maybe he disagreed with

Gerstenmaier and the other leadership quite a bit and left because it was seeming non-productive. Now, with this change happening, if he re-enters the picture, that says things might shift a little and it could go in an interesting direction. There's a lot of other interesting directions it could go. You could see an internal promotion. Someone like Jason Kruzan, who's the director of Advanced Exploration Systems, he kind of heads up the department that is responsible for the next step proposals, like the next step habitats and things like that. The precursor to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, he headed up that. Lunar Catalyst was the name of that program. His department also handles the small business innovation and research awards um so there's a lot that's under his uh direction that uh is very

relevant to you know building up to a lunar landing uh he might favor gateway because of its connection to things like the next step projects um but also you know was he just working within the political environment that he was dealing with you know the knowing that the leadership was supportive of Gateway, he crafted the projects to go that direction. But maybe he personally feels different about it. Internal promotions to me would say, stay the course, don't change too much. It would be interesting to see an internal promotion that really flipped the script on NASA, if that's even possible. So that's, you know, if I see an internal promotion, I'm going to say, okay, maybe things aren't changing as much. There are others out there

that have been at NASA in the past that would be quite interesting to see return. I mentioned Lori Garver earlier. She was the deputy administrator under Charlie Bolden, and she was the front runner for administrator if Hillary Clinton had won. She typically takes part in Democratic candidates' transition teams and then part of their won. She typically takes part in Democratic candidates' transition teams and then part of their administration. She's typically talked about with the Democratic Party. But this could be a quite interesting way to garner political support. Maybe it's an interesting way to extend an olive branch across the aisle, as politicized as NASA is getting lately, to have some bipartisan leadership, to have a woman come

in at that high level as you're pushing to put the first woman on the moon. That could be pretty good optics. So it would be a very interesting decision there. She was a huge proponent, if not the driving force, behind commercial cargo and crew. She would be the most interesting pick. It does seem like a long shot just because of all the other political realities here. She's been very harsh towards SLS Orion of late, very complimentary of commercial ventures, so it would fit with the current administration's ideas. So it would be incredibly interesting to see that happen. I find it unlikely, but I would be thrilled to see her get a shot at this position.

And then there's the other typical kind of people that would be thrilled to see her get a shot at this position. And then there's the other typical kind of people that would be floated about for the Associate Administrator of Human Explorations. Wayne Hale is somebody that I've always admired his writing. He was at NASA for a long time. He was effectively, at the end, the Space Shuttle Program Manager. He was the Deputy Associate Administrator for Strategic Partnerships or something crazy like that in the 2000s. So he program manager. He was the deputy associate administrator for strategic partnerships or something crazy like that in the 2000s. So he would be a good target. He's now on the NASA advisory panel. So he does still, you know, think about this stuff a lot and have an effect. So I'm not sure he'd want to leave that post having just joined it. And then there's like

the astronaut picks, you know, there's Terry Vertz, who's former astronaut, or I guess once an astronaut, always an astronaut. But he's written a lot of op-eds in the last couple of years that are critical of the current path. And so he's kind of been drifting into the space policy discussions. There's people like Eileen Collins. She had a big part in the election. She spoke at one of the conventions, at the Republican convention. She was talked about as administrator candidate for a while, so she could come into the picture. So there talked about as administrator candidate for a while. So she could come into the picture. So there's a lot of directions for them to go.

Internal promotion, outside acquisition, if you will, of somebody who is thinking the similar lines as this administration, but maybe someone like Lori Garver who spreads their political support a little wider, or bring somebody from the shuttle era back to NASA and put them in charge of exploration. A lot of directions for it to go. But I also wonder how much it matters. You know, and I had these similar thoughts last

year when we were talking about Jim Bridenstine coming in as administrator. I had a lot of questions about does administrator really matter all that much? And yes, Bridenstine's administration has changed a lot of things, but what has the effective outcome been? We still don't have any additional funding for this lunar push. We've got contracts already signed for gateway items. We've got ISS extension to 2030 being floated in Congress. Right now, Bridenstine is making a push to get an extra $1.6 billion to start the Lander project. But until that budget item is secure, effectively nothing has changed in the world of space policy. There's a lot of

turmoil. There's a lot of talk from NASA. There's a lot of grandstanding by the vice president, by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, by the leadership of NASA that talks about a new way of doing things, that talks about the way forward, that talks these big bold plans. But when you get down to the actual stuff that makes the gears turn in Congress, there's not been a lot of change yet that's supportive of these new initiatives. So if we do get that lander funding underway, then things will start to change. But right now, if you just look at the congressional budgets, there's not a lot of change that you're seeing in this administration for all the talk that's

been happening. So does administrator matter that much? Does the head of human explorations matter that much? I don't know, unless they're able to actually pull through in Congress. And Congress is showing very little signs of wanting to rock the boat too much. So it's a tricky situation because there are encouraging signs if you're somebody who cares about this direction of NASA. But also, you know, the political environment at large is typically resistant of things like this. But you do chip away at it over time, and every little bit that you can move the needle

does help down the line. I'm always thinking of that quote by Bill Gates where, we overestimate the change that happens in two years, but underestimate that which happens in five. And I think that might be a similar track that we're on here for space policy. If you take 2016 and 2021, I think the discussions that we're having about space policy are drastically different in those five years. But 2016 to 18, even to 19, are they that different? I don't really think so yet.

So that's kind of where we're at right now. We're going to watch for who gets these new positions at NASA. There's three vacancies. We're going to watch how the budget comes together through the rest of this year and early 2020. And I think that will be a really good indication of where we stand with these projects and if we're really going to see big change in the way of NASA policy. But for now, that is all I've got on this Gerstenmaier Alistair. Big news this week. So let me know your thoughts. Email me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Don't forget to support the show, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And buy that Apollo National Park shirt.

It's pretty rad, and you could be wearing it through the 50th anniversary of all the landings. Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.