Main Engine Cut Off - T+197: NASA’s Human Spaceflight Directorate Shakeup

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

At a town hall this week, NASA announced that the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate will be split in two: the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, led by Jim Free, and the Space Operations Mission Directorate, led by Kathy Lueders. I discuss what this change might mean for the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, and why I think it’s not something to worry about if you’re a Kathy Lueders stan.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 42 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 683 other supporters.TopicsNASA Town Hall on Human Spaceflight - YouTubeNASA splits human spaceflight directorate into two organizations - SpaceNewsNASA to split leadership of its human spaceflight program | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by ESA

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I had a couple thoughts I want to share on this directorate reorganization that NASA is going under right now. There's been a lot of talk about this over the last couple of days. And I think generally, this is one of those stories that gets a little more overheated than it needs to be. And I think people are worrying about it

more than I would. So though I am open to being very wrong about this in the near future and coming back and saying, I was totally wrong about this. I am less worried about this than many people I see, and I would like to talk you through why. And maybe it's not that I'm less worried, but I'm more worried about other things. So let's dive into this news. Yesterday, as I

record this, there was a NASA town hall on human spaceflight where Administrator Nelson announced that they were splitting the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate into two different organizations. What that directorate was, it was created about 10 years ago by merging two different directorates, but that contained all of the human spaceflight missions and operations, per the name, obviously. That contained all of the human spaceflight projects in one organization. So that was everything from the International Space Station to what is now the Artemis program. Everything that involves humans getting on a vehicle and flying off the Earth was under that directorate. That was led by Bill Gerstenmaier for a long time. He departed

under circumstances at which we don't really know the details of at this moment. There was some tumultuous time in the middle. And then back last June, Kathy Leaders, who was formerly the head of the Commercial Crew Program, was appointed the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration. So since June 2020, she's been running this organization. Her tenure included the selection of SpaceX as the Artemis lander for Artemis 3. She selected Starship. Her name was on the source selection document. We're going to talk more about that in a minute, but she was given, was given and rightly so a lot of credit for that very bold decision, which we've talked about at length here in the show. So I don't need to rehash it entirely, but that was under her tenure as well.

She has become a fan favorite, uh, over the past several years and, uh, you know, internally is very well respected as well. So she was the right person for that gig. Um, but now this director, it's going to be split into two different things. One will be the Space Operations Mission Directorate, and Kathy Leaders will be in charge of this one. That's handling the International Space Station commercial crew still, since we're still working through getting Boeing Starliner up online, and also the commercialization efforts of Low Earth Orbit. And then there will be an Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, which will be responsible for the Artemis program and all future exploration initiatives that are not yet in the operations phase, but are still in the development phase,

and I guess the initial checkouts would be in that as well. And that'll be run by a man named Jim Free, who, uh, was formerly the director of the Glenn Research Center. He was also the deputy associate administrator for human exploration. Uh, he was basically the second under, uh, Bill Gerstenmaier before he left the agency back in 2017. And, uh, since then has done a couple of different things. He was also part of the NASA advisory council. So he's been around this racket before, and he'll now be in charge of the Exploration Directorate. Now, where everything gets a bit overheated for my liking is that people instantly jumped into

the fact that this was stripping the Artemis program away from Kathy leaders, effectively demoting her by pairing her responsibilities back, you know, almost in half and taking the, what many see as the more interesting stuff off of her plate and putting that in a separate directorate and then having her focus once again on the ISS. Um, there's a couple of different branches of this that, uh, people are people are hot and bothered about, I guess, that they are saying, well, she was the one that had a name on a document that picked Starship that started this whole drama that we've been seeing play out where there's protests and litigation and stop work orders and everything is being held up to prevent SpaceX from working on that Artemis 3 contract, and prevent NASA from working with SpaceX on that.

So this is stripping her of those responsibilities, because people are mad at her for making that decision. And I think that's wrong from the first character of that paragraph on, for a handful of reasons. Number one, in the town hall yesterday, and there was a media call after that, Administrator Nelson and others referred to the fact that this had been a plan that had been going back almost a year. It was something that came from the transition team. So after the election, once the transition team came in, this was something that was being talked about. So not quite a year, but all of this calendar year, this has been being talked about. Not only that, this was talked about in the previous administration as well. It didn't happen back then, but the idea

was being tossed around that this reorganization would make sense. So, you know, much like the Space Force, it happened eventually, but it had been talked about for a very long time. And I know for sure that that's not just spin coming out of the heads of the agency, because I've talked to multiple people over the past day that say, yeah, this was in process for quite a long time, predating the decision to pick Starship. So, you know, that's something that is out there. The other thing is, Kathy Leder's, her bread and butter has been commercial crew program, and she clearly loves that. She spent so many years on that. So if given the choice here, she probably would have picked that one anyway. I think it's not, it would seem very likely to me

that that would be the one that she would be really into, to continuing the work there, to still driving that forward. Importantly, the low Earth orbit commercialization effort, I think that's a huge part that I want to talk about in a couple of minutes. So I wouldn't count it out that this is the one she would pick if given the choice herself and if somebody else wasn't making this decision. So I don't want to count out that part of it, that you're stripping the agency from her to make the decision that this is where she would rather work. I don't know for sure that that's the case, but I wouldn't be surprised by that. And lastly, the other thing I would talk about is

this being retribution for picking Starship. I think that would be indicative of the fact that there was a lot more people at the agency that very strongly disagreed with Kathy Leaders, that she was the only one that felt this way to make this call, and that the higher-ups, even her bosses, are unhappy about that. You can refute that with open information. When Bill Nelson became

administrator of NASA, he stood by the decision that was made. It was made before he was the head of NASA, and he stood by that decision. And all he has done from that decision forward was go to Congress to try to get more money. And that's not more money to sideline Starship. That was just more money to give some more money to Starship and also have another lander. And I know that that conversation is now tainted by the fact that Blue Origin is on this scorched earth strategy of litigation and protests and weird infographics. But if you're someone that's looking out for NASA, your job is to go get more money for the things that you want to do, regardless of who that second competitor is going to be.

So none of that really lines up with the fact that this is retribution for picking Starship. The head of the agency has stood by that decision, even if it was a decision that he might not necessarily have made himself, he has stood by that. And furthermore, I don't think Kathy Leaders was the sole voice in the room that said this was the direction we're going. I don't think that's how NASA works. I believe there's other people in the organization that agree with her, that supported her in that decision, that made sense to them, that she built consensus around maybe. But there's other people out there that think very similarly, that want to see things

go in this direction, and that agree with the choice that was made. And not only that, it has to be backed up and already has been confirmed to be backed up legally by the Government Accountability Office that says NASA did follow their own criteria and they selected the thing that they basically had to because of the criteria they laid out and the proposals they received. So I think, you know, thinking that this is retribution is not giving enough credit to SpaceX, to NASA, to the leadership there, to the team there. It's stripping all that out and making it this very singular personality that picked Starship. And I think if you're someone that kind of thinks that way,

that makes me more sad than it makes me excited. If this is all up to a single person being in a very specific role at NASA, and without that, the whole thing collapses, that is not a very exciting program to me, and that is not something that's going to last longer than a couple of election cycles, at most. Now, will Jim Free come in and take over the Exploration Systems Development, have a different opinion, and maybe rock the boat entirely? Plausible. Definitely plausible. We certainly saw Doug Lavero, in the position of being the head of human exploration, do very questionable things that got him tossed out of NASA, and that was putting the thumb on the scale towards Boeing.

So it's certainly possible for the person in that position to express that kind of bias. I don't know that Jim Free will. And also, there's a lot more in motion at this point in time than there was when Doug Levero was futzing around with proposals. And that's something that I know I've talked about before, that so much of the momentum right now that NASA is working with is unstoppable. There is an unstoppable trend in the industry and the people that are working with NASA that NASA has to figure out how to jump on board with or really, you know, fight kicking and screaming to prevent that momentum. But NASA is not, it's not in their interest to prevent the

momentum. It is in their interest to jump on and ride the momentum as best they can. And certainly there are people that disagree on exactly how to do that. But there's a certain amount here that's just an unstoppable momentum that is trending in a certain direction that we saw this decision last spring take advantage of the fact that SpaceX is putting so much in Starship. That was a huge part of why Starship was chosen, that SpaceX put so much on the line, so much investment in Starship themselves, that NASA was very comfortable about that because they are effectively doubling their budget for the chosen architecture. So not only was that a reason that Starship was chosen, that was something that was baked into the selection criteria of the Lander decision. So even the more programmatic or organizational decisions that are being made within NASA are acknowledging the

fact that they're taking advantage of this crazy momentum that's in the industry right now. So will Jim Free totally disagree with that and destroy it entirely as a single person to completely derail everything and go back to the old way of doing things. I guess it's plausible, but it doesn't seem very likely to me, given everything else that is happening around this position. I guess what I'm saying is that the office structure of NASA, the internal structure about who reports to who, and how things actually flow, who's doing the annual reviews of who. I don't know that that's the stuff that has been holding NASA back or propelling them forward,

for that matter, over the last decade. Because there's certain areas that are completely floundering right now. There's certain areas that are doing great. And I don't know that I credit or whatever the negative version of credit is. Blame, I guess, would be the negative version of credit. I don't know if I credit or blame the office structure of NASA for any of those things. And I don't know if any of those things historically are good or bad. Things we've seen over the last 20 years at NASA are because of the office structure internally. There's one other part I want to jump into which is the Leo commercialization efforts but before we do that I want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting main engine

cutoff every single month over at mainenginecutoff.com support there are 725 of you cannot believe we are inching our way up to a thousand I think we're going to get there eventually I don't know when I would love to get to four digits here. So if you have not yet, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join the crew. This episode was produced by 42 executive producers. Thank you to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Laura, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Jonas, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everdashnaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators Thank you all so much for your support for making this show possible. And if you want to be like them and head over to support,

if you're at the $3 a month or more level, you get Miko Headlines in your podcast player every week. It's an entire other podcast that I do where I talk about all the stories from the week, give some opinions on things that might not make its way to the main show here, but you should be aware of. And it's a great way to keep up on Space News to help support the show and get more of my voice in your ears, if that's your kind of thing. So thank you all once again for the support. All right, so one of the things that Kathy Leaders is a fan favorite because of is that it was seen when she was put in charge of the human spaceflight division, it was seen that she was going to take the best lessons learned from the commercial crew program

and apply it to Artemis, and apply it in the same way that the Commercial Crew Program has succeeded to something like a lunar lander. And the Starship decision was heralded as an example of that. But there's another area that I think is a huge problem for NASA right now that needs to be solved in the next five to ten years. And I think that same reasoning gives me a lot of hope that it will be solved by Cathie Leaders. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm an alarmist on the ISS at the moment. I am very concerned about the state of the ISS. I'm very concerned about the ISS partnership generally. There's a lot of rabble rousing that I hate out of Russia. There is a lot of hardware issues coming out of Russia. There's NASA trying to save face on some of these things,

but internally I would hope they are more angry than they're showing externally. Specifically, stuff like the Nauka docking that has happened recently, spun the space station. There's some major incidents happening there. And the thing is showing its age. And not only that, it's the typical problem of, you know, the ISS is a huge commitment. It is a huge budget line item that is sitting there that is preventing NASA from spending money in other areas. It's something that's been talked about for a decade at least, but it's something that I think we are really starting to see as budgets get weird.

We're still in this cycle now where the federal government's not going to have a budget for who knows how long. So NASA is not going to be getting a huge budget increase to cover the Artemis program. So one of the best ways to free up money is to reduce the amount of money that you're spending on the ISS. Not only that, like I just mentioned, the iss is going through some rough times right now so the idea to commercialize low earth orbit to have commercial space stations to at first contribute to the iss like axiom will be doing they'll be adding modules to the iss but to eventually have free flying space stations that serve nasa's purposes um in a way that is enabling them to spend less money because they're partnering with

somebody else. They're buying services on a space station, the same way they're buying services to get to the space station today. That seems like the winning ticket. Uh, and you know, not only does it seem like the winning ticket, there are companies working on it actively right now. Axiom space is already doing this, uh, with the ISS. They're working towards building out their modules right now. They already have approval to do that. Blue Origin has talked a lot of game over the past couple of years about commercial space stations. They've shown off some renderings, at least, of like, here's our initial thing that we could do up in space. NanoRacks has talked about it a lot at length. And there's a whole host of other companies that are thinking in this way.

And there's a whole host of other companies that are thinking in this way. And we just saw last week a private mission to orbit. Didn't go to a space station, but certainly went nice and high. And it was a totally private mission to orbit that, you know, there's no reason that other governments or even NASA themselves couldn't buy one of those missions to do something that might not necessarily need the ISS, but just needs time in space with people. So there's a huge trend in that direction right now that NASA can take advantage of, just like I was talking about at the beginning of the show. And if Kathy Leaders is going to be tasked with this, in the same way that we were all hoping we could trust her with the Artemis program, I think we can trust her even more so

with the thing that she has focused the last, what is it, seven or eight years of her life on. So that right there gives me huge hope because I think this is a huge pressing problem for NASA human spaceflight that needs to be solved. The ISS is in a situation now where it can't just continue on in the way that we've been doing it forever. We can't just keep extending it to 2030 and expect everything to be fine. There's stuff that needs to be solved here. We need to be going in a new direction. And if Kathy Leaders is able to focus more of her energy on that, I think that's something that solves a problem for NASA that they need to solve in the next five to 10 years if we want to see the Artemis program succeed.

And also by doing so, if she is able to succeed in the way that I would hope, that is by way of taking advantage of private companies that have a much more expansive vision of humans in space than NASA could have hoped for five or ten years ago. So if this is successful, think about how much better of a position we'll be in in five or ten years to actually go out to the moon and do stuff on the lunar surface, in lunar orbit, even beyond lunar orbit, if we have a whole host of private companies that are offering transportation, habitation, and services in space regularly to NASA. They have trusted partners that can do this, and then they extend that model out. Given the current situation right now over in the Artemis program where there's congressional wrangling, there's legal wrangling, there's protests, there's

active lawsuits that are going on, that part doesn't seem to be going too well. So if you're up to me, and not only that, it's not going well in the same way that it doesn't seem to be going too well. So if you're up to me, and not only that, it's not going well in the same way that it hasn't went well for the past 10 years. So if it's up to me, if you've got a race here between can the model that we're seeing develop in low Earth orbit extend its presence quicker than we can get all the ducks in the row in Congress and in the legal system and in all the contracting rounds that we need to go through. Which one of these things can go faster? It is not obvious right now that the faster way to do it is the Artemis direction at the moment. And furthermore, SpaceX is not slowing down their work on Starship. Even if all that stuff's

happening to the Artemis program and it's holding them back from working with NASA on the Artemis lander, that is not slowing down the Starship program. So the momentum there is unaffected by this. The specific implementation of the Artemis lander version of Starship has slowed down maybe, but Starship itself has a lot of other things to solve before they even get to worrying about what they would need to for Artemis 3. So if we've got somebody who knows exactly how to achieve what NASA needs in low Earth orbit and get them off of the ISS in a way that grows the industry and grows the supplier base that they can rely on to do their other stuff, and SpaceX is unaffected by the

political and legal wrangling of the Artemis program right now and is continuing its momentum, that part of the industry seems a lot more hopeful to me than, you know, the part that is going to be under this new Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and Jim Free. Nothing against Jim Free. Maybe I will in the future, but right now, I have no reason to think that he's going to go one way or the other. I'm just looking at the trends. I'm looking at the problems that need to be solved that are immediately in front of NASA and the trends in the industry that work around that. And that side of things seems very hopeful to me. I'm putting more stock in that, and I'm excited to see where that goes. So hopefully,

if you're somebody out there who is a little worried about this, who doesn't really know what to make of it, this helps you get into my mind a little bit and maybe chill out a little bit about this decision and see how it goes for a couple of months. But anyway, for now, that's all I've got for you today. I will likely be back talking with you soon because there's been a lot of stuff happening this week. I still want to talk about Inspiration4. So I will be talking to you soon. And once again, thank you all so much for your support at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you have any questions or comments, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time,

I'll talk to you soon. I'm sorry.