Experts Find NASA Is in Major Trouble

"One tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing."

Death Becomes Her

In a new report, a group of aerospace experts have declared that NASA is at a turning point — and the agency's death could be imminent.

As the Washington Post notes, the new report, fittingly titled "NASA at a Crossroads" and published at the behest of Congress by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, highlights in grim detail just how much trouble the agency is in.

NASA has for a while now been hemorrhaging talent as its best engineers retire or take higher-paying jobs in the private sector amid cut after cut to the agency's funding. Though it continues pursuing complicated and attention-grabbing missions like the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, others like the Mars Sample Return mission have been delayed, leaving openings for rivals like China to forge ahead and leave the US in its space dust.

Clocking in at roughly 200 pages, the report features committees comprised of dozens of experts from both public and private entities including SpaceX, the Planetary Society, and a number of universities to issue recommendations. As WaPo notes, the overwhelming consensus reached by these assembled luminaries is that NASA is too focused on the short term to plan strategically for the future.

Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who served as the report's lead author, put it another way when speaking to WaPo: "One tends to neglect the probably less glamorous thing that will determine the success in the future."

Private Sector Blues

To fill the gaps presented by its talent and budgetary woes, NASA has over the past decade increasingly come to rely on the private sector. Results may vary, as seen when the agency contracted Boeing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station on its Starliner launch craft this summer, but was forced to tap SpaceX fly them back on a Crew Dragon capsule when Starliner proved not up to snuff.

"It will have trouble hiring innovative, creative engineers," Augustin told the newspaper. "Innovative, creative engineers don’t want to have a job that consists of overseeing other people’s work."

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who is both quite hawkish when it comes to the US-Chinese space race and a champion of the agency's private sector partnerships, said in a statement provided to WaPo that the report "aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead."

Still, it seems that Nelson may be missing the forest for the trees when it comes to this scathing report — or in this case, the stars for the spaceships.

More on NASA: Boeing Execs Snub NASA at News Conference After Starliner Landing