NASA Is Worth Saving

Guest Column by Casey Handmer

[This is a guest column by my friend Casey Handmer; original available on his personal blog.]

NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology development program to safeguard US interests in space.

NASA embodies the US ideals of optimism and technical excellence. I was privileged to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for four years, among titans of the industry.

It is clear, however, that today’s NASA is but a shadow of its former self. I care less about the why of NASA’s long decline, than about whether NASA can be rebuilt once again, and how. I believe NASA is worth saving. I’m accustomed to articulating a minority view point, but in this I’m confident – there are millions of Americans who want NASA to once again embody a golden century of supreme optimism and confidence. A NASA that leads humanity into its infinitely bright future.

In this post, I summarize some of NASA’s existential challenges and point the way to a better future. It is partly a response to the recent withdrawal of Jared Isaacman’s nomination as NASA Administrator, in whose leadership so much of our hope had rested. Jared’s skills and experience are rare but hopefully not unique. NASA, and the American people, deserve a leader equal to its current challenges.

Freedom And China

It is 1637 days until China takes the Moon.

The last page of our passport is a solemn promise that the USA will guarantee freedom as we lead humanity into an infinite and eternal universe.

In some desperate corners of the Earth, totalitarian dictatorships still stomp on the potential of a billion hearts, but the future belongs to freedom, under a flag with thirteen stripes and infinite stars.

In 1969, this father and son watched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins fly their thunderous Saturn V to the Moon, definitively establishing the primacy of western democracy and market-based economics in the cold war.

The son saw a world opening, one which cared about his right to self-actualization, one where his descendents would live progressively better lives and ultimately explore the universe.

In just 1637 days, China, whose totalitarian government does not share our ideals and does not respect our norms, who builds more rocket cores than any other nation, whose extraterritorial ambitions already threaten war in Vietnam and Taiwan, will take the Moon. They will claim the prime real estate around the polar craters, defend them as the sovereign territory of a nuclear-armed state, and place a permanent choke hold on humanity’s future.

It will have taken a quarter of a millennium, but the noble American experiment of government by the people, of the people, and for the people, will have suffered a grievous setback if not a mortal blow, no less severe for the cause of Freedom than the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War.

China wants the Moon so bad. They can taste it. They obsess over it all day. They dream about it all night. They fear the consequences of failure. Viscerally. It’s affecting their appetite. They work 80, 90, 100 hours a week. The job isn’t done until it’s done. Their engineers and scientists cannot freely express themselves, cannot leave China, cannot assert sovereignty over their own bodies. But they can prove their intelligence and determination by building more rockets and bigger rocket factories than anyone in the West they deride as decadent, and not entirely without justification.

Is NASA on track to uphold US interests on the Moon? To fulfill its mission since 1958 to uphold the values of freedom and self-determination in its domain of space? To establish and defend a global commons where explorers of all nationalities are welcome to travel, to explore, without fear of repression?

Absolutely not.

NASA has spent $100b and 20 years developing the Space Launch System, an ostensible Moon rocket that cannot even reach the Moon, and will never be able to. NASA is burning $12m per day on a program that has 0% chance of success. China sees this and it galvanizes their resolve to take advantage of NASA’s carelessness. To capitalize on our unforced error.

We have 1637 days, barely more than four years, to quash this threat – if we can.

The US Is A Launch Superpower And NASA Seems Not To Have Noticed

SpaceX first launched Falcon Heavy in 2016. First reflew a first stage Falcon 9 booster in 2017. First flew astronauts to LEO in 2020. As of 2025, SpaceX is launching >80% of all the global mass to orbit, and has flown the Falcon nearly 500 times.

Since 2019, industry advocates (including me) have been sounding the alarm. Abundance of launch enables all kinds of new programs and missions, just as it is also a grave threat to legacy business models.

NASA’s response to this unexpected explosion of launch capacity is … nothing. It’s 2025, and we’re still building one Mars rover per decade, and at a cost of billions of dollars. We’re launching crew to the space station only twice a year. SpaceX is winning contracts to launch some science missions, but NASA is <7% of their overall business. Most of their launch capacity is flying their own constellation of Starlink satellites, which are projected to earn more revenue than NASA’s entire budget as soon as next year.

SpaceX is determined to put people on Mars, to build a whole self-sustaining city there. They have the capability to self fund. Does this mean NASA is redundant, that its fate doesn’t matter? No. A renewed, productive NASA would greatly strengthen our ability to contribute the full weight of US industry and expertise to the success of SpaceX’s mission. At the least, my vision for our Moon base includes hardware with both SpaceX and NASA logos!

You would think that NASA’s response to SpaceX achieving launch abundance, a process shepherded in many ways by NASA itself through COTS and technical assistance, would be to open the binder of “stuff we get to do after we have abundant launch” and then work their way down the list. But instead, we get an Astrophysics Decadal Survey where, stung by JWST’s $10b overrun, we push the next great space telescope out to the 2050s.

Why is SpaceX so far ahead of all the other launch companies, both here and abroad? Eric Berger wrote a great book about the early history of SpaceX and about a dozen journalists earn their keep writing about various missions, but no-one seems to have really dug into what it is that SpaceX does that no-one else seems able to do. There are even companies founded by former senior SpaceX executives that raise 10x more money than SpaceX ever did, and still fail to develop a compelling launch product.

There are of course no shortage of excuses from people in industry. SpaceX raises more money on better terms. SpaceX has a lock on top talent. SpaceX just works harder. SpaceX isn’t unionized. None of these reasons account for why employees, who move between these various companies as well as NASA and the Space Force, seem to be ten times as productive inside SpaceX as outside it.

My best guess is that SpaceX is incrementally better on a bunch of axes: architecture, work ethic, productivity, hiring, firing, pace, compensation, vision, founder mode. Those incremental deltas are multiplicative and cumulative. If you beat your competition by 1% on 10 axes for 10 years in a row, you have an insurmountable lead. But there’s nothing intrinsically uncopyable about this strategy, you just have to want it more. China sure as hell does.

NASA must slough off decades of institutional inertia and fight like hell for the future we must have. If SpaceX can do it, NASA can do it.

SLS Is Original Sin

NASA has a giant Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), but it’s years behind schedule, tens of billions over budget, and doesn’t work properly. The problem with the SLS is that it looks like a huge, capable rocket on paper, but its various flaws are too subtle to terrify the average congressional staffer. When it was formulated as the Ares V back in 2005, it had to choose between recycling Shuttle parts and continuing various Shuttle contracts, or having the ability to fly to the Moon. NASA chose to perpetuate the Shuttle program, and SLS occupies the part of the budget where a capable Moon rocket should be.

In space travel, margins are razor thin. A 1% difference in launch mass is enough to completely obliterate the total payload on the Moon. For example, the Saturn V moon rocket weighed about 3000 T. The lunar lander weighed just 16 T. 1% of the launch mass is 30 T. If you mess up one decimal point, there is no way to get the lander to the Moon, let alone back. The SLS has this problem.

This is not the place for 10,000 snarky words on the mistakes of SLS, I wrote that already back in 2021 and updated it in 2024. But I will provide a brief summary.

SLS’s problem is not that it’s a huge, overweight porky jobs program, though it is. I don’t mind spending money to get results. The problem is that we’ve spent nearly $100b over 20 years – equivalent to three Manhattan Projects in a row – and the rocket will never meet the demand of flying to our actual Moon, as opposed to a hypothetical moon that’s 20% closer.

Don’t believe me? Let’s get these questions into the Congressional Record.

1. How much delta V is required to launch a capsule, like the Apollo Service/Command module, from Earth to Low Lunar Orbit, then back to Earth?

   1. Don’t accept “Let me get back to you on this.” Any 12 year old who plays Kerbal Space Program has memorized the answer.

   2. Answer: At least 13.7 km/s. 9.0 km/s to Low Earth Orbit, 3.1 km/s to trans-Lunar Injection, 0.8 km/s for Lunar orbital insertion, 0.8 km/s to escape low Lunar orbit and return to Earth. Total: 13.7 km/s, assuming zero margin. For reference, flying down to the lunar surface is another 1.7 km/s. Flying back up to low Lunar orbit is another 1.7 km/s, which was handled by the two stage Apollo Lunar module back in the day.

2. How much delta V can SLS Block 1, the configuration tested in 2022, deliver to the Orion capsule?

   1. Don’t be distracted by promises of upgrades or improvements based on Block 1b or the Exploration Upper Stage, as these have not been built or even fully engineered and on current schedule cannot be delivered before 2029, despite having already consumed almost $4b in development costs.

   2. Answer: No more than 12.3 km/s. 1.4 km/s short – which is a lot worse than it sounds. Recall how razor thin mass margins are for space exploration. This also assumes zero mass budget for any kind of lunar lander.

3. Does that mean the SLS and Orion have enough fuel to fly to the Moon, but not enough to slow down when they get there?

   1. Answer: Yes.

Potential follow up questions:

1. Which NASA center or contractor currently has the prototype for the SLS-launched lunar lander?

   1. Answer: There isn’t one – another oversight. This is distinct from the Human Landing System program, in which contractors deliver their own lunar lander to the Moon for NASA. We really spent decades and tens of billions of dollars on the launcher and then didn’t build a lander to go with it.

2. The SLS is about 30% bigger than the Shuttle. Longer solid boosters, 4 engines instead of 3. Why can it lift only 95 T to LEO?

   1. Answer: I have no idea, actually. On paper, the Shuttle external tank, SLS boosters, and SSMEs should be able to launch about 200 T to LEO.

3. Which NASA program manager is responsible for spending $100b of public money over 20 years and failed to inform Congress that the rocket they were building could not reach the Moon???

We’ve spent $100b on a launcher and capsule to launch Americans to the Moon that … can’t even make it to the Moon. We’ve already spent 20 years sharpening our pencils and scratching our heads but it turns out the Moon is indifferent to our contemporary organizational inability to engineer a rocket that can actually get there. It’s not going to scoot just a little closer to make it any easier for us.

So where can SLS launch Orion to, if it can’t get to the Moon? It can launch Orion about halfway to the Moon, to a lonely area of no-man’s-land in space almost a week’s flight from the Moon. Further, in terms of flight time, than the three days from LEO to the Moon under the Apollo program.

The latest genius fix dreamed up by the self-serving program managers at HQ to paper over this grievous, undeniable liability is the “Lunar Gateway,” the ultimate participation trophy project, and an enduring monument to the weakness of the SLS and the compromised institutions that brought it into being.

What if we took the worst parts of ISS (incredibly incremental, expensive, modular, programmatically brittle orbital dead end) and the worst parts of our launcher development program (4x over budget, 4x schedule slip, 2x performance miss) and combined them into the ultimate boondoggle to expedience and smug satisfaction with a lack of professional integrity?

My father once taught me “Son, when you’re this deep in a hole, the only good move left is to throw away the shovel.” The SLS and Orion answer the question: What if we’re in a hole and pay $12m/day to keep on digging for 20 years?

I haven’t even mentioned how we’re spending $420m per SLS engine – engines that NASA already owns. Or that we’re going to pay Bechtel $2.7b to deliver the SLS launch tower five years late. Or that Orion’s heat shield is fundamentally flawed and essentially unfixable, a problem pattern that has already killed seven astronauts. Or that Artemis currently has no space suits. Or that SLS’s pattern of zero programmatic discipline seems to have infected nearly every other NASA program.

Congress assumes because it spent $100b on a Moon rocket, we’re in good shape. We’ve spent the professional careers of thousands of talented engineers on a rocket the professionals knew couldn’t do the job. It is time to cut our losses.

1637 days until China takes the Moon.

China is not giving themselves a massive handicap trying to figure out how to repurpose 60 year old hardware to perpetuate the various jobs programs of their local political leaders, they are simply assigning the resources needed to build what is required to get the job done as quickly as possible.

If we want a “race back to the Moon” flags and footsteps-style mission, have Impulse/Astrobotic/Intuitive Machines/Rocket Lab/Firefly build a simple lander for Falcon Heavy, and do Apollo again. Double track it with Blue Moon, just to make sure.

If we want an Antarctic Program-style mission with a permanently occupied moon base and programmatic sustainability, surge resources into Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan, etc and start delivering cargo in 100 T increments ASAP.

We should do both – starting today.

Every day we kick the can down the road, pouring the resources and brilliance of a nation onto the raging inferno of the SLS-Artemis program, is another day China laughs at our idiocy from behind our backs and continues their steady, inexorable progress towards stealing our childrens’ future.

Opportunity Cost of Talent Misallocation

NASA’s gravest sin isn’t the constant waste of money. It’s the waste of talent. NASA spends ~$20b/year, paying the salaries of tens of thousands of brilliant people, mostly to waste their time, their passion, their years, their lives, their potential, and our hope for the future. When NASA misspends $1b, it’s not just a billion dollars out of the taxpayer’s pocket that cannot be replaced and cannot be respent. It’s a billion dollars worth of expert engineering and science labor ploughed into failing programs. The US has far, far more money than we have talented engineers.

The capital constraint isn’t money. It’s people.

SpaceX has for many years had no difficulty raising money, making recruiting and talent development the major challenge. The same applies at NASA, except that at NASA, the wasted talent withers on the vine or flees to better opportunities. Jobs which pay at market rate, often 2x or 3x more than NASA’s salaries, along with equity and better benefits. Jobs where outcomes are measured and effort is rewarded rather than punished. Jobs where underperformers are routinely weeded out instead of accumulating. Jobs where a manager takes an interest in career development.

How To Save NASA?

Shortly after Jared’s withdrawal, he provided the following summary of some of the things he intended to do to help reform NASA.

“In short, I would have deleted the bureaucracy that impedes progress and robs resources from the mission (this is not unique to NASA, it’s a government problem). I would flatten the hierarchy, rebuild the culture—centered on ownership, urgency, mission-focus alongside a risk recalibration. Then concentrate resources on the big needle movers NASA was meant to achieve.

And if it came down to poor outcomes like failing to launch a near-complete Roman, shutting down Hubble or Chandra prematurely or flying reduced crew sizes to the ISS just to save money (yes, people are actually considering 3 astronauts instead of 4)…then yes, I would have funded it myself to protect the science.”

It’s worth mentioning that Jared had other, better things to do with his time. Before he was nominated, he was managing his successful payments company, spending time with his family, running a private fleet of fighter jets, and flying in space.

Running NASA is a difficult, thankless task. There’s just no way that NASA’s operational effectiveness can be restored without upsetting a lot of existing constituencies, many of whom are quite comfortable consuming vast quantities of public resources and producing fewer and fewer space wins. I know a number of public servants whose personal crusades to cut back on corruption were rewarded with manufactured investigations and even prosecutions. Jared understood he was about to kick a hornet’s nest and did so anyway because, in addition to being pathologically brave, he felt an obligation to help the country which had helped him. Jared indicated he was even willing to personally fund the science missions currently at risk of cuts. We need more people like Jared!

To Jared’s list, I will add a few more suggestions.

Spend Money In Texas and Florida

First, don’t mistake my antipathy for SLS as a plea to fire thousands of hard working and talented engineers. My preference is to get them aligned on a project they can actually believe in, pay them more, upgrade their working conditions, bring a new generation of talented engineers back to the agency, and increase economic productivity in all the space states. There’s a big difference between the economic activity of paying 1000 people to keep legacy Shuttle hardware production lines open, and paying 1000 people to innovate and invent the basis of the next century of technological progress. With Starship being built in south Texas and Florida, the future is bright for spending in those states.

Free Coffee

No organization that is serious about success charges its employees to consume a safe and legal stimulant on company time.

Vision

NASA does a lot of things. Probably too many things. What is the unifying message and mission?

It is simple. NASA’s mission is to defend US interests on the civilian side of space. From this flows science, exploration, technology development, and the development and exploitation of commercial capabilities.

Moon and Mars eat first. In 1637 days, China takes the Moon. We’re on a deadline here.

There is plenty of opportunity to go around when NASA’s substantial talents are aligned behind this goal. Humans on the Moon and Mars will bring incredible opportunities for science and technology development, oriented in support of this broader goal. It will also significantly improve overall organizational productivity, meaning that even if unaligned planetary science or astrophysics can no longer count on JWST-style infinite money, it will still be possible to build, launch, and operate instruments to get the necessary information for a fraction of the previous cost.

Product-oriented Org Chart

All organizations end up shipping their org chart, so it’s time to orient NASA’s org chart around the products that it produces and launches. There’s no need for five separate layers of intercenter strategy alignment process development. NASA must have a concise list of core products and the urgency and determination to deliver them. We don’t need redundant layers of functional line management, this ends up creating more problems in terms of talent allocation than it solves. What we need are small but powerful product groups that build their own org charts in service of serial production of the assets that reflect NASA’s competitive advantage. This isn’t exactly revolutionary in the science of organization management.

Compress Management

It is absolutely essential that NASA’s leadership is technically elite, and that organization leaders have the responsibility, authority, and knowledge to rapidly make sufficiently-correct decisions to drive projects forward. Non-technical managers of technical projects must exit the organization. We can no longer consume 1,000 hours per year of each senior manager’s time with endless budget strategy sessions and group meetings where no decisions are ever made and no new insights are ever produced. Economic central planning lacks the necessary flexibility to drive innovation and productivity improvements across the organization.

Get Curious About Productivity

NASA is the place where a bunch of the technology our civilization uses to drive productivity growth has originated. As a result, we should expect that NASA is the world’s most productive workforce. This is obviously not the case, if anything it may be the opposite. It’s long past time to ditch the “cost estimation” process that just tacks on cumulative 30% fudge factors to each sequential project and actually engage in some forensic accounting to discover what people are actually spending their time on. You’re not going to like the answer, but ignoring this problem is admitting that we cannot solve it. The cost estimation process needs to be oriented towards cost reduction, not cost growth.

Reorganize Center Areas of Expertise

NASA has grown accretively over time, and the areas of expertise embodied by each center no longer reflect NASA’s needs as well as they did in, say, 1970. Success is not optional. The new NASA administrator needs to take a hard look at existing areas of expertise and existing areas of technical need, and re-organize accordingly. This will require a bold willingness to make up for decades of neglect on this front.

JPL’s expertise in producing exquisite bespoke science assets for deep space exploration is past its expiry date. We have abundant launch capacity and an eager private sector ready to build more capable, and significantly heavier space assets. JPL needs to switch to a “serial production” mode that exploits launch capacity, lowers unit costs, and ramps up science gathering capacity while supporting a more effective internal team to remain at the forefront of global technology development. Since I first wrote about the coming loss of JPL’s competitive edge in 2019, more than a thousand people have been laid off due to a continued inability to bring in enough business and the Mars Sample Return debacle. Enough!

Other NASA centers also need to adapt to the next few decades of challenges and opportunities. How do they serve the central mission of a robust, innovative, competitive, and lean Moon and Mars program? It is time to abandon parochial zero-sum strife and develop new generative and compounding cores of technical and executive expertise. I have a bunch of ideas here but prefer not to prejudice the prerogative of NASA’s next administrator.

Beyond NASA, its network of contractors face an existential challenge. The nature of the business is changing. Hungry newcomers are picking off new contracts. Boeing and Lockheed’s launch business is a tiny fraction of what it was. Boeing’s work on SLS will end some day. Meanwhile their Starliner capsule is $1.6b in the hole with no way out – entire subsystems will have to be re-engineered, and even if this was done, the ISS is in its twilight years. Beyond that, we’ll be launching humans to space in 100 T increments, not tiny capsules built for last century’s space program. Let Boeing buy their way out of Starliner and instead devote their efforts to a future-facing program.

NASA, and the USA, need a healthy defense ecosystem, including the legacy primes. Just because it’s no longer okay for Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing to make billions of profit on enormous cost plus contracts that arrive years or decades late doesn’t mean we’d be better off if these companies failed completely. The new NASA administrator will need to write future-looking development contracts with the legacy primes to ensure they have a piece of the action on the Moon and Mars, and to ensure their incentives align with renewed vigor and dynamism. This alone is a daunting challenge, but success is not optional.

Fix NASA’s Talent Game

I’ve worked at NASA and in the private sector, and the contrast could not be more apparent. NASA absolutely must prioritize correction of hiring, promotion, and performance management. We need to fix incentives around talent. We need to routinely fly Mission Specialists from across NASA. NASA should be the Schelling Point for the smartest, most ambitious people. It should not necessarily be the most pleasant place to work for an entire career.

When I was at JPL, I knew multiple hiring managers tearing their hair out because the recruiting function (housing dozens of people) would routinely ghost promising applicants for days, weeks, or even months. Where sending a follow up email to your recruiter to “please get the offer out to the candidate this week, they said they have offers for double the salary from Apple, but really want to work here if we can move things forward” earned a “quiet hour” on effective interoffice coordination, not a summary firing from the recruiting function manager whose only job is to make sure that JPL can hire people.

I have spoken with multiple people on JPL’s Executive Council about this and similar issues and got shrugs. Apparently, it’s no longer anyone’s responsibility to ensure that JPL can discharge these basic organizational functions. Ed Stone would have straightened it out in a single blistering 15 minute phone call, which is probably why his Voyager missions are still functioning after more than 50 years. The new NASA administrator must be willing and able to push through this kind of nonsense and insist on outcomes-oriented, rather than process-oriented, metrics.

When I was at JPL, I routinely encountered “frozen in place” career types who showed up to work and did approximately nothing, who never delivered work product, who would sometimes disappear for a week or two at a time, who would sit on an account for months to do a few hours of work, or who appeared to know nothing about their area of expertise. Obviously a bad hire decades ago had been shuffled into some part of the org chart to limit the damage, but could not be fired unless they accidentally stole a paperclip. This wastes the person’s time, since they could be productive elsewhere. It wastes NASA resources, since this person consumes a salary that could employ someone who obviously wants to work there. And it wastes the time of everyone who has to work with them, around them, and despite them.

Since I left JPL, hundreds of other early career people I worked with, sick of daily indignities and frustrations like this, eventually picked up the phone when a recruiter from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Honeybee, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc offered them twice the money and stock, and left.

The rest of NASA is probably even worse. There are great people there, but an organization that cannot hire competitively, refuses to fire, and promotes only in the event of an unexpected death, cannot expect to assemble a winning team.

This is existential.

The Chinese space program does not have this problem. Their program managers fear, viscerally, the consequences of failure. They know that if NASA continues to sleep at the wheel, in 1637 days the Moon will be theirs.

We Must Act With Urgency

The problems with the current approach have been obvious for decades. We do not have the luxury of another decade to fix them, or ignore them. Whoever the next administrator is, the stakes could not be higher. This is no time for half measures or placating hysterical constituencies who’ve become all too comfortable with failure.

The US people demand a space agency that safeguards their future.