The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that NASA was looking to cut its employee costs by as much as 20 percent to create a “down payment” on the additional money the agency would need to perform human exploration beyond LEO. According to the report, deputy administrator Lori Garver told NASA contractors those cuts, involving NASA personnel overseeing work at contractor sites and contractor personnel themselves, were under consideration.
However, in a letter to the editor published Saturday, Robert Jacobs, NASA assistant administrator for public affairs, says the Chronicle story got it wrong. “Garver has not initiated any discussions with NASA contractors in an effort to reduce jobs,” he wrote. “In fact, it was the contractor community that first approached NASA with ideas on how it could restructure existing work to reduce costs.” Jacobs adds that “No specific actions will be considered until the White House makes a final decision regarding the future of human spaceflight.”
Let’s take an analytical look at the situation. What determines the size of the NASA workforce? Many things, but one big driver is number of flights per year and number of crew members. Up until recently, KSC, MSFC, and JSC have been sized to fly up to seven flights per year, each with about seven people. That drives refurb of the Orbiters, training, software development, food, cameras, simulators, flight surgeons, experiments, etc etc etc.
After Shuttle and with only ISS – that is gonna be a person or two per year.
With Orion, we will have up to four people per year, and at first a flight per year. Maybe after four or five years of flights we may have more than one Orion at a time.
So we go from supporting 49 or 50 people in space per year – to supporting 2 or 3 – to supporting 5 or 6.
So we need about 5/50 as many people, right? It does not take a rocket scientist to see that many of our people will go away. Many of the skills needed to support operations (food, training, etc) are not needed in hardware development activities.
Now that the Hubble servicing mission is over, the shuttle should be
in a canned software mode. You could close almost the
entire shuttle software group. What do you need, a couple of
top folks and maybe some testers and a couple of people writing patches.
With ISS the only mission left, you should close most of the abort sites
because the only place to abort to is newfoundland.
Of course, there are 200 people at white sands, supporting an abort that has never happened and never will.
The nature of the LV affects the workforce too. This is largely independant of the launch rate.
Shuttle requires roughly 3000 to support a launch where an EELV (integrated vertically on the pad) requires roughly 300 and a Falcon 9 (integrated horizontally) requires roughly 30.
And this reflects into costs.
Shuttle roughly $1B a flight.
EELV roughly $200M.
Falcon 9 $50M.
It all depends on what sort of space program you want.
@Fred
Fred, how about reading the comments Michael Griffin made on 15 september 2009 before the committee about a real reactor and a paper reactor?
I want a real space program, not a paper one.
I believe the determination of the proper size of a federal civil servant workforce would correlate best with the budget of the agency in question. Someone would have to craw up a graph of the budget of all the federal agencies divided by the number of civilian employees.
By way of reference NASA has about 19,000 employees, and this is everyone, not just human space flight, and a budget of about $19B dollars a year, a nice symmetry yielding a value of $1M being managed in some way on average by each civil servant employee.
For comparison to the Defense department at $700B a year (2009 value) in the new more inclusive budgeting, and 3 million employees (both civilian and in uniform) the equivalent metric would be $233K per employee. This would climb some if counting only civilian, non-uniformed, but it would not approach NASA’s metric.
In practice NASA already outsources more than most all federal agencies, about 90% of it’s budget, for which the prior metric of budget managed per employee would be LESS than NASA’s for far less advanced, technological, and far more defined programs.
That 90% is in keeping with the prior metric, thinking of the NASA employee salary costs alone. In essence NASA runs as a 10% cost above the contractors, which is rather efficient, again given the complexity of what is being managed. On the other end of technology, something truly pedestrian like property management fees, these also run in the private sector about 10% of rents (semi-equivalent to budget).
The EPA, HUD, Social Security Administration, Post Office, etc would all have to be plotted for this “total agency budget/employee” metric, but I would be surprised if the prior correlation did not hold up well to statistics. Deviations would occur such as for the Post Office, where the large number of mail carriers would cause outliers.
Summary – there’s not much more efficiency to be found in the NASA civil servant ranks unless we were to ask NASA to improve itself even further by comparison to all other federal agencies doing far more pedestrian, predictable roles in good government.
What I don’t understand is why Boeing is running adds all over the place for people to fill positions in EGLS (Exploration Ground Launch Services)? I’ve seen both paper ads and online banners requesting qualified people for these positions. Aren’t we talking about laying off people? Do they know something we don’t? I started seeing these three months ago.
Example: http://boeing.com/defense-space/space/constellation_egls/
John Malkin – the Boeing ad is a standard resume roundup. The contractor has to demonstrate (in the proposal) that they can supply the needed people and skills. They “satisfy” this requirement by presenting a stack of resumes. Whether those people would actually be available when the contract is issued is another matter. Contract award is in April 2010 – so Boeing does not actually have any jobs at all to fill. You might notice the Confidential label – they are asking for incumbents to express interest.