1. 2012 NASA MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE
HUMBOLDT C. MANDELL, JR., Ph.D.
THE PATHOLOGIES OF THE CONVENTIONAL
WISDOM OF NASA PROGRAM PLANNING AND
MANAGEMENT

2. MANAGEMENT PATHOLOGIES COULD BE
RUINING NASA’S FUTURE
 Human space exploration development times have
increased monotonically for fifty years
 Costs have increased proportionally
 Causes: At least 6 pathologies
 Frozen, inefficient management culture
 Excessive overhead
 Cost estimating, budgeting, and control processes
 Risk aversion and institutional pessimism
 The myth that new technologies are required to perform
advanced missions
 “Not invented here” aversion to ideas from outside
 Result: May be putting itself out of business

3. THE TREND OF PROGRAM LENGTH
YEARS FROM START TO FIRST OPERATIONAL FLIGHT
Development Time, Years
20
16
12
8
4
1950 1960 1970 1980
Year Started

4. COST AND SCHEDULE TRENDS CAN NOT BE
SUSTAINED
 Programs longer than 10 years are:
 More expensive than they need to be
 Almost impossible to plan: Situations and
technologies change too fast
 Hard to sustain politically (> 2 presidential terms)
 Hard to keep public interest
 A plan longer than 10 years is no plan at all
 E.G., 2004 Vision for Space Exploration
 If it can be done, it can be done in 7 years
 Apollo lunar program was 6.8 years from start to
human landing

5. NASA PLANNING INSTABILITY
 Every president since JFK has appointed at least one space
advisory group
 Members usually prominent veterans of politics and/or high-technology
program management
 Most do not have the necessary intimate knowledge of the inner workings of
NASA and its pathologies.
 Often reflect the pessimism of the past (“it will take 30 years to get to Mars”)
 Sometimes unrealistic in expectations of the future (nuclear fusion
reactors, VASIMR engines) and dismissive of internal NASA ideas
 Often contain members with vested interests in specific outcomes (2004
study dominated by moon advocates)
 Sometimes politically naïve
 Seldom produce a unified, affordable single focus for NASA programs
 Some enemies!

6. RESULTS OF NASA PLANNING INSTABILITY
 Resulting recommendations have almost never come to
fruition
 Sometimes unworkable recommendations
 Resistance by the NASA culture
 Usually ignored by the President and Congress, who have had
higher priorities
 As a result of this and other pathologies, NASA future
plans have been tenuous, at best, and unstable for at
least the past two decades: e.g.:
 Space Exploration Initiative Cancellation in 1992
 Space Station Near Cancellation in 2003
 Constellation Cancellation in 2009
 STS Cancellation in 2010

7. WHY ARE NASA PROGRAMS SO LONG?
 A Small agency dominated by one or two
programs
 Annual costs, peak annual funding are the
primary constraints
 So, Funding growth can not be accommodated
by higher annual costs, moving money around.
 And programs get longer.
 This has created the expectation that future
programs will take just as long or longer
 And this gets built into the culture of NASA and
its oversight agents (OMB, Congress).

8. WHAT ARE THESE
PATHOLOGIES?

9. PATHOLOGY 1: THE NASA MANAGEMENT
CULTURE
 Born in the days of the Apollo Lunar program,
 The NASA culture is not appropriate for today‟s missions:
 Totally enculturated ways of doing business: excessive specs and operating
procedures
 Based on plentiful resources and expensive multiple approaches to
technology, use of money to mitigate risk
 Rare knowledge and skills, which are today more plentiful (but will become
more scarce with time)
 Racing past detailed definition in the haste of the Cold War
 Violation of basic systems engineering practices (some not invented then)
 Starting programs before uncertainties resolved (e.g., EPS, TPS)
 Combining of public and private sector work forces (no one‟s responsibility)
 Technically forbidden
 Overlooked in the interest of national urgency
 But the practice persisted
 Violates “Unity of Command” basic management
 Management culture is the LARGEST cost driver!

10. PATHOLOGY 2: EXCESSIVE OVERHEAD
 The combination of urgency and pork politics
produced TEN NASA installations
 All ten are still in operation
 Feeding this infrastructure takes about ¼ of
the NASA budget
 About the amount of money required to do a
very nice human mission to Mars
 For political reasons, unneeded installations
will be difficult to close!

11. PATHOLOGY 3: COST ESTIMATION, BUDGETING,
AND COST CONTROL PRACTICES
 NASA costs are as much as 6 to 10 times as
much as private sector
 Some of this is because of how program
management and budgeting have evolved
 Unnecessary costs result from the way NASA
handles estimation. For example:
 Cost model estimates raised by growth factors:
 BUT: model estimates already have growth built in
 Costs always grow from the INITIAL estimate, which
adds more growth to future cost model data

12. EXTRA GROWTH FACTORS CAUSE FUTURE COST
GROWTH
2
1.8
1.6 3
1.4 2
1.2 CER ESTIMATE
1
ORIG. EST. W/O EXTRA
0.8 1 GROWTH
0.6 ORIGINAL EST WITH
EXTRA GROWTH
0.4
1: RESERVES ADDED BY THE
0.2 ESTIMATOR TO ACHIEVE
ACCEPTABLE RISK
0
2. RESERVES ADDED BY THE
CER DUPLICATE FINAL POLITICAL PROCESS
ESTIMATES GROWTH RUNOUT
FACTORS COSTS 3. EXTRA COST CARRIED TO
NEXT GENERATION CER‟S

13. BUDGETING PATHOLOGIES
 THREE YEARS (OR MORE) FROM ESTIMATE TO
APPROPRIATION (E.G. „71=„73 $)
 PROGRAMS ARE DESIGNED TO PEAK-YEAR
FUNDING CONSTRAINTS, NOT OPTIMUM COSTS
 CONSTANT VERSUS “THEN YEAR” DOLLARS
 NO MORE SUPPLEMENTALS
 GROWTHS MUST BE ACCOMMODATED WITH
SCHEDULE SLIPPAGES
 ASSUMPTION OF ELASTICITY OF PROGRAMS
 SCHEDULE SLIPPAGE TO MEET ANNUAL
CONSTRAINT IS EXPENSIVE!

14. PATHOLOGY 4: INSTITUTIONAL PESSIMISM AND
RISK AVERSION
 At the end of the Apollo Lunar program many of
the original risk takers left for more excitement
 With notable exceptions, left a work force where
many were more focused on security than
adventure
 Then, Challenger and Columbia losses had
profound effect upon agency psyche
 NASA and Contractors
 Congress
 The Presidents

15. RESULTS OF A RISK AVERSE CULTURE
 “Conventional wisdom” that Mars would take 20-
35 years (moon had taken 7 from a cold start)
 False Prophets: For example: “Moon is a
necessary precursor to Mars” (to reduce risk):
 In reality, the Moon is a poor analog for Mars
 May cost as much or more to send humans to Moon
as to Mars
 Enemies: People threatened by Human
Exploration programs will add their voices, using
sometimes false premises (e.g., Steven
Weinberg)
 Leaves a climate averse to major new programs

16. PATHOLOGY 5: THE MYTH THAT NEW
TECHNOLOGIES ARE REQUIRED
 NASA management has often held out hope
that spending money on technology will reduce
cost and risk
 Some new technologies may indeed reduce
cost and/or risk
 But few if any true breakthroughs are evident
today or on the horizon
 Almost everything we can do in space can be
done safely and affordably with today‟s
technologies
 Far advanced from the technologies that took us to
the moon, in every system

17. PATHOLOGY 6: “NOT INVENTED HERE, NOT THE
WAY WE DO THINGS HERE”
 Many brilliant people have brought forth ideas to
NASA
 Some ideas have been so powerful that they have
prevailed: for example:
 Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (John Houbolt)
 In-Situ Resource Utilization (Robert Zubrin)
 But some have fallen by the wayside
 Management Improvement ideas
 Richard Reeves
 Larry Ross
 Jack Lee
 Mike Griffin

18. CONCLUSIONS
 If the US is to be a player in the future
human exploration of the solar
system, NASA must:
 Overcome at least these six pathologies
 Especiallyinstitutional risk aversion and pessimism
 Excessive NASA overhead
 Set affordable, ambitious, even risky, early goals
(e.g., human Mars expedition in a decade)
 Implement new and bold management
cultures, based on the sound research of recent
years
 Work more closely with the international

19. CONCLUSIONS
 And Must Restore Political Support
 Make NASA relevant to solving some urgent
national problems
 Demonstrate that they can do the job affordably
 Prove to the political world that they have re-
invented the agency

20. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS THE ENEMY
 "Everything that can be invented has been invented,"
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899
 "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible,"
-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
 "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."
-- Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television.
 "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom."
-- Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
 "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
 "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,
 "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates, 1981

21. AND
 “Human space exploration can never be justified”
 Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate, The University of Texas, 2009

22. “IF YOU DO WHAT YOU ALWAYS DID, YOU
WILL GET WHAT YOU ALWAYS GOT”
W. EDWARDS DEMING

23. REFERENCES
 1. NASA HQ: “President Bush Announces New Vision for Space
Exploration, remarks by the President on US Space Policy.” Washington
DC, January 14, 2004
 2. Levine, Arnold S., Managing NASA in the Apollo Era: Washington DC: NASA
1982
 3. Anderson, Jr., Frank W., Orders of Magnitude. Washington, DC, NASA, 1981
 4. McNamara, Bernard, Into the Final Frontier: The Human Exploration of
Space.Ft Worth, Texas, Harcourt College Publishers, 2001
 5. Mandell, H.C. Jr., and Griffin, Michael D., “Management as the Enabling
Technology for Space Exploration,” 43rd Congress of the International
Astronautical Federation, October 1992
 6. Mandell, H.C., Jr., “The Human Exploration of Mars.” Austin, Texas, The
University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research, Feb 13, 2004.
 7. Mandell, H.C., Jr., and Duke, Michael B., “Benchmarking Processes for
Managing Large International Space Programs,” 44th Congress of the
International Astronautical Federation, October 16, 1993.
 8. “Space Exploration Programs Management Plan,” NASA Johnson Space
Center, Exploration Programs Office, Houston, Texas February 1993