[eggy]

I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing.

I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).

I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.

I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

[tempnow987]

The issue here is a couple of things:

- Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat.

- The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations

- NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System").

So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy!

So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)!

Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.

[mcswell]

This will be a bit off-topic, but I can't resist.

"The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations"

LtCdr Joseph Rochefort, leading a team in Hawaii during the early months of WWII processing Japanese encrypted messages about an impending attack, got both the location (Midway Island) and the date (early June) right, while other cryptanalysts near Washington DC got both wrong. Rochefort was recommended for an award by Admiral Nimitz (CINCPAC, in Hawaii), but this was turned down by Admiral King in DC. Eventually Rochefort was re-assigned to command a floating drydock in San Francisco, about as much of a demotion as he could get. At the end of the war, Rochefort did get a medal, still over the objections of Admiral King. Some think this bad treatment was because Rochefort and his team in Hawaii embarrassed the crypt analysts in DC.

[tempnow987]

She first headed commercial crew which outperformed tremendously by comparison to almost all NASA programs (in terms of budget and execution).

She then got promoted to lead Human Exploration and Operations - which is absolutely a promotion. In terms of putting US Astronauts in space, her crew dragon program as significantly outperformed SLS at an absolute fraction of the per seat cost. So yes, very embarrassing.

I'd have to look at timelines, but my instinct is Nelson likely came on and that pretty much marked the end of her career at NASA as a result.

She wasn't afraid to make the calls she thought were right, she was pushing towards fixed price awards even on things like HLS, and having her in Exploration Systems Development would just have ruffled too many feathers over time.

The whole lunar landing architecture was so comical. SLS launching Orion to lunar gateway? Lunar gateway in a nonsensical orbit that would have needed an an entire separate transfer vehicle to get to LEO where it should have been to start with?

“Why would you want to send a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down?” asked Buzz Aldrin, who called the Gateway concept “absurd.”

Kathy was involved in HLS selection I think - and when I saw they were going to maybe leave gateway out of architecture for first lending... you knew that common sense couldn't last!

The ihab module on gateway (currently getting maybe 800 million per year in funding) is going to have 53 cubic feet for FOUR PEOPLE!! The entire module has a diameter of maybe 4 feet BEFORE life support? And gateways orbit mean you can only get to it at a very specific time once a week basically .