NASA’s Management Challenges

With NASA now facing a new administration in Washington, it is worth looking at where the agency is at the moment and what may need some attention. The 2024 Report on NASA’s Top Management and Performance Challenges, released by the NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG), is a good place to start.

Here are a few of the challenges facing NASA at the moment:

• Improving the Management of Major Programs and Projects
  • Changing requirements, significant technical issues, increased costs, and schedule delays continue to impact the sustainability of major programs and projects.
  • Cost increases and schedule delays often create cascading effects across NASA’s portfolio of projects.
  • Without complete, credible, timely, and transparent cost and schedule commitments for the Agency’s major projects, it is difficult for NASA, Congress, and stakeholders to make informed decisions about the prioritization of efforts and the Agency’s long-term funding needs.
    
    
• Partnering with Commercial Industry
  • The transition to commercial space systems will require significant long-term financial investments by NASA and private companies as well as growing demand for non-NASA customers to ensure long-term economic viability.
  • Commercial partners are competitors in an emerging industry, developing modern space transportation capabilities and associated operations that have never been available.
  • The challenge to commercial partnerships comes in balancing the speed of development, flexibility, and adherence to timelines against the safety and reliability of new technology.
    
    
• Enabling Mission Critical Capabilities and Support Services
  • NASA faces challenges with its mission critical capabilities including attracting and retaining a highly skilled and diverse workforce and managing outdated infrastructure and facilities needed for science, aeronautics, and exploration missions.
  • NASA’s decentralized information technology management structure and lack of strategic leadership negatively affect the Agency’s ability to protect and fully utilize computer systems and data vital to its mission.
  • NASA’s contract management practices have consistently led to increased costs and overly generous award fees.

This is quite a list, and the report goes into great detail on all of them. Of course, this is not SSA or the IRS with a pretty standard day-to-day mission, and where future expectations of the agency are easily foreseeable. As the auditors note, NASA is dealing with high-risk, complex issues requiring highly skilled workers who have to maintain many current programs around the solar system while also assisting a newly emerging private space industry here in the United States (which is pinching its staff). Moreover, looking back at the beginning of the universe as well as searching for sources of life in the universe today are big missions. We are asking a lot of NASA. This is rocket science and much, much more.

Kudos to NASA for what it has done over the years while maintaining a highly-motivated workforce.

In addition, since I expect Elon Musk will try to claim that he came up with these issues on his own, I thought it was worth highlighting this report now. NASA knows it has a lot to do and it is working to solve these matters each and every day.