“Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac

The new NASA budget is a fundamental challenge to the way we operate in the human spaceflight community.  It asks us to stop expecting Washington or another JFK to tell us what to do and demands that we determine what we can offer the nation and set out to break as many boundaries as we can, while respecting the fiscal realities this country faces.

We can either fight this “paradigm shift,” as some have called it, or we can embrace it and make it our own.  Human space exploration is not going to die because of the cancellation of the Constellation program.  The American human space program itself will only die if we fail to rise to this challenge.  The NASA community has core assets and capabilities, such as the premier ability of JSC’s Mission Operations Directorate to conduct launch, ascent, and reentry of human crews, that must be conserved and shared if we are to succeed.

No, the commercial space entrepreneurs are not ready to fly astronauts yet.  However, NASA is chartered by the Space Act to foster commercial enterprises in space.  Go look at it if you don’t believe me. The agency is obligated by law to help them grow, while still meeting its own needs.  The question before us is how we can bring the best of NASA and its people to create this new public-private partnership in LEO and determine a more innovative and sustainable path for exploring the rest of the solar system.

Yes, these are uncertain times.  I know I prefer certainty as an engineer. Given that the most common complaint I’ve heard about the new budget is the lack of an explicit destination or timeline, it would seem I’m not alone in that preference.  The adversity to risk that is endemic in our professional culture and, frankly, our society only compounds the anxiety.  I ask you, my friends and colleagues, to not despair, though.  We may never have an opportunity like this again.

We have a chance to break down the institutional barriers that have stymied further advancement into space time and time again.  We have a chance to escape the overbearing current of organizational inertia and find enabling processes, systems, and technologies that can take us further than we even imagined.  We have an open horizon and the Administrator has asked us to help him chart the course.

I think the choice is straightforward: Adapt and thrive or go find something else to do.  There are many problems to solve in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead.  There is no lack of work to be done.  We need serious, dedicated, and passionate people to  turn this very high-level view of NASA’s future into a cohesive, coherent reality.  There is no one right answer to be handed down from on high.  That’s why we need everyone’s ideas and inputs.

I got into this field because I believe our species’ future depends on exploring space and settling the solar system.  I know that many of you share this view.  The military doesn’t quit their core mission when one of their programs gets canceled.  They find a way to get the job done with the parameters they’ve been given.  So must we.