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>>196125NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin - So the post below went a bit viral, and I was tagged on it several times. I'm not posting to disagree, as I write and talk a lot about freeing NASA from external impositions, eliminating needless bureaucracy, empowering our talented workforce, and focusing resources on the objectives NASA was created to achieve. No need to rehash all of that here and make this post excessively long.
And of course, SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has enabled NASA to accomplish far more at lower cost, from transporting astronauts to the ISS, to launching Europa Clipper, to the first Moon Base mission set to launch in December. Its ambition to make humanity a spacefaring civilization is exciting and important beyond words.
I will just leave you with this: NASA is the world's greatest space agency. We put 12 American heroes on the Moon and brought them home safely, built the Space Shuttle, landed rovers on Mars, launched great observatories like Hubble, James Webb, and now Roman, sent a spacecraft to kiss the Sun's corona, and sent Voyager nearly a light-day from Earth, and she is still going.
There is a reason the NASA "meatball" is one of the most recognizable logos on the planet. What our people accomplish inspires generations. Even with the occasional institutional inertia, NASA remains the space agency others aspire to be. We didn't earn that reputation through continuous perfection. We earned it by accomplishing what others thought impossible.
Quoted Post:
Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2109671170408579406 23