With the United States space sector already generating more than $380 billion annually and supporting 100,000 American jobs, incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and NASA stand at a crossroads. Isaacman has a rare opportunity to truly transform NASA into the 21st century space program America wants and deserves.
The current challenge
The first challenge facing NASA’s new leadership is as old as the agency itself: bureaucratic inertia. The cardinal rule for any incoming NASA leadership team is simple: “run the bureaucracy, don’t let the bureaucracy run you.” The current NASA-centered approach for mission management, exemplified by programs that run billions over budget and years behind schedule, represents an outdated model that cannot compete with nimbler commercial alternatives or match the pace of international rivals like China.
NASA’s portfolio suffers from severe mission creep, with programs expanding far beyond their original scope and intent. This cycle of expansion is not new. To break it, NASA should recreate the Office of Program Evaluation and Analysis, employing “red teams” to conduct independent assessments of ongoing programs and projects.
Career staff have a well-worn playbook of stalling new leadership teams during their first year, watching and waiting to see what kind of leaders they’ll be. Isaacman and the transition team must break this cycle by demanding timely information and holding senior career staff accountable for rapid, accurate responses.
The path forward
Instead of embarking on the traditional and time-consuming tour of NASA’s field centers, the new leadership team should remain firmly planted in Washington, focused on developing and implementing their action plan. This plan must make tough choices: canceling underperforming programs regardless of size or political protection, strategically restructuring NASA’s career workforce and increasing contracted work — all while maintaining flat budgets.
While institutional resistance to change is formidable, Administrator Isaacman has powerful tools at his disposal. His authority to direct reassignments of Senior Executive Service employees should be leveraged strategically to drive organizational change and instill accountability. NASA should pursue aggressive buyouts and “early outs” while strategically transitioning a majority of the agency’s 19,000 career civil servants into excepted term appointments.
Term appointments can run from three to six years and provide awesome professional development while also engaging America’s best and brightest through a NASA experience. After their term, the worker joins or returns to industry or academia, enabling commercial space to flourish. Increasing term appointments at NASA benefits the agency by creating a pipeline that provides NASA with contemporary, diverse and innovative ideas and skills while also exposing future commercial space leaders to the unusual and unique challenges federal agencies face. It also assures our nation has the domestic intellectual capacity needed for tomorrow’s challenges.
Specific programs and priorities
The most exciting developments in space today happen in the commercial sector. NASA must better support newspace through innovative collaborative agreements, partnerships and contracting vehicles. For in-house technology work, NASA needs a reset.
The new administration faces the opportunity and challenge of maintaining a permanent human presence in space through use of commercial space stations. Dramatically increasing the funding for NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program will create new opportunities for on-orbit commercial space microgravity activities while also providing a training ground for NASA and private astronauts headed to the moon and Mars. Successes such as Voyager Space and Redwire demonstrate that the high frontier is open for business — business that should include full-up commercial orbiting laboratories.
Meanwhile, NASA’s science organizations should place priority on leveraging the extraordinary talent and products that American commercial science data providers now reliably deliver. NASA’s science team should explore more cost-and-data sharing partnerships and collaborative arrangements like CRADAs, or cooperative research and development agreements, between NASA and academia.
Through CRADAs, government labs can be used by schools and businesses to advance development of new technologies, products and services. The government benefits from access to private sector resources and expertise, tech transfer and commercialization, research cost-sharing, mission enhancement and workforce development.
NASA Technology Directorate
A reorganized NASA Technology Directorate (combining the current Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate) should focus on addressing the most pressing technology needs of NASA’s mission. With limited budgets, NASA’s mission requirements need to be the genesis of the technology problems the agency solves.
While NASA’s technology activities should address agency mission needs, they also should serve industry and academia through technology strategy formulation. A new technology organization should facilitate and harvest new technologies that meet both NASA and broad national needs, casting a wide net to assure opportunities for American innovative small businesses and startups. The tech directorate should regularly engage and partner with industry to solve barriers to U.S. commercial leadership in aerospace.
Return on investment from mission-driven technology development and maturation will only be fruitful, however, if there is ongoing political support for NASA’s major missions, without course changes every four years.
Americans surviving and thriving on the moon and Mars is a generational challenge that will require decadal roadmapping and a national commitment to U.S. leadership in human space exploration. This administration must regularly and repeatedly explain the “why” behind NASA’s big programs in relatable terms to its investors — the American people.
By streamlining its workforce, embracing accountability, better managing science and technology investments, supporting commercial innovation and focusing on core priorities, NASA can reclaim its role as a catalyst for American space leadership. Right now the high frontier is beckoning — the U.S. will either heed that call and bring with it our democratic values, or we will follow and be customers, subservient to foreign interests.
David Steitz served as NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Technology, Policy and Strategy and as the agency’s Deputy Chief Technologist, retiring in 2022. Steitz now works as a technology policy and strategic communications consultant in Washington.
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This article first appeared in the January 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
