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Casey Handmer on Nasa underperformance

Sun Oct 13 2024

I’ve been following Casey Handmer’s writing and podcasts appearances over the past year since stumbling across his company, Terraform Industries. He’s always got interesting stuff to say and his recent appearance on the ‘Off-Nominal’ podcast included a demolition job on the current Nasa administration that resonated with some of my own experiences of working in government. I’ve put the key bits below:

1. By their own admission Nasa is having problems with talent retention… ask yourself, why is that the case? A place with an incredible brand that every nerd on earth wants to work at, myself included - I spent years getting a green card just so I could work there - and then once I got there, why did I decide not to stay there for the rest of my life?

2. It’s kind of catastrophic.. I knew hundreds of people at JPL at a similar stage of life and probably more than half of us have left. Why is that? You get to go and work on spacecraft… do you actually get to turn bolts and design things? No, most of your time is spent begging for money. You don’t spend your time actually building spacecraft, you spend ninety plus percent of your time begging for money. Maybe that’s why these projects cost 10x too much.

3. Do you get paid decent money? No, you’d get paid twice as much for the same skill level at an entry-level job at Apple or something. Is it necessary to make money? Yes if you want to live in Los Angeles. You will not be promoted until you’ve been there for 10-15 years and the people above you have literally died because they will not retire.

4. You also have to spend a lot of your time dealing with bureaucratic inefficiency caused by the fact that the organisation is clogged - even in JPL - with people who will not do their jobs and will not resign and will not be fired. You think I’m speaking hyperbolically here.

5. In private industry, if you fill your organisation with 99% bozos, you will not release your products on time and on budget, your business will go under straight away and the creative destruction of capitalism will recycle these elements into something more productive, but at Nasa that never happens. They just print more money and the schedule moves to the right and the budget just climbs to infinity.

6. What a great deal, I get to work at Nasa and my managers have markedly little interest in what I’m doing - when I personally pointed out that I’d saved a bunch of time on a project I got in trouble! So not only are they not measuring or rewarding productivity, they’re actually punishing it, and then they ask why’s it the case that we have difficulty retaining talent.

7. Solve for the equilibrium: over time all the ambitious talented people will leave and you’ll be left with whoever is not ambitious or talented.

8. By contrast here’s the value prop at SpaceX: you also don’t get paid very much but you do get stock and you get to work on hardware, and because there’s pretty quick turn over there - for all kinds of reasons - if you’re good you’ll be promoted pretty quickly and you won’t have to work with people who are bad at their jobs because they’ll get found out and fired very quickly. So by and large the people working there are dedicated, switched-on, smart people working hard on projects like they matter. Which is why they are able to deliver on time and budget.

9. You can bullshit your way through some parts of life, but not flying things in space. You can’t bullshit physics. We’re 20 years into building the Space Launch System (SLS), which is trying to bullshit a physics problem. All the same people are working in the same jobs and we’re not actually getting anything out of it. Nasa is meant to be an organisation that speaks the truth, it’s meant to be an organisation that studies science. If the senior leadership at Nasa can’t look themselves in the mirror and say ‘something’s not right here’ then that’s a huge problem… Charitably, they’re just going through the motions and hoping that it fixes itself, uncharitably, they’re on the public purse. My taxes are paying their salary to do a particular job that is 100% achievable… they are occupying the role as head of the program, fronting it to the public and they know that it’s not succeeding, cannot succeed, and they are content to take that money and lie to us, lie to themselves and waste our time. It’s appalling. If you can’t do the job you should resign and do a different job. Is it moral to take public money to do a job that you can’t do?

10. On the FAA: I came away with the impression that it was an organisation full of well intentioned people but like many organisations, their collective outcome was starkly at odds with their individual desired outcomes.