The spotlight tends to shine on NASA only when a tragedy occurs or when there are issues such as the recent ones with Boeing’s Starliner.  The removal of that spotlight coupled with incompetent congressional leadership has left NASA without a strong sense of purpose.  This alone would be enough to damage the space program, but there’s another rather large issue: for decades, NASA has engaged in open discrimination against white male engineers.  This discrimination has led to bloated budgets, caustic work conditions, and many of our best engineers leaving the field.

The subcontractor issue

Years ago, NASA decided that there were too many white male engineers.  However, there simply weren’t enough engineers of other races or of the opposite sex to hire — even with the racially based preferences, mentoring, etc. that NASA has in place.  The solution that the government came up with was to let people of other races form “companies” called “subcontrators.”  NASA would then give those engineering jobs at Lockheed (LM), Boeing, NASA, etc. specifically to those companies.  Those companies would then hire those same white male engineers.  The engineers do the same work in the same building, as if they were hired directly by those companies, but now those white male engineers count toward minority statistics.

NASA will publicly claim that this saves money.  The reality is that those white male engineers make less than they would if they worked directly for LM, Boeing, or NASA, as a cut of their salary goes to the subcontracting company.  Those engineers can never be promoted, as they were hired into that “seat” and not into the parent company.  They also lose their jobs whenever the project they were hired into ends.  In effect, you are asking people with advanced degrees in aerospace engineering to be temp employees so that people of desired races can make money off of their labor.

The situation is far worse than it seems.  Subcontracting employees are not covered by the parent company’s ethics policy, meaning that those employees can be verbally abused; made to work an unlimited amount of time; and terminated with zero discussion, warning, or explanation.  White male engineers have absolutely no legal recourse to address any ethics violations, discrimination, or abuse and have no career path.  Additionally, the subcontracting company is wholly dependent upon the larger company to “use them” as the subcontractor.  If a large company like LM or Boeing wants to abuse a subcontracting employee, any subcontractor company that defends the rights of its employee will find that it gets no future contracts.  

As outlined at this website devoted to ending these policies, the day-to-day environment for an engineer in these positions can be nightmarish.  

Let’s talk money...

Let’s compare today’s programs to some of the early ones at NASA.  The table below shows the program name, the years that program existed, the number of years from program start until the first manned flight, the rough total of vehicles built, the number of missions, and then the total cost of that program with all dollars adjusted for today’s inflation (sources).

As you can see, the average time from inception to manned launch for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo was less than four years.  The Orion program is in its eighteenth year and just recently launched its first unmanned vehicle, with plans to launch a manned mission in the next two years.  Yet the Orion program has already spent roughly two thirds the amount spent on the Apollo capsule (the comparable part).  So it’s taking more than five times as long with higher costs to get fewer results.

Why is this happening? 

The two primary problems are congressional indifference and the racially based system at NASA that incentivizes bloating.  Where previously, an engineer at NASA would do “technical work” and be managed/mentored by an older engineer with technical expertise in that field.  Now that engineer is a subcontractor.  His “technical work” must now support management at the parent company as well as management at his subcontracting company.  Neither of these groups of people are “technical people.”  Some may have degrees, but they often don’t have experience or training in CAD modeling, Finite Element Analysis, design mathematics, or any other field needed to oversee such work or to mentor junior engineers.  So these subcontracting engineers are often being asked to do all the “technical work,” earn less pay, have no career path, and be open to all forms of abuse...while the people in the larger companies and the subcontracting company live off their work.

These practices should be ended — not just because they are wasteful and damaging to the space program, but also because they are patently immoral and unconstitutional.

Image via Raw Pixel.