NASA Administrator Isaacman talks budget issues

With the Artemis mission is largely done with its distractions, the news is going to switch to the annual budget concerns. The least important word there is annual because congress hasn't actually passed an annual budget since 2009, but while they don't pass an actual budget, they pass funding mechanisms by other names, especially "continuing resolutions" - where the phrase "CR" you'll be hearing comes from - and other forms of what I call an LCS budget (LCS = Lie, Cheat, Steal). 

You may have heard some of the dire reports last week about the White House's NASA budget being significantly lower than congress had wanted. In this year's Space Symposium, currently going on this week in Colorado Springs, NASA Administrator Isaacman gave a talk that covered the topic of working to the White House budget, and reported on by the online industry journal Payload. 

The interview is a two screens full of text that would probably print out to two pages if done at printer settings that would yield a magazine-style page, and it's a good interview, but I will respect their ownership of the written words and not just lift everything, but let me start out with an early Question and Answer:

I saw your early findings on the heat shield. Anything else you can share that you’ve already learned post mission?

I had seen the underwater photos of the heat shield as soon as the divers could transmit them. So I knew when that picture was going around on the internet. I was like, “No, there’s no chunk missing, that’s discoloration that got washed away.” The heat shield looked great. So a lot of credit to the JSC, and the folks at Ames, for doing the right work to get us to flight. 

All that aside, if you’re going to wait three and a half years between missions, just replace the heat shield. 

Other findings are super minor. Orion is a very robust vehicle, with lots of redundancy in systems. So a helium leak in ESM [the European Service Module, attached to Orion]—very, very minor.

We had a water-valve issue—one of four that didn’t perform as expected—but there was no issue accessing drinking water. With the data we’re getting right now, I don’t have the early read on why that primary wastewater line was clearly getting clogged. But these are all very fixable things.

There are several things that Isaacman said that just hit a proper chord with me.  When asked about the big picture lunar and deep space things he has talked about publicly, he gave a good answer: “No one at NASA that I’ve spoken to, at any level of the organization, thought it was a good idea to fly Artemis II and wait three years to try and attempt a [Moon] landing. No one thought that was a good idea.” One of Isaacman's first talks was to turn Artemis III from the lunar landing to a mission intended to test out docking with the landing systems and to increase the launch frequency. The Apollo/Saturn V flew much more often than once a year, although there was irregularity and not always “every  3 months.” I believe the pace is part of doing it properly.  

There was something that Isaacman said that I thought was very healthy. When asked about CLD (Commercial LEO Destination) providers being concerned his approach might be wrong he said, “I’m not surprised that CLD providers didn’t like what we had to say. So prove that we got it wrong.” I like the competition of ideas. “You've got a better idea? Prove it!” 

Jared Isaacman during a talk at the Space Symposium. Image credit: NASA

I think his final Q&A is worth excerpting. Or at least the first answer.

How do you politics-proof your Moon plans?

That’s exactly what we are putting in place. Administrations past have thought the right approach was to make a program that is too big to fail. What they didn’t realize is that you can also make it too big to succeed.