{"id":45979,"date":"2023-08-19T01:53:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T17:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasas-buildings-are-even-older-than-its-graying-workforce\/"},"modified":"2023-08-19T01:53:03","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T17:53:03","slug":"nasas-buildings-are-even-older-than-its-graying-workforce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasas-buildings-are-even-older-than-its-graying-workforce\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s buildings are even older than its graying workforce"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s big news when a hurricane damages buildings at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center or hits a rocket factory in New Orleans. There\u2019s damage that needs repairing immediately so missions can move forward to launch.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a deeper problem with NASA\u2019s infrastructure. Erik Weiser, director of NASA\u2019s facilities and real estate division, told a blue-ribbon National Academies panel Thursday that the agency\u2019s budget for maintenance and construction is \u201cwholly underfunded.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his presentation to the National Academies committee, Weiser described NASA\u2019s infrastructure as in an \u201cincreasing state of decline.\u201d There\u2019s a mismatch between what NASA needs to maintain or upgrade its facilities and the dollars the agency devotes to those efforts. The maintenance gap is $259 million per year using NASA\u2019s most conservative estimate, or more than $600 million if NASA followed the maintenance practices of the commercial industry, Weiser said.<\/p>\n

And the gap is growing. That has caused NASA\u2019s facilities to \u201cdeteriorate over time,\u201d Weiser said. \u201cThe majority of our facilities are beyond their useful life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trend is not good\u201d<\/h2>\n

Weiser said 83 percent of NASA\u2019s facilities are beyond their design life. That\u2019s well above the percentage of NASA\u2019s workers eligible for retirement, about 25 percent, which itself a significant worry for the space agency.<\/p>\n

Funding for facility maintenance comes from disparate parts of NASA. Some of the money comes from specific mission directorates responsible for ensuring launch pads, test stands, and other facilities are in good shape for operations at NASA\u2019s field centers. Other resources come from a general overhead fund.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach center knows what their most important facilities are for success, so when they see an issue, it\u2019s all hands on deck to fix that problem so they don\u2019t impact the mission,\u201d Weiser said.<\/p>\n

But triaging maintenance needs can\u2019t go on forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re deferring projects year in and year out, and over the last four years, we\u2019ve had to defer 78 projects,\u201d Weiser said. \u201cAll that does is increase the risk on the maintenance side because a lot of those projects that were deferred were repair projects, whether it\u2019s horizontal infrastructure, such as your electrical distribution, potable water, sanitary sewer, or it could be some other projects, major renovations to buildings and things like that.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout doing those projects, there\u2019s more pressure on the maintenance side for unplanned failures that we have to take care of,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd many of those unplanned failures could lead to mission risk and missed milestones, and we don\u2019t want that to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiser briefed a National Academies panel chartered to examine the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA\u2019s long-term strategic goals and objectives. Thursday\u2019s briefing was one in a series of public meetings the committee will hold before issuing a final report with recommendations to improve the situation. NASA leadership, lawmakers, and White House budget officials are expected to review the report.<\/p>\n

The majority of NASA\u2019s facilities across the country are rated \u201cmarginal to poor\u201d in condition, Weiser said. \u201cThis is not the laser table or a test stand in a building. This is the building that supports that test capability inside. \u2026 You can have a world-class microscope and materials lab, but if the building goes down, that microscope is useless to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This chart presented by Erik Weiser, director of NASA\u2019s facilities and real estate division, shows the agency\u2019s rising maintenance requirements compared to declining budgets.<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

NASA is seeking to reduce its maintenance burden in a few important ways. One is by demolishing structures that are no longer needed for future missions. The agency has identified more than 700 facilities that can be torn down, which will reduce NASA\u2019s maintenance requirements by several tens of millions of dollars, according to Weiser.<\/p>\n

But NASA doesn\u2019t have the funding to quickly demolish all those facilities. It will likely take five to 10 years to get rid of them all, Weiser said.<\/p>\n

NASA is also turning over surplus facilities to commercial companies and other users. A couple of high-profile examples include NASA\u2019s leasing of Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center to SpaceX, and the turning over of the old space shuttle runway to Space Florida, an enterprise aimed at luring aerospace businesses to the state. That shifts the cost of maintenance onto other entities.<\/p>\n

Kelly Elliott, NASA\u2019s acting chief human capital officer, said about 60 percent of the agency\u2019s employees work in aging facilities rated as fair or worse. That will affect employee experience and work efficiency, and Elliott considers it a \u201csignificant risk\u201d for NASA\u2019s workforce.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

The National Academies panel is chaired by Norm Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin who led two high-level reviews of NASA\u2019s space programs in 1990 and 2009. He said in Thursday\u2019s meeting that NASA\u2019s aging infrastructure could put off job candidates.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get people out of college that you\u2019re trying to hire, and so are other companies trying to hire them, and they\u2019ve been working at the leading edge of technology,\u201d Augustine said. \u201cThey go out to visit the site at NASA that they\u2019ve been hired to work at, and it\u2019s like going back 40 years in their field. In many cases that I\u2019ve seen, that\u2019s kind of a fatal circumstance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiser didn\u2019t disagree.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been in some of the new facilities that SpaceX and Blue (Origin) have built, and others,\u201d he said. \u201cI look at our facilities, and I love them all, but if I want to inspire the next generation of our workforce \u2026 we need better facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a trade-off with NASA\u2019s maintenance and construction funding. Does the agency repair its existing infrastructure or build new facilities?<\/p>\n

In some cases, it\u2019s an easy decision. Alongside the state of Florida and the US Department of Transportation, NASA is co-funding the construction of a new bridge that serves as a primary access point for driving onto the Kennedy Space Center. Satellites, rockets, and other hardware regularly transit this road, which previously had a drawbridge dating to 1964.<\/p>\n

NASA is also replacing a causeway that is the only access to launch pads at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, where Northrop Grumman and Rocket Lab launch their missions. In the not-so-distant future, NASA is interested in building a new payload processing facility in Florida for nuclear space missions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a goal to go to Mars,\u201d Weiser said. \u201cHave we really thought about the infrastructure we need within the agency to ensure that we can get to Mars? It\u2019s not just about building the rocket that can get there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s big news when a hurricane damages buildings at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center or hits a rocket factory in New Orleans. There\u2019s damage that needs repairing immediately so missions can move forward to launch. But there\u2019s a deeper problem with NASA\u2019s infrastructure. Erik Weiser, director of NASA\u2019s facilities and real estate division, told a blue-ribbon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[303,190],"class_list":["post-45979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-infrastructure","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}