Lots going on at NASA...

There is a lot going on at NASA. Firings, layoffs, contract cancellations and hints of center reorganizations and maybe even a closure.

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First, it appearts the the new NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, plans on letting go of 20-50 high-level managers at NASA ("NASA Chief to Oust 20").

Senior NASA officials and congressional and aerospace industry sources said yesterday that Griffin wants to clear away entrenched bureaucracy, and build a less political and more scientifically oriented team to implement President Bush's plan to return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them to Mars.

Considering that I have some insight into the NASA organization ("Columbia & Challenger: Organizational Failure at NASA"), I can only hope good things will come of making the organization more science and engineering-oriented.

And the trimming-down doesn't seem to be limited to just staff. Take this report (seen via NASAWatch) that notes that the NASA culture examination initiative has had it's contract cancelled (" NASA cancels $10 million culture change contract"). Seeing as how a central finding of the CAIB was that the NASA organizational environment was not one where information flows freely, especially bad news, this seems to be killing a valuable messenger before it is allowed to speak. From NASAWatch ("How To Avoid Bad News"):

One quick way to avoid hearing bads news about internal NASA processes is to cancel the contract of a company which may be relaying the bad news in the first place. When NASA starts to rely on its own internal, self-managed mechanisms to gauge how things are going in terms of employee attitudes, management culture, etc. - well ... we all know what inevitably happens. Its like breathing your own exhaust.

We also see hints of NASA center reorganizations and maybe even a closure or two in a recent email that Mike Griffin sent to NASA employees ("NASA Internal Memo: Message from Mike"). We see evidence of layoffs and RIFs:

With that perspective, I realize that a number of Centers are dealing with potential, near-term decisions to shape the magnitude and pace of potential civil servant and onsite contractor layoffs. These potential layoffs are due to a number of factors with the agency's budget and strategy for carrying out its missions.

And we see that Griffin is not dropping the effort to reorganize some Centers into "Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, Government Corporations or university consortia."

Finally, note this bizarre statement:

"The government ownership of the intellectual property that sustains our aeronautics research and space exploration journey will be with us always, as long as there is a government. [...] However, I believe the core capability, the core intellectual property that will sustain this journey, must reside within NASA as an organization, and particularly within the NASA Field Centers."

Mike Griffin appears to be quite the IP protectionist... which is odd given the third directive of NASA's charter (from the "National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958"):

provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof;