Losing the Forest for the Trees in NASA Exploration Systems Development

NASA's Bill Hill discusses previous space exploration achievements - July 14, 2015

Sandwiched between Pluto celebrations today, I attended the monthly National Space Club luncheon. Today's guest speaker was Bill Hill, NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development.

We all know that engineers aren't always the best public speakers. Sometimes the people with the best technical knowledge have difficulty translating that information to an effective presentation. The experts in the room probably didn't learn anything new from today's talk, and in fact a few of us caught some errors. (This Jupiter/Mars mix-up caught by my friend Ryan was my favorite.) But we made the best of it.

Although NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto got a brief mention in the beginning, the talk stuck to NASA's current exploration talking points, especially the “journey to Mars.” Science enables exploration and exploration enables science, he said. But we are limited by the top line, that is, funding and budgets. Along those lines, international partnerships are the key to sustainability.

The speaker briefly mentioned the major lesson of the International Space Station (really, all space missions): what works on Earth doesn't work so well in space. We are building capability and experience. He focused on the Orion exploration vehicle and NASA's work to build a better booster. In an audience question about how well Congress responds to NASA, he stated that we need to prove our worth every day.

One thing that struck me about this talk is that we can get lost in the details about what we're working on and forget the bigger picture and purpose. Today should be a day when every NASA employee should be celebrating the success of a NASA mission to explore the solar system, especially someone with the word exploration in his title, and yet he sounded like even mentioning it was an obligation. He wasn't excited about Mars either, it seemed like he was forced to mention it because “journey to Mars” is the current NASA buzzphrase. The only thing that seemed to excite the engineer was talk about the Orion test launch last December and the rocket booster testing.

But why do we care about a new spacecraft or a new rocket? What good is a new exploration system without the spirit of exploration? In pure engineering thought, his concern is: how do we get this system to work the way we want it. I come at it from scientist thought: what do we want this system to do, and why? His colleagues may only care about the how, but the rest of the world wants to know the what and the why. And so do I.