Washington – NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is calling for a culture change in the aerospace industry, accusing players of using too many resources and taking too much time to accomplish things.
“We have too many people doing every job we do,” said Griffin, speaking at the Inside Aerospace conference organized by the Reston, Va.-based American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation.
“Everywhere we look, we see cost growth and overruns” such as those experienced on the James Webb Space Telescope program, he said.
“We spend so much money on things which ought to cost less that we don’t do other things,” Griffin said. “That’s every bit as much a failure as breaking a piece of hardware.
“What we want is a robust, vital aerospace industry that has the kind of turnaround and the kind of high-tech image and capability that we see in Silicon Valley today, appropriately tempered for the requirements of government programs.”
Griffin’s comments come as Congress reviews NASA’s $16.8 billion budget request. NASA is likely to keep getting the same amount of funding it has gotten in the past, Griffin said, even though the current management paradigm is expensive.
“If we want to see the space enterprise survive, it can’t continue to cost what it costs,” he said. “We, the country, don’t get enough back for what we spend.”
Griffin also took a swipe at the aerospace industry’s ponderous management culture.
“We allow people way too much time to make decisions,” he said. “Everybody in your company is not a stakeholder on a given decision.”
Making decisions by committee diffuses responsibility for the decision, he said.
“We’ve removed quite a few such committees at NASA,” Griffin said. “If I find more, I’ll remove those, too.”
These are cultural matters, Griffin said.
“We are the enemy,” he said.
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-820-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
