NASA realigns in response to commission’s recommendations

NASA is restructuring its operations in response to a presidential commission that studied ways to implement U.S. space policy, but is making no promises that it will adopt a recommendation to turn all 10 of its field installations into federally funded research and development centers.

"We're attempting to wire ourselves for success," NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said as he unveiled his plans for the agency's "transformation" last week. It was a nod to the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, which contended in a June 16 report that without radical change, the space agency cannot meet its latest, biggest challenge.

The report, "A Journey to Inspire, Innovate and Discover," found the agency's mission-focused enterprises too numerous and its mission support functions too diffuse. It said NASA must realign them in order to carry out President Bush's vision of a sustained and affordable series of robotic and human expeditions beginning at the moon and reaching deeper into the solar system.

On Aug. 1, NASA will consolidate the work of six enterprises into four mission directorates -- exploration systems, space operations, science, and aeronautics research. It will combine 13 administrative functions into six mission support offices: finance, information, engineering, institutions and management, legal counsel, and communications. (To see the agency's new organizational chart, click here. To see the old chart, click here.)

NASA's education efforts and safety functions will enjoy new prominence in the organizational scheme, reflecting their overall importance to the agency. To improve the decision-making process, NASA will create an advanced planning directorate, a strategic planning council, and a chief operating officer council.

While the realignment complies with a Moon-Mars Commission suggestion that NASA start by streamlining, it does not address a key recommendation to let universities or not-for-profit organizations operate nine more of the agency's field centers. NASA already has one federally funded research and development center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Edward "Pete" Aldridge, a former Defense undersecretary who chaired the commission, says its members made the field center recommendation after seriously considering a military-style base realignment and closure process for NASA. "We clearly saw the political implications of trying to do that. The report would have been burned the first day it arrived," he said at a June 17 hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee's subcommittee on science technology and space.

The commission also recommended elevating space exploration efforts to the Cabinet level, through a multi-agency steering council appointed by President Bush.

In the coming months, O'Keefe said, NASA will examine the details of the report to "determine how and if" it will implement all the advice, and then present proposals to Congress.