~Jon

If the former, here’s something that might be politically feasible, based on some prior comments here.

1. Cap NASA’s payroll and HR overhead.

2. Offer to pay any company that hires a NASA transferee the equivalent of that transferee’s full cost to the government (including social security, benefits, etc.) for a period of 2-3 years. Make this money non-taxed.

3. Make this offer applicable to start-ups of NASA employees (i.e., NASA employees create startup, quit NASA, go to work at the start-up, the govt. pays the start-up).

4. Do *not* require that the recipient company use the money for salary and salary expenses. If former NASA employees want to work for miminal salaries while using the money to fund their start-up, so be it.

This proposal would allow a fairly continual churn of the more entrepeneurial employees at NASA.

-Adam Greenwood

-Adam Greenwood

-Adam Greenwood

You do not want NASA civil servants working in a commercial start-up. There are some, like Ken, who have the drive to do it, but most civil servants are at NASA because they like that culture.

When these NASA people go back to NASA after a year, they will be better prepared to have strategies to compete with the commercial sector using government funds. You can imagine how upset your investors in Masten will be when they see NASA issue an SBIR that will fund 20 new competitors to Masten.

NASA people are not losing their jobs with the Shuttle transition; it is the contractors at United Space Alliance that NASA has always hated (since Dan Goldin helped create USA in the mid-1990’s to lower NASA payroll) who will lose.

NASA is doing an extremely poor job of spending tax payers money, and it is not neccessarily their fault. The Shuttle transition is an opportunity for NASA, and no one should feel sorry for them, especially when NASA does not execute with their $17 Billion annual budget. Even if ARES I and CEV are successful in 2015, NASA would still probably have inferior capability to the dramatically less funded Russians, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, US Commercial, and possibly Indian manned spaceflight programs.

Is your idea any different than the NASA HQ IPP solicitation that went out on May 17 of this year? See http://tinyurl.com/58w5sm (I got the link from NASAWatch) where the press release says “The goal of the Innovation Transfusion project is to increase the flow of new ideas into NASA by increasing connections between NASA employees and outside organizations that are creative leaders in areas that could benefit NASA missions.”

Just wondering!

Ken

This could be cool for the people as they would also get good contacts and might transfer for a real job later if they leave NASA. Or the other way round.

At least over here you can buy research time from the government technical research agency, VTT, and many technology projects have some joint venture parts.

Not in personell but in business tactics, this would seem to have a similar result as prison work release. Having worked just one person in this manner, I can see some of the same benefits and problems from the employer point of view.

The guy I hired was willing to take almost any job at almost any wages to get out of the work release facility. Some of the highly motivated NASA people would probably feel the same way toward fast moving start ups. Some wouldn’t, and they could stay as they would not be assetts at any price.

The unwilling to rock the boat mentality could be similar. One didn’t want to do anything including disagree that would get him sent back to prison, the others wouldn’t want to go back to a doomed agency. This would be nearly fatal to innovative thinking even if they knew you were wrong based on their personal experience.

The tax breaks and cheap controlled labor make work release employees very desirable in some industries, at the expense of entry level positions for non criminals. The cheap via subsidy aerospace workers with the control factor of them being tied to a doomed agency could make them more desirable for top down companies that entrepreneurial start ups.

The externships would be disruptive to a fledgling industry, the question is, of which kind. In the best case it could be like the thousands of aircraft dumped on the market after the world wars, a near freebe creating massive demand and improvement. On the other end it could be like the wars on poverty, drugs, and illiteracy.

As a counter suggestion, also politically unfeasible. Put an agency termination date of 5-10 years in the future. During the count down to dissolution, any NASA employee that finds another job in his own voting district gets a second paycheck from the agency as a percentage of the time remaining to the end. As the end approaches, the second paychecks get smaller until they disappear. They keep working with high relative pay in the voting district of that congressman through a few more elections.

Just in fun sorta, I don’t see anything like this happening.