Aldridge Commission Report Leakage

06/10/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

(Via Transterrestrial Musings) Space.com's Brian Berger has a report that contains some of what will appear in the Aldridge Commission report that is due to be released on Wednesday, June 16th.

The report specifically has the following recommendations:

• (Re) Creation of the “Space Exploration Steering Council” which reports to the President.
• Turning NASA Centers in to Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). This allows for much more flexible staffing and local partnering. It also removes the employees from the federal payroll and makes them part of the local partner organization. JPL is an FFRDC and all of its employees are on the University of California’s payroll.
• To quote directly: __“NASA allow the private industry "to assume the primary role of providing services to NASA, and most immediately in accessing low-Earth orbit.”__ I’m not sure what this means without a lot of detail. Especially as it concerns what parts of FAR apply.
• Again, quoting directly: __NASA and Congress work together to create three new organizations within the space agency: a technical advisory board, a independent cost estimating organization, and a research and technology organization that sponsors high risk technology development efforts.__ I think this is a result of the “NASA needs its own version of DARPA”. The Technical Advisory Board is really vague to me so I’m not sure what that is. The cost estimating organization is definitely needed. But for both it and the Advisory board to mean anything they will have to be outside the NASA organizational structure, either reporting directly to the Administrator or to the Steering Council.

So far all of this is right in line with expectations. With the exception of the Technical Advisory Board for NASA, most of it was predicted by the Committee during their last meeting.

Oh, and the name for the report will be “A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover”.