14 DAY TRIAL // Andrew Thomas, four-time spaceflight pilot, took a swing at the American space agency recently, when be created a short video clip and uploaded it on YouTube. The home-made film depicts the difficulties innovative people have to face while trying to get their idea across the management segment, for implementation. Institutional inertia and extreme bureaucracy make it extremely hard for anyone trying to bring something new to the table to advance through the ranks, and significantly contribute to the overall design.
The facts presented in the clip are not fictional, but are inspired from real-life events, which makes everything even more sad and disappointing. A young engineer attempts to bring her new sketches to her managers, but then institutional inertia and compartmentalization kicks in, and everybody keeps telling her that it's not within her job description to create such innovation. In real life, the same holds true. Project and branch managers are too scared to step out of the line, even if a new idea could significantly lower the cost of the entire project or could make a rocket design a lot safer.
The 10 minute-long film was, however, approved by NASA, following a private screening with the management department. The main target of the new video is the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, where those in command seem less than willing to accept new ideas of development, out of fear of not annoying or upsetting various other contractors or people from the upper hierarchy. "The point about the video is it's not fiction. All of those scenes are real. They've actually happened to people to various degrees," Thomas told Space.
The idea for the satirical movie has been synthesized from various accounts of JSC engineers and contractors, who have complained about the difficulties they encounter while trying to get a new idea across, even if the idea is better than the current approach, and it saves NASA money. What's worst is that they don't even get the satisfaction of getting their work rejected on scientific reasons. They are simply told by bureaucrats to resume their normal work, and that's unfitting for the world's leading space agency.