Apollo's lesson in trust

Gerry Griffin, a flight director during Apollo missions, learned that critical spaceflight roles must be held by NASA employees who share responsibility for success or failure.

When lightning struck Apollo twelve

During the Apollo twelve launch in nineteen sixty-nine, a Saturn V rocket triggered lightning through electrically charged clouds. Flight controllers and astronaut Alan Bean reset the spacecraft's electrical systems.

“When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry. With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference.”

Contractors took over Mission Control

During the Apollo era, contractors supplemented NASA's workforce but critical Mission Control positions remained NASA employees. By the space shuttle era, many Mission Control jobs had moved to contractors.

Isaacman reverses the outsourcing

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman launched a workforce initiative this year to bring seven thousand five hundred contract positions back into the agency as civil servants to rebuild core competencies.

Griffin welcomes the change

Gerry Griffin applauds Isaacman's plan to restore in-house capability and responsibility, saying it will be better for NASA in the long run despite the massive shift in how the agency operates.

“I applaud Jared's idea to get back to that kind of in-house capability and responsibility.”

Industry opposes the rollout

The largest affected contractors are Amentum, Jacobs Engineering Group, and KBR. They say the workforce model has allowed NASA to succeed for decades and the radical change introduces uncertainty.

Isaacman claims over one billion in savings

Isaacman says early pilots identified more than one hundred million dollars in savings from making employees civil servants, potentially growing to more than one billion dollars over time.

“There are, of course, cost savings from this effort. There are also operational benefits, as contractor structures often include layered management, third-party tools, contractual barriers, and other inefficiencies that can challenge progress.”

Contractors dispute the savings claim

Contracting firms say their overhead is only about two or three percent of an employee's compensation, disputing Isaacman's assertion that contractor structures create significant inefficiencies.

NASA's workforce before and after

Prior to the initiative, NASA had about forty thousand contractors and about fourteen thousand civil servants. Today NASA has about twenty-one thousand civil servants after the conversion began.

Schematic access problem at Kennedy

During Artemis II preparations, NASA controllers at Kennedy Space Center could not directly access rocket schematics due to contractor intellectual property rules, requiring information via Microsoft Teams screen sharing instead.

“You would be sitting there with some tool that's livestreaming someone else's display, trying to see a schematic. How effing absurd is that?”

Safety panel endorses the shift

NASA's independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, chaired by Lieutenant General Susan J. Helms, lauded the workforce initiative at a meeting in late August, finding no critical safety concerns.

“From the panel's perspective, the administrator's directive is a coherent and necessary vision for the future of NASA's workforce.”

Concerns about lost flexibility

Industry groups worry that civil servants have more protections than contractors, limiting NASA's ability to adjust workforce size quickly if the agency changes direction or priorities shift.

Disruption for individual employees

Most converted employees can remain at their current location, but contractors must give up existing jobs for NASA positions and cannot continue working for their contract firms, creating churn and uncertainty.