// ARS TECHNICA — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants?
“The administrator’s directive is a coherent and necessary vision for the future.”
As a flight director during NASA’s Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust your colleagues in the trenches.
“When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry,” Griffin said in an interview. “With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference.”
This really happened in 1969. Griffin’s “Gold Team” in Mission Control led the launch of the Apollo 12 mission, when the ascending Saturn V rocket triggered lightning as it soared through electrically charged clouds. The lightning strike disrupted the Apollo spacecraft’s electrical systems, which flight controllers and astronaut Alan Bean scrambled to reset. The rocket and spacecraft survived, going on to complete the second lunar landing.
During the Apollo era, Griffin said, contractors were brought in to supplement NASA’s workforce. But the positions in Mission Control remained NASA employees, and that was important because the space agency ultimately had responsibility—success or failure—for what happened during its missions.
After he left NASA, that began to change. “Midway through the space shuttle era, I was surprised to find that a lot of the jobs in Mission Control had gone to contractors,” he said.
Griffin doesn’t want to denigrate contractors. They play a critical role in extending the agency’s expertise for subsystems built for the space agency. But over time, often as a way to increase headcount at the space agency without raising the NASA civil service count, critical jobs were outsourced to contractors.
This year, in a move that has largely gone under the radar, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to reverse this trend. As part of his “workforce initiative,” Isaacman is bringing 7,500 contract positions back into the agency, making them civil servants to rebuild what he calls “core competencies.”
This is a massive shift in how NASA does business, and it’s not without controversy. But Griffin said he welcomes the change and believes it will be better for the agency in the long run. “I applaud Jared’s idea to get back to that kind of in-house capability and responsibility,” he said.