5

Addressing Programmatic Issues

The codified elements of organizational control, policy, procedures and practices, as well as programmatics, organization design, and reporting structure—responsibility, authority, and accountability—determine opportunities for success. Data and actions on these areas are discussed in this chapter.

ESTABLISHING SUPPORTIVE FUNDING

A healthy research community is funded.

Funding and Appropriations

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is funded at approximately $7.6 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2022, an increase over FY2021 appropriations.¹ The budget supports more than 105 missions, including 45 currently preparing for launch and 60 in operation. As stated previously, this funds ~10,000 U.S. scientists at NASA and in universities, industry, and government laboratories with more than 3,000 competed research awards. While this is a large number, the estimated space, Earth, and biological and physical sciences science research community is much larger.² The committee did not develop specific conclusions concerning the allocation of research funds between hard and soft funding, but visibility between directed funding and competed funding would be of interest to the communities of scientists assessing the state of the profession in the decadal surveys.

For FY2020, 92 percent of NASA’s budget came from congressional appropriations, either for the current year or from prior years.³ External funding for NASA comes from revenue agreements. This $2.2 billion of revenue is derived from NASA’s authority to provide goods, services, or use of facilities to other entities on a reimbursable basis (see Figure 5-1). Generally, appropriated funding is assessed year-to-year and specific programs may be

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¹ Congressional Research Service, 2022, “NASA Appropriations and Authorizations: A Fact Sheet,” R43419 updated March 29, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43419.

² Although there may be overlaps, membership in the professional societies provides some insights into the size of the community. AAS has about 7,000 members, AGU about 60,000 (though significant, 30 percent are international members), AMS about 13,000 members; APS has a Division of Astrophysics with about 3,000 members.

³ NASA, FY2020 Agency Financial Report, Washington, DC, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_fy2020_afr.pdf, accessed November 8, 2021.

debated as the agency’s funding is considered discretionary. Year-to-year refocus and change is difficult when the long cycle natures of both shifting culture to embracing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and performing space, Earth, and biological and physical sciences are involved.

The committee noted the relative dominance of specific NASA centers in support of various science and research scope. As captured in SMD’s recent study funded in 2020, “Agency Science Workforce Study,” to develop workforce strategies targeted toward the broad science community, 47 percent of SMD’s total budget was allocated to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC; 2020 data); 31 percent went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL; 2020 data), with Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, Langley Research Center (LaRC), and Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) each around 4-5 percent; and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Ames Research Center (ARC), Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC), and Glenn Research Center (GRC) each around 1 percent (2020 data) (NASA 2021a). Fluctuations are reflected in NASA’s budget and are associated with the introduction or completion of major flagship missions, major programs, testing, and other scope. Of course the data reflect directed funding to support missions.

NASA makes decisions regarding allocating work and projects to its field centers based on many considerations, some of which are decided at executive branch and congressional levels. The agency has made decisions based on its own workforce needs as well as the expertise needed to successfully develop innovative spacecraft. Even if the agency decided to make decisions about allocating projects to centers based on the health and vitality of its research communities, NASA’s ability to do so is substantially constrained.

Funding the Space and Earth Sciences Research Community

While essentially all SMD research funding is allocated by competitive merit review, SMD has two acquisition models for space and Earth sciences mission and research selection—directed and competed.

Directed missions are typically more expensive missions directed to a specific NASA center to meet strategic goals and are most often the larger missions that reflect the guidance of the decadal surveys and other advisory groups based on high value science targets. Research competition occurs via announcements of opportunity (AOs) for an instrument selection on a directed mission.

Competed scope falls into two broad categories—competed missions or principal investigator (PI)-led missions and solicited research. PI-led missions are competed from proposals solicited from the community and reflect the

elements of a complete mission, including hardware and instrument designs, teams of contributors from universities, industry, federal laboratories, international partners, and small businesses. Research funding on mission teams is provided competitively through a competed mission AO.

An assessment of the quality of science obtained from these multiple categories of acquisition generally concluded that the diversity of processes and funding supported good science across the board, even considering the uneven nature of the funding and proposal processes between categories (Bitten et al. 2016). As such, PI missions represent a great opportunity for new entrants into the research community to participate in NASA’s science endeavors. SMD solicits basic and applied research through AOs for specific spaceflight missions, and the annual omnibus NASA Research Announcement (NRA), Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES). Contracting mechanisms include contracts (particularly for AOs), grants, and cooperative agreements (limited applications, generally when the research is performed in close cooperation with NASA). Overall, SMD’s budgets are consistent with its emerging science priorities driven by its different missions, with 60 percent going to basic and applied research and 40 percent to experimental development (NSF 2022).

The ROSES announcement for FY2021 anticipated that SMD would receive 5,000 proposals—from educational, industrial, and not-for-profit organizations, as well as federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), NASA centers, University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), and small businesses in different sectors. Based on available budgets and past experiences, SMD anticipated funding 1,250 of these proposals. The approximate breakout of proposal awards by science area is shown in Figure 5-2 (NASA 2022a). Diversity in the sources of these proposals provides opportunities for new entrants into the NASA science community.

The committee focused on the opportunities introduced by the entrance of participants new to NASA funding through the competed avenues made possible through ROSES and AOs. These need to be carefully monitored, as they serve as gatekeeping functions to the emerging researcher pool. The unique challenges of the emerging researcher pool merit closer examination of research funding. Two areas were specifically explored—data to assess the impacts of soft versus hard research funding on the health of the research community and data to track and address the effects of proposal selection percentages.

Hard Funding Versus Soft Funding

Starting with definitions—in research, hard funding typically refers to “salaried positions,” where a salary can be expected as long as a researcher, scientist, or engineer, etc. has a working contract, with funding provided by an institution, whereas soft funding is generally contingent on grants or other temporal funding.

Under circumstances where consistent internal institutional funding is available for salaries, “hard funding positions” can be established. In universities these positions are generally reserved for tenure-track positions with funds derived from tuition, services, philanthropy—for example, endowed chairs, etc. Civil servant research positions or positions at institutions (directed missions) are also “hard money” positions, generally driven by the organization or company charter, longer term contracts, or strategic plan. These positions provide long-term hard money career employment for mid-career scientists. With the exception of the NASA and FFRDC/UARC workforce, and the SMD resources that fund larger missions, the significant majority of the funding for space, Earth, biological and physical sciences research is soft funding through ROSES. An overview of hard versus funding by science discipline is included in the FY2022 President’s Budget Request Rationale for Congress (NASA 2022a). Increased hard funding for NASA science would mean shifting already constrained grant funding directly to institutions, an action nearly universally perceived as negative. The ratio of directed dollars allocated to community-competed research is an important metric and guidance for grants by science discipline is covered in the decadal surveys, with increased grant funding tied to the important role it plays in development and sustainment.

ROSES grants are awarded annually and generally last for 3-5 years. Fall FY2021 awards averaged $155,000 per year (NASA 2022a). SMD’s approach to funding research using grants awarded through the ROSES program provides a distinct advantage to research by regularly refreshing science objectives and calling for the most talented and capable researchers to respond to immediate and critical research priorities using processes that allow for competing ideas, new and motivated entrants, rigorous peer review, and ranked research. The flexibility allows for extending its research competencies beyond NASA’s facilities—research-as-a-service model. Of course, grants to universities also support and cultivate the next generation of space, Earth, biological and physical sciences (Benderly 2010). The committee was conscious of the work of the decadal surveys, which spent considerably more time and effort addressing subjects such as appropriate levels of research and analysis (R&A) funding, which constitutes the majority of “soft money” funding in their disciplines.

While agile, concerns with the grant-based research model are associated with the burdens it places on the burgeoning research community (Benderly 2010; LeClere 2012; Smith 2007).

• 80-100 percent of salary for postdocs is often funded by soft money. While managed differently by various institutions, these positions may require pursuing grants “regularly and with vigor” (LeClere 2012). Junior personnel do research to keep costs low. Postdoctoral salaries are depressed, driving a need for multiple grants to support a professional wage.
• The cycle of grant writing, often multiple simultaneous grants, is mandatory and a career “feature,” because an aspiring academic research career requires grants, papers, citations, reviews to keep small research teams together, etc.

The health of the research community outside NASA, which is dependent on soft money support acquired through the funding of successful proposals, is affected by the probability of funding and the type of research that is supported. Too high a success rate can lead to complacency; too low to disillusionment and to talented researchers leaving the field. Both extremes can result in science proposals that are too conservative and aim for low-risk science. Finding the “sweet spot” is hard and may be best addressed by charging a “committee of visitors”⁴ to review past proposals—successful and unsuccessful—with the benefit of scientific hindsight in order to divine “lessons learned.” Additionally, a metric to judge proposals could be “high-risk, high reward.”

Some of the data to assess the potential impacts of soft funding on the space, Earth, biological and physical sciences research could be obtained by accessing data currently in the NASA databases. For example, using the NASA NSSC Grants Status search capability,⁵ a non-statistical, random review of multiple Principal Investigators with awards across the United States showed multiple active grants per PI/Co-I (NASA 2022a). These data indicate an opportunity to assess the risk of potential implications to the health of the emerging researcher com-

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⁴ The “Committee of Visitors” is a National Science Foundation (NSF) tool to obtain the expertise of external experts in providing advice on NSF programs. See National Science Foundation, “Committee of Visitors (COV),” https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/activities/cov.

⁵NASA, 2021, “Grant Status Form,” https://www.nssc.nasa.gov/grantstatus.

munity—for example, churn associated with excessive grant applications, scope overload diluting PI focus, etc. For example, if research success rates are 5-15 percent, grant writing to support phased awards could generate a significant burden, potentially impacting quality of science, personal career longevity, etc. The extent to which the community is actually performing research or developing missions, rather than writing and reviewing proposals is an indicator of community health.

IMPROVING THE PROCESS FOR SOLICITATION AND REVIEW OF HIGH-QUALITY PROPOSALS

NASA’s R&A programs represent a major source of support for the U.S. science community. The proposal preparation and review process, selection rates tied to funding, and improvement opportunities associated with proposal resubmission serve as critical gatekeeping processes to the community demographics. SMD has recently announced steps to improve the R&A proposal and review process, including trialing dual anonymous peer review (Byrne et al. 2021). Recent SMD acquisition efforts also include no due date proposals championed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve proposal quality and also acceptance rates and potentially greater access to NASA funding. The New Investigator Program (NIP) element was initiated to support a larger cohort of investigators to better support early career investigators.

A non-referenced plot of proposal selections versus grade, Figure 5-3, is included on the SMD website.⁶ The plot supports the observation that SMD selects the higher rated proposals, but it also indicates there is a wide range of quality, with a majority of proposals with low grades and it also indicates, among other things, that not all proposals graded as “Excellent” get funded (NASA 2022a). These data are generally not reported, but the data are useful in conveying proposal risk rates, consistent causes for limited quality and opportunities to improve the proposal process, even if there is some percentage of selection criteria which may need to remain confidential. Anecdotally, organizations like JPL and the Planetary Science Institute perform internal peer reviews prior to proposal submittals. This feedback loop reduces churn, cost and proves instructive to the candidate PI teams. Whereas smaller institutions may not have this capability, the possibilities of partnering to improve these data may be of interest to SMD.

If team-based solutions that bridge both scientific domains, and potentially diverse researcher/PI skill levels are identified as useful tools, research solicitations need to incentivize these approaches. These solutions are generally more complex and will require effort to organize and conduct successfully (NRC 2011a).

THE SPACE AND EARTH SCIENCES RESEARCH COMMUNITY HARD FUNDING

When considering the space and Earth sciences pathways that SMD influences, whereas SMD does not significantly drive the K-12 entry pathways into space and Earth sciences, SMD plays a very significant role in the

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⁶ NASA, “Plots of Grades vs. Who Gets Selected.” NASA Science, https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/grant-stats/a-plot-of-gradesvs-who-gets-selected.

evolution of space science and Earth science careers from higher education through the completion of careers in these disciplines. Strong competed mission and research grant processes ensure development of not only current and future research leadership but also ensure a healthy and vibrant supplier base capable of providing key technologies—for example, sensors, optical comms, coronagraphs, sample return, computing, and data management, etc., to complement, support, and drive the accomplishments of the research community. Much like the importance of broader impacts in an NSF proposal, it is important to recognize that training, of both undergraduate and graduate students, in these key technologies is an important aspect of competed mission and research grant proposals. As mentioned previously, this process flow is augmented by directed programs at GSFC, ARC, MSFC, LaRC, and GRC to provide unique capabilities necessary to support discovery, with competition for specific elements—for example, instruments.

MAINTAINING CONTINUED SUPPORT, ADVOCACY, AND FOCUS THROUGH CHANGE

This section discusses the opportunities to enable consistency of science trajectories, or at least communicate and forecast risks through data visualization with a goal of perhaps securing multi-year support for important efforts.

RESILIENCE TO EMERGING CHALLENGES

As discussed in Chapter 2, health and vitality of a community includes its ability to move forward in the face of adverse circumstances or other surprises. Responsiveness to address a spectrum of issues is best developed not only through its workforce, but through (1) strategic tools that support visibility to challenges, (2) strategic planning to address potential downsides, and (3) robust continual learnings. Strategic tools like a dashboard to track science priorities over time to assess aging critical skills, aging capabilities, vulnerable facilities, etc., support science continuity across multiple domains in the face of unforeseen challenges. From a funding perspective, SMD, like all federal organizations and departments, continues to operate in a highly constrained budgetary environment. Difficult choices, competing priorities, emergent challenges, like a global pandemic, will vie for investment—and

will likely change over time. A good example of a fundamental change to plans is the recent pandemic. SMD is responding through newly developing studies—for example, the recently released “Rapid Response and Novel Research in Earth Science” (RRNES) of ROSES 2020 as an opportunity to propose investigations which make innovative use of NASA satellite data to address regional or global environmental, economic, and/or societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tools that enable visibility to change in priority and the impacts on various resources and risks to future objectives are critical to understanding as well as forecasting to the science community.

Space missions are complex in design and difficult to build. They take multiple years to complete and would probably benefit from stable multi-year funding. Yet, there are drawbacks—primarily the lack of public oversight, and it is nearly impossible to know the total cost of a unique project that has not been attempted before.⁷ Annual funding based on near-term milestones is the simplest way to achieve the long-term goals, and NASA has been very successful in accomplishing complex missions. Some missions in development have been canceled. In some cases, these cancelations were due to overruns in other missions. As this uneven funding cadence potentially impacts missions, it can and does impact efforts focused specifically on workforce vitality.

There has been much discussion on the benefit of multi-year appropriations. For example, the Department of Defense (DoD) has developed a 5-year Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). Funding NASA, or even special initiatives or programs within NASA, for multiple years, rather than annually, might provide more stability and come closer to matching and synchronizing with the space and Earth science decadal surveys. This would also allow SMD to adopt the mantra used by NASA Space Ops, “Constancy of Purpose,” when they were seeking to gain congressional support for the Commercial Human Space Flight Program.

Data visualization has proven effective for decision making, strategic focus and assessment of unintended consequences, particularly when actions include social implications (Kerzner 2017; Sarikaya et al. 2019). Tools emphasizing the opportunities and risks of funding cycles may be helpful to SMD. For example, a data visualization tool that captures the FY2022 budget request⁸ could track requests, authorizations, and expenditures across the SMD.

In addition, visualization should capture the kind of science that seeks long term variation and change—for example, climate science, or that requires long term investment in human resources and collaboration—for example, interdisciplinary science, to ensure they are not disincentivized in favor of science that appears to produce more immediate returns. These assessments must also recognize that in the near term, minority scholars are less well funded than their counterparts (Bol et al. 2018).

Input from the science communities helps drive the prioritization process for funding and developing scientific missions of the greatest interest to the community. In 2020, SMD deviated from the traditional Science Plan and developed a 2020-2024 Vision for Scientific Excellence, “where four cross-cutting priorities and accompanying strategies that reflect SMD shared values and are directly responsive to changes in the broader ecosystem.”⁹ This document intentionally sets priorities and strategies to focus attention on those areas where the greatest impact can be achieved and establish a shared sense of understanding of SMD values. Although it would be ideal to develop an integrated science plan across SMD to fully evaluate and assess the portfolio for balance, differences in budget, external influences, and other priorities make that impossible. Of course, the decadal surveys and other studies provide opportunities to balance the individual science disciplines’ research, but visualizing progress and opportunities of the long view strategy, whether for science or workforce vitality could be beneficial, potentially supporting multi-year funding requests.

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⁷ There is an explicit proposal in the Astro2020 decadal survey to conduct a Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program, which could reduce some of this uncertainty.

⁸NASA, 2022, “FY 2022 Budget Request,” https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2022_budget_summary.pdf.

⁹NASA, 2020, Science 2020-2024: A Vision for Science Excellence, https://science.nasa.gov/science-red/s3fs-public/atoms/files/2020-2024_Science.pdf.

DEVELOPING SYNERGIES WITH INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES, OTHER U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, AND DOMESTIC PARTNERS

Both SMD and NASA overall have included collaboration and synergies with other agencies, public-private partnerships with industry and open science as strategic goals. The opportunities include better science, encouraging new entrants, broader community outreach and global problem resolution. Visible data to capture progress on these fronts would inform progress and potential opportunities.

International Collaboration

Space and Earth science is a global enterprise involving cooperation and collaboration among all space-faring nations. Most space science missions are intrinsically multinational. NASA has an almost unique opportunity to demonstrate that scientists from different countries and cultures can work together productively, combining diverse backgrounds and perspectives for a greater good. In addition, there is the opportunity to develop partnerships that produce research results that have genuine benefits to both partners.

For example, as reported during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference meetings, the world faces many substantial and potentially existential challenges which will require global responses with strong scientific and technical components. NASA is also likely to be even more heavily involved in monitoring and interpreting global, environmental change using new instrumentation, detailed scientific modeling, and machine learning. If this happens, NASA will have a need for a large cohort of future workers well-trained in relevant skills. This could provide an opportunity to broaden the composition of the SMD workforce if NASA is proactive about fostering appropriate education and training as widely as possible. Possible approaches to assess and manage change within the community are discussed in Chapter 4.

There is a more general point. NASA has an unusually high profile among government agencies, especially when it comes to young people. The excitement that attends NASA missions and interest in their scientific results as reported though various channels is very high. Invariably, the presentations involve astronauts, scientists, engineers, and administrators who are collectively responsible for the content. If those involved are seen to represent

the entire population of the United States then this sends a very powerful message to students and the teachers who encourage them. The public energy about NASA’s scientific activities also helps lift interest in the entire science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) enterprise, which can help foster a more diverse workforce in other engineering, medical and scientific disciplines that are less well exhibited in the media. McLeod’s study indicated the value of ethnic diversity in work teams, including foreign-born members, may have measurable positive effects (McLeod et al. 1996).

A healthy community leverages opportunities to accelerate science. Collaboration with various international partners could avoid duplication of effort and inform logical next steps in research in proposed experiments with a coherent, defensible, research program that maximizes the experimental, analytical, and numerical capabilities of researchers worldwide. NASA has many extremely successful international partnerships and examples of projects that allow for sharing data and rapid identification of next steps.

Domestic Partnerships and Collaboration

Inter-agency collaboration provides the opportunity to share multiple insights and perspectives to shared problems. The shared contributions of other agencies can also provide added funding to support needed projects. Historic collaboration with agencies such as the Department of Energy, DoD, the National Institutes of Health, and NSF have produced significant science results and present opportunities for unique future collaboration in intersections like quantum technologies, nuclear systems, etc.

Partnerships with the commercial sector also provide unique opportunities to advance science, particularly as new capabilities are being made available and a commercial space economy is growing. Areas of particular interest include commercial initiatives associated with lowering costs, reducing the mass and volume of instruments and flight hardware, and extending the life of hardware on orbit. For example, reusable launch vehicles, in situ vehicle health monitoring, small satellite bus and instrumentation development, On-orbit Servicing and Manufacturing (OSAM) and big data analytics and visualization tools are changing perspectives on how data may be obtained from space observatories within SMD’s cost and schedule constraints. Awareness of changes in relevant commercial enterprises can be important in transforming science expectations. Solicitations that encourage partnerships with a view toward ensuring that science objectives are met are critical.

Citizen science, the public participation in the scientific process, usually through data characterization, data categorization, and interpretation has demonstrated opportunities to advance scientific objectives. Citizen engagement can be a means to drive public advocacy and educate the public, but also a resource to energize science and support research overall. In 2007 150,000 people classified more than 50 million images from the Hubble Space Telescope in a project called Galaxy Zoo. This crowd sourced effort completed a task that is characterized as having accomplished something that would have been difficult to achieve even with complex computer algorithms (Bonney et al. 2016). Recognizing the potential for gaining dual benefit from engaging large numbers of members of the pubic in science endeavors, funding for citizen science in tech, the Advancement in Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program continues to popularize partnerships with the public in the execution of science initiatives. The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment program (GLOBE), jointly conducted by NASA and NSF, engages students from around the world in interdisciplinary investigations relating to the atmosphere and biosphere. Recent projects include data transcription, categorization, management, and interpretation on projects like exploring the surface of the moon, model Earth’s climate using historic ship logs, etc. (Bonney et al. 2016). Acknowledging the role of citizen science, the 2022 ROSES solicitation includes multiple elements like the Citizen Science Seed Funding Program and a dedicated web page (NASA 2022b).¹⁰

These programs that require open access to data represent an additional opportunity to engage and grow a larger science community. Consistently providing access to data remains a priority captured by the SMD Strategy

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¹⁰ NASA, “Citizen Science Projects,” https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience.

for Data Management and Computing for Ground Breaking Science 2019-2024, requiring data management plans for all science proposers to address availability and access.¹¹ An additional concern with lack of access to data is the potentially problematic limitations associated with scientific reports behind paywalls. NASA’s development and support of the Scientific and Technical Information (STI) program is a critical tool for acquiring and disseminating technical information.¹² The recently implemented SMD Science Information Policy, SMD Policy Document-41, is a big step in support of this effort.¹³

PROVIDING ADMINISTRATIVE OVERSIGHT OF A HEALTHY AND VITAL RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The management of each science domain, to include both a focus on research excellence and a focus on community excellence has been the responsibility of SMD leadership. By most metrics, they have been extremely successful. There are more excellent ideas submitted in research proposals than can be funded. There is a continuing stream of undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs interested in performing space, Earth, and biological and physical sciences research. There is support from the stakeholder community, with Congress providing adequate and often increasing funding to accomplish science objectives. These successes are the result of work on the part of the SMD team, an established system of researchers and research communities and established power structures. Evolving this system, even with goals of making it more productive and innovative, will be disruptive and in many cases unwelcome. Success—accelerating world-class science while shaping the workforce that does it—will require leadership dedicated to equally balancing multiple goals.

The role of leadership in sustaining any initiative that requires changing perceptions should not be underestimated. Key strategies, generally already in place at SMD, include (1) an articulated vision; (2) leadership with the scientific gravitas to carefully weigh decisions, and appropriate positioning to effect and understand the risks of change, with the responsibility, authority and accountability and resources to accomplish necessary efforts; (3) management of a data stream to understand status, risks, and visibility to intended and unintended outcomes, with (4) a regular cadence of review and criteria against which to evaluate outcomes. Each strategy is discussed below using headings captured in the italic above.

Articulated Vision: A Vision for Excellence

Both SMD and NASA overall have compelling visions. SMD’s vision, “Science 2020-2024: A Vision for Scientific Excellence,” and NASA’s overall plan, “NASA Strategic Plan 2022,” both capture a vision and anticipated outcomes and in some cases and expectation of building a dataset for evidence-based outcomes (NASA 2021b).

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¹¹ NASA, 2019, “Science Mission Directorate’s Strategy for Data Management and Computing for Groundbreaking Science 2019-2024,” NASA Strategic Data Management Working Group, https://science.nasa.gov/science-red/s3fs-public/atoms/files/SDMWG_Full%20Document_v3.pdf.

¹²NASA, 2022, “Explore the NASA STI Repository (NTRS),” Scientific and Technical Information Program, https://sti.nasa.gov.

¹³NASA, 2022, “Science Information Policy,” NASA Science, https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/science-data/science-information-policy.

Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, and Resources: Clarity of Responsibility

NASA developed a focused initiative in 2010 to address the challenges of diversity and inclusion, captured in the NASA Diversity and Inclusion Framework and Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Implementation Plan (NASA 2016). The recently completed plan, NASA Equity Action Plan (NASA 2021c), builds on this foundation.

Strengths of the plan include explicit goals, actions, and metrics, recognizing that evolving the NASA mindset on DEIA supports organizational effectiveness, and impacts the thousands of support workers, contractors, suppliers, and stakeholders in the NASA enterprise. Acknowledging that change occurs at the individual level, the plan distributes responsibility across the NASA enterprise. However, the plan also distributes accountability, with plans for quarterly reporting to the headquarters level. A high-level summary of goals and distributed responsibility of the NASA plan across the agency reflects multiple departments or organizations as the “Lead Office” (NASA 2021b).

NASA’s decentralized management structure offers an opportunity for SMD to address its unique needs, but the challenge starts with gaining access to data. The decentralization limits exchanges and the sharing of data. The Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer (OCHCO) has generated ideas and data relevant to workforce issues within SMD. It sponsored the Future of Work Initiative, noting the difficulty in defining the culture of NASA. SMD has multiple micro-cultures dispersed across its components. This circumstance enables flexibility but can lead as well to habits, actions, and frameworks that are counterproductive.¹⁴ The decentralization has interfered with ongoing exchanges between SMD and the OCHCO as well as ones with NASA’s Chief Scientist. A result of this structure is lack of consistency in the types of data collected, the format in which it is collected, and the understanding of what other data have already been collected making it difficult to employ expertise outside of NASA. Such expertise in the collection, handling, and dissemination of research-related information could be used. As discussed in Chapter 3, the social science community represents a resource that should be tapped for assistance.

SMD could benefit from a data-centered effort concentrated on the strengthening of communication within NASA, monitoring changes in skills of the NASA workforce, and working collaboratively with professional societies to ensure that NASA achieves the goals it has set for diversity, equity, and inclusion. With multiple objectives that include monitoring impacts to science, focused on mitigating issues and amplifying expected benefits, there is a need for a senior executive within SMD. (For example, the civil service Senior Level [SL] rating could be utilized to recognize the seniority/authority level with the responsibility to coordinate data-related activities such as collection and data analysis within SMD and to set up task forces as needed.) The occupant of the role would interact routinely with the leadership of SMD to ensure that the directions taken target the health and vitality of the NASA research community. This is critical for building the data-based foundation for excellence that SMD has set forth. To be effective, this position will have to be funded and staffed to support data review on both DEIA and science, assessment of results and trends and engagement with partners at the centers and in the community.

NASA SMD currently lacks an official with the responsibility to assess the health and vitality of its research communities (see Figure 5-4). The critical organizational change required to facilitate the attainment of a diverse, healthy, and vibrant community is the formal appointment of a single executive in SMD with responsibility and authority for overseeing and directing data collection and analysis used in assessing the health and vitality of SMD’s research communities, as well as employing the data to ensure SMD is meeting the DEIA goals of the directorate and the agency. This executive would also oversee and evaluate the effectiveness of the hiring, training and retention of the future workforce needed to sustain the health and vitality of these communities. In order to accomplish the ambitious objectives of this new position the associate administrator of SMD will need to support the responsible executive with adequate staff to fully accomplish its tasks/objectives. The committee considered other options, such as relying on agency-level initiatives, encouraging better coordination and communication between the Office of the Chief Scientist and SMD, and allowing individual science mission areas to proceed as they individually felt was appropriate, following the guidance of their individual discipline State of the Profession decadal reports. However, the committee concluded that an SMD directorate-level initiative was appropriate, with

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¹⁴ Nicholas Skytland in the OCHCO led the Future of Work Initiative. The comments about micro-cultures appear in a Future of Work blog post by N. Skytland, 2018, “Redesigning for the Future: the Age of Impact,” November 29, https://blogs.nasa.gov/futureofwork/author/nskytlan.

primary responsibilities for this effort because having a leader with significant responsibilities outside of SMD would dilute the effectiveness.

• Work in cooperation and collaboration with the other agency offices/departments (Chief Scientist, other directorates, Office of Human Capital Management, Small Business, etc.); and
• Apprise the SMD associate administrator (AA) and division directors on a regular basis of progress being made and barriers to accomplishment of established DEIA goals.

The executive should report to either the AA or deputy associate administrator for the SMD and will negotiate with the AA SMD on appropriate staff support to facilitate the successful conduct of the duties of the position.

Management of a Data Stream Review and Criteria Against Which to Evaluate Outcomes: Data Collection and Analysis

NASA Human Resources gathers extensive information on its workforce through the NASA Office of Human Capital Management. The Workforce Strategy Division provides information, updated biweekly, on multiple dimensions—work location, occupations, grades, salaries, demographics, and trends.¹⁵ See Figure 5-5.

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¹⁵NASA, 2022, “Workforce Information Cubes for NASA (WICN),” https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/wicn_cubes.html.

COMMUNITY STANDARDS OF CONDUCT

As an agency, NASA uses multiple controls to ensure a safe, fair, and equitable work environment within the foundations of NASA and externally conducted research, as summarized in Chapter 2. It is appropriate to acknowledge that NASA is compliant with legal regulations and uses multiple controls and mechanisms to ensure a safe, fair, and equitable work environment. The following, found on NASA’s ODEO and SMD websites, are examples of the regulations and controls NASA uses to manage compliance:

• NASA Policy Statement on Antidiscrimination in NASA Conducted or Funded Programs, Activities, and Institutions (NASA Policy Directive [NPD] 1600.3, “Policy on Prevention of and Response to Workplace Violence,” was reviewed and revalidated in May 2021).
• Statement included in each solicitation: “NASA recognizes and supports the benefits of having diverse and inclusive scientific, engineering, and technology communities and fully expects that such values will be reflected in the composition of all proposal teams as well as peer review panels (science, engineering, and technology), science definition teams, and mission and instrument teams.”
• Compliance with civil rights laws:

— Pursuant to NASA’s Title VI regulations, the agency conducts a program of onsite and desk-audit Title VI compliance reviews of grant recipients.¹⁶

— Grant recipient compliance form.¹⁷

• As of April 2020, NASA-funded institutions are required to notify the agency whenever they determine a principal or Co-I has violated policies concerning harassment or assault, or if the personnel are placed on leave due to a harassment investigation.

Although NASA is compliant with federal regulations, data indicate there are additional opportunities. These issues have been addressed in decadal recommendations; to reassess discrimination and harassment and inclusive professional practices, including issues concerning quality of life that impact work—for example, access, childrearing, service work, elder care, awareness of bias, workplace culture, etc., and develop an explicit code to be

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¹⁶ Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive Order 13166 prohibit exclusion from participation in, denial of benefits of, and discrimination under federally assisted programs (e.g., universities and colleges receiving federal grant assistance) on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, including limited English proficiency (LEP).

¹⁷ From MISSIONSTEM website “NASA has certain baseline civil rights requirements for recipients of our grant awards and other forms of Federal financial assistance. Among the most important of these requirements is an assurance by the grantee institution, prior to award, that it follows all Federal civil rights laws. The Assurances provision (http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=1&SID=dd96cfeb9003010abe83d2511baaa3ec&ty=HTML&h=L&n=14y5.0.1.1.25&r=PART#14:5.0.1.1.25.0.1.11) is an example of this requirement. A signed Assurance of Compliance (https://missionstem.nasa.gov/docs/NF_1206.pdf) form (also known as NASA Form 1206, https://missionstem.nasa.gov/docs/NF_1206.pdf) is required of all NASA grantees. The form provides valuable information on specific requirements under the four civil rights laws NASA administers.”

reflected in SMD statements and contracting. This could be the cornerstone of SMD efforts to lead this area of change and could be captured on the SMD State of the Profession web page.¹⁸

Most of the space, Earth, and biological and physical sciences disciplines have expected standards of conduct captured by their universities, professional societies, and other places of work. Some, like the geosciences, have established baseline frameworks that are intended to be extensible to specific groups.¹⁹ For instance, the geoscience baseline ethics framework has been leveraged toward adjudicable ethics standards in professional services, in issues of land-access and cultural sensitivity in paleontological collection, and for addressing the ongoing challenges of sexual harassment and limitations to differently abled individuals within the profession. Similarly, the American Geophysical Union’s Ethics Center is a good example of centralizing many diverse aspects of ethics and conduct standards into a means for effective community consensus and self-policing.

SMD is a multi-disciplinary enterprise, but as with the example of the geosciences, identifying core standards that can be scaffolded to address community-wide expectations of conduct, inclusion, and engagement is plausible. The key will be how to develop effective processes to address deviations.

Constructive leadership is the most efficient means to develop a new understanding of community standards. However, any system involving humans is prone to various potential failures. As noted in the National Academies’ astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey (Astro2020), The Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s (NASEM 2021), a key step for addressing enforcement of expected standards is by calling for discrimination and harassment to be classified as professional misconduct, from which appropriate organizational measures can be taken. Complicating this position is that final responsibility falls to the managing organizations (including departments and universities) to enforce professional conduct and policies of diversity and inclusion. This ambiguity remains a potential problem that needs a solution of either clear expectations by the funding agency to managing organizations, or a formal requirement of documented standards and strategies defined by the managing organizations with appropriate performance reporting as part of deliverable information.

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¹⁸NASA, 2021, “State of the Profession SMD Initiatives,” NASA Science Mission Directorate, https://science.nasa.gov/science-pink/s3fspublic/atoms/files/Sheth_APAC%20March%202021.pdf.

¹⁹ As an example, see American Geosciences Institute, “AGI Guidelines for Ethical Professional Conduct,” https://www.americangeosciences.org/community/agi-guidelines-ethical-professional-conduct.