Episode 43: NASA Reorganizes to “Ignite the Orbital Economy”
The Elara Edge
Host: Scott King
SME: Renee Wynn, former Chief Information Officer at NASA and Partner at Elara Nova
00:02 – 01:05
Earlier this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA) announced a reorganization effort that restores its “mission directorates” in a way that agency leaders hope will position itself for an ambitious future. The moves, whose influence can be traced back to a December 2025 executive order, will streamline workforce priorities toward five new objectives recently unveiled by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
Taken in tandem, the reorganization steps and the new agency objectives aim to ignite a commercial orbital economy that advances scientific exploration, but NASA can only get there by scaling the safety and cybersecurity discipline that the agency has forged over the years.
Welcome to “The Elara Edge.” Here to discuss these changes, and why NASA’s commercial space partners should be paying attention to them, is Renee Wynn, partner at Elara Nova and the former Chief Information Officer at NASA.
Ma’am, welcome to the show.
01:06 – 01:16
Thank you. Scott. It is fabulous to be here and represent what I think – the most iconic federal agency in the United States federal government. But I’m biased.
01:17 – 01:24
NASA certainly is an iconic agency with a storied history, so before we get into the changes underway today – can you first take us back to NASA’s founding?
01:25 – 03:19
I think a great place to start is our origin. And that is those Soviets up there in space, not before us, but parts of what they were doing were before us. And a bit of how dare they? I mean, we’re the United States. And so the National Aeronautics Space Act of 1958 charged NASA with some very important and I think a very sustainable mission that really holds true today.
I’m going to point out, I think, some key elements from this Act of 1958: expanding human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. It included performance, speed, safety, efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles. And today we benefit with our airplanes on greater safety and greater sustainability. Developing and operating vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms, not just astronauts, but living organisms through space. Establishing long-range studies for the benefits, opportunities and the challenges for aeronautical space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes.
And I stress peaceful because space is highly contested. Intentional and unintentional. The unintentional is we’ve also got a lot of space debris. Some of it is man-made, some of it’s not man-made. And of course, this Space Act says preserve the role of the United States as a leader. And then finally, I want to point out, is cooperating with other nations in the peaceful application of space research and its results.
03:20 – 03:27
Thank you, Ma’am. Now, can you speak about the influence of NASA’s role in what’s become a projected $1.8 trillion space economy?
03:28 – 07:35
The shuttle program was retired in 2011 and there wasn’t a replacement. And imagine what that might have felt like that retirement day, that decision, how that would have weighed on the agency and the nation to say our route to the International Space Station, which was done in cooperation with the Russians, is no more.
And I think from a business perspective, that you do have some stopgap measures in place. And so the United States sort of turned to Russia and said, “Hey, can we buy some seats?” to the tune of roughly $80 million for U.S. astronauts to ride on Soyuz, and our astronauts needed to be trained in Russia. So we’re going to Russia.
This was a costly lesson, and I share this because it had some benefit from a geopolitical relationship perspective. But it also meant we lost some things from a United States capability. And so it really set us up for a lot of learning and a lot of opportunity.
And so NASA got to work long before the retirement to begin what was called the Commercial Crew Program. There’s a big culture shift. NASA went from being a buyer and a maker of all of these things, to being a partner and having, in this instance, SpaceX and Boeing developing something.
Then we were going to be buying these rides to the International Space Station. You also had the culture of: does the commercial sector truly get what it’s like to look in the eyes of the family to say, “I am sorry that we lost an astronaut.” Over 40 astronauts have been lost in the pursuit of space exploration. They were NASA employees, they were NASA people that went to those families to break the horrific news, just like it happens in the military.
Would those cultures truly understand the depth of the heartache and heartbreaking that that would bring? We understood it because there were engineers from the shuttle program that knew Columbia and Challenger, and knew what it felt like. Did they understand safety? That was a very, very hard thing for NASA to convey.
And so you begin on the lower risk version, but it’s still high risk and that’s cargo. So first we’ll do the cargo and then we’ll get around to crew. It’s a tiered-risk you know milestone-based. And we just worked and we worked and we worked. NASA helped SpaceX and Boeing achieved success. And that was hard sometimes because we were there to coach and mentor and So you have all of this learning going on and the next launch from American soil wasn’t until May of 2020.
So what is the difference make? The difference makes from a bottom line. And I like to use this with people is in 2020 when I left NASA, in general, it was $17,500 to launch a kilogram of something into space. And that just gives you kind of an average price. Today, that average price is $1,500 to $2,500 per kilogram. That is the difference six years makes and that is the economic difference. How more and more businesses and countries are now reaching space. And I think that puts a really fine point on how accessible, although still expensive, space is today, more so than it was just a few years ago.
07:36 – 07:45
And this past May, NASA announced some reorganizational changes to position itself toward the future. Can you describe what these changes are and why they matter?
07:46 – 10:10
I want to begin with the objectives stated by the administrator, Jared Isaacman. And that is one: Artemis is key objective on this one which is a continuation of what was going on when I was there. The Moon Base. The moon base is a sustainable presence on the moon, and that has been back and forth between being a lab off the moon called Gateway versus a lab on the moon. The decision now is a moon-based lab, the Moon Base.
This next one, I think really matters. It is the creation of a Space Reactor Office. And in short, is a nuclear power in space. Then the fourth thing is “ignite the orbital economy.” Not only astronaut missions, but high potential commercial science. And finally is build more X-planes, launch more missions of science and discovery and finding some efficiencies in commercial Earth observation, space weather, and other missions beyond their original design life.
So the reorganization puts NASA back somewhat like it was when I was there. What NASA announced was the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and Space Operation Mission Directorate was pushed together to make Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, which is what it was when I was there. And then the other change was the Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate was pushed together to create the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.The Science Mission Directorate remains where it is.
So when I say bottom line, NASA looks more structurally like it did when I was there. The big change is this former STMD, as we call it, and Aero, have been pushed together. It has the opportunity to succeed. I think from a perspective of an organizational size. It puts it as a size that’s probably about right for a directorate at NASA than it would have been given budget size and people size losses that we have seen at NASA over the years.
10:11 – 10:19
So what do these changes enable NASA to do now that maybe wasn’t possible or more difficult to do before? And why make these changes now?
10:20 – 12:03
I think the changes are largely resource-driven. So NASA offered a number of deferred retirement opportunities, and a number of individuals took this opportunity, and it was multiple waves of it. As an example, in my organization, in the end, about 25% of the people took it. And that happened across the board. NASA was certainly one of the agencies at the higher end of people staying for their career.
Most people, when they hit their 30-year mark, that is not even close to when people are thinking about retiring from NASA. So the opportunities offered for the deferred retirement, a lot of people took that. And this particular administration went over the five objectives: Artemis, Moon Base, Space Reactor Office – nuclear power in space – ignite the orbital economy and build more X-planes, launch more missions of science and discovery.
And they felt that the reorganization would allow them to focus because they also created a place for a space reactor office. So that was a new creation. And pulling people into that, all the rest of the stuff is tightening up the organization, which is what we’ve seen in this administration. So I don’t see it as trying to fill a gap or anything else other than: how do we tighten up our organization in order to meet these five objectives?
12:04 – 12:07
Can you explain some of the challenges that will need to be overcome as these changes unfold?
12:08 – 14:16
It’s all about people. Any reorganization needs to have a clear purpose. The current administrator, Jared Isaacman, laid out why he did what he did. So clarity of purpose was written, and he’s been going around to provide that clarity to more people than just the people that get to see him on a regular basis. But the challenge remains: does everybody understand what needs to be done and how their job matches with the objectives of the reorganization?
And so not only does the administrator and his direct reports, but all the way down the line, everybody just needs to understand their role in that reorganization.
And the second difficult piece with reorganizations is: how do I get my job done? So if the people I worked with moved organizations, the good news is they didn’t move their email and their phone number – most likely.
I still can reach them, but some people may have left their job. So now how do I find my procurement specialists that would help me get something done? How do I find my HR person? How do I find my software engineer? Making sure I know how to get my job done in the middle of a reorganization – that’s the other hard part that happens during a reorganization.
It’s a little bit of the chaos with it, and so doing that piece is also very hard. I say this from experience. Every reorg that I did, I did better and better on it. I feel like now if I ever led a major reorganization, first of all, I would set the bar really high, but I would spend so much time getting to that clarity and making sure that everybody knew how to do their job, so that when we moved the chairs and shifted the figurative organizational boxes, that when we hit the go button, everybody would be able to do their job 60-80% on day one.
14:17 – 14:23
And what does this reorganization effort reflect about how NASA, as an agency, has evolved from its founding?
14:24 – 15:05
I think it just represents the evolution of science and space exploration? And that is when NASA was founded. Yes, space exploration was envisioned. We have humans living in space, and we have for 25 years.
That’s not what was envisioned. I mean, yes, we plan to put boots on the moon. Well, now we’re envisioning not only have humans lived in space for over 25 years, but now we’re envisioning this Moon Base and so I think the evolution of an organization is with these dreams and these goals that we have of space for our country.
15:06 – 15:20
As we mentioned at the top, this reorganization effort can be traced back to an executive order that was signed in December of 2025: Ensuring American Space Superiority.
Can you summarize that executive order for us and what some of your key takeaways are from it?
15:21 – 18:05
I see this building off of the previous administration’s efforts for the United States, and this is especially under Trump’s first administration. And as I read through it again, the emphasis that I see in it was the deadline for commercializing the ISS, the International Space Station replacement and explicit preference for commercial solutions, and a preference for Other Transaction Authority or Space Act agreements at NASA to focus on troubled programs.
That’s always been a focus of NASA, but it’s calling it out in particular in this executive order. And then the firm fixed price and “as-a-service” models were extended for weather and ground infrastructure. This is really continuing to nudge on the commercialization of several elements of what NASA does – ground infrastructure being one of those. And we’re seeing the private sector really develop some of that as well.
So those were, I think, sort of some of the highlights. There’s a lot of information in there, but those are the things that really struck me.
I see there’s a couple of benefits and I see there’s some challenges. I see economic growth in what they’re pushing on this one, and that’s always good. Advancing space traffic management, that’s a definite need from a safety perspective, as well as for economic growth, vehicle safety as well as astronaut safety.
Debris management – we’ve got to continue the conversation on debris management and the harm, as well as the opportunity that managing this debris better can come of this. and just start to get going on this. It’s just going to take us some time to get there.
The challenges are the timelines. I love a good challenge, get this done by then, but I also like to be realistic because of safety and just want it done well. And funding. And I reflect on the 27 president’s budget across the United States government and the funding that would be required for some of these items in here. I don’t see it matching up, but perhaps these Other Transaction Authorities and Space Act Agreements can offer some innovation towards the funding that I’m just not privy to.
The International Space Station replacement. It’s a funding thing. And can we get this going? Because it is a wonderful asset for this country and for humanity and I don’t want to see it lost without us having a replacement. You know, I go back to the example about losing the shuttle and not yet having commercial crew. I really, I don’t want to see that. That’s where I would see those challenges.
18:06 – 18:10
Can you elaborate on what Other Transaction Authority (OTAs) and Space Act Agreements are?
18:11 – 19:42
So for an OTA, as they are most commonly called, you can write a white paper to the government and get an early stage technical solution to a problem. And the government can say yes and fund it. You can’t scale it and say, wow, this really does solve our problem. You got to pop over to the more typical understood acquisition process.
But if you want to do your experimentation and all of that, the OTAs are a great way to say, “Yeah, let’s try a few of these items and see what they can do to solve some of these problems.”
So I’m not that familiar with Space Act Agreements. It wasn’t an instrument that I used in my organization, and I wasn’t exposed to how it was being used in other parts of NASA as well.But quite quickly: Space Act Agreements enable NASA to enter into flexible mission-supporting agreements outside the typical procurement rules, which means they can engage contractually with private and commercial industry, universities and nonprofit organizations, government agencies and international entities. So it allows them to pretty much work with a lot of different entities to support getting the mission done.
19:43 – 20:00
Now, earlier you shared NASA’s historical emphasis on safety. In the modern day, particularly in space, cybersecurity is a key component to safety.
So given your prior role as CIO at NASA, how do you think NASA views the relationship between cybersecurity and mission safety?
20:01 – 23:24
Oh, I have direct experience about how NASA thinks about cybersecurity. When I first got there NASA didn’t want to think about it at all. Why do I say that? Because I had only been the CIO for a few weeks when a now dear friend of mine called from the White House, the Chief Information Security Officer, former General from the Air Force, calls and says, “Renee, we are coming over to talk to your administrator about a problem here at NASA.”
“Well, what’s the problem, Sir?” He says, “Your cybersecurity posture is a problem for national security.” “Well, tell me about that problem.” “You are a problem for everyone.” “Everyone?” “Like, everyone.” “Yes, for almost every federal agency and the military that you work for.” “Okay, well, that would be a big problem,” He says, “Yep. I think you’ve got the picture.”
So he proceeds to describe to me what the conversation is going to be about – greatly appreciate it. You know, a phone call before bad news to your boss is always appreciated. I call my boss, Charlie Bolden, former NASA administrator, former Marine Corps general, former astronaut, former shuttle pilot. So it’s going to be former general to former general Air Force to Marine Corps.
And I’m like, all right, I got to get everybody ready. So we get Charlie ready for the whole thing. We have a great meeting. Explain everything from the White House’s perspective. So Charlie’s listening, he’s like, “Great. Thanks so much for telling us that.” And he just looks over to me and he says, “You just go make that happen.”
What they were talking about was not only our global posture. Remember, we operate in Russia, but also our posture in space. So at this point, this is 2015. We are seeing satellites hacked from a cyber angle, NASA’s included. So you can take it as a crisis or you could take it as an opportunity. I frankly took it as both.
And what the approach was is mission had to operate – don’t break mission. But I also had to say we let nothing happen to our astronauts and we can’t have an international incident on the International Space Station because of the cyber incident. So we did all of the basics first because that didn’t exist. And I made it a point that we were going to be doing a culture change, that NASA would be a safety and cybersecurity culture by the time I left the agency.
And we just did it by hook or by crook, we made friends. We got yelled at like you wouldn’t believe. I got called up on the Hill a lot to brief them on one incident after another, we found things that’s embarrassing for the United States government. It was embarrassing for NASA to have this.
We got F on our report card for how we managed IT, and NASA was embarrassed by that report card. And Charlie and then Jim Bridenstine were huge supporters of these initiatives that we went about to make that change.
23:25 – 23:34
The relationship between space and cyberspace is a thread we frequently pull on in this show. But to get your perspective on it: how do you personally view the relationship between the two?
23:34 – 25:06
They go hand-in-hand. I mean, first of all, you can go on YouTube and see how to hack a satellite and it’s not wrong. Secondly, you’ve got insider threat, which can be a cyber hack, and then you’ve got the ability to hack a satellite through typical cyber means. And it’s a real threat. And from a science perspective, if you’re going to build your entire career on the integrity of the data and what you find in space – cybersecurity is confidentiality, integrity, and access of data – that is the heart of scientific discovery in space.
They’re just hand-in-glove. Go together for scientific integrity. So to me it’s a must do. It’s table stakes. If you’re going to put your career on the line for discovering planets and dark holes and dark energy and all of that, you’ve got to have cybersecurity in place if that’s what you’re going to do. When you’ve got human space exploration, you have lives on the line.
Everything that those astronauts rely on in space, on station, we are giving it to them. It’s not like the air they breathe is out there in space. It’s not like the water they drink is coming from a stream. It is coming from services provided to the International Space Station through complicated – and that’s chips and software and hardware. And the Mission Control Center for Human Spaceflight is very, very well run from a cyber perspective and I was so excited to learn that.
25:07 – 25:28
This also brings to mind the challenge that comes with having so many stakeholders operating in the space domain, whether that be national security, civil, or commercial entities.
Can you elaborate on why a military service like the Space Force or the Air Force should care about the cybersecurity measures in place at a civil agency like NASA or similarly at a commercial partner?
25:29 – 27:32
So NASA is not military, it is civilian, and it will remain that way. However, NASA does a lot of research projects. They do a lot of research projects for FAA. They do research projects for NOAA, they do research projects for the military, and they do research projects for space just in operational space awareness and things like that. That means we’re grabbing data, we’re looking at things, we’re interconnected. When we’re taking on these research projects, that interconnectedness means that I’m exposing myself to you and you to me.
I like to use the example, and this does hold true for space. If I do a project with glitter, I get glitter on my hands. And let’s think of glitter as cybersecurity. Then I go to hug you or shake your hands. Now, I’ve tried to get rid of that glitter, but guess what? You now have glitter on you, Scott.
And you go home and now you’ve got glitter on your carpet. That is cyber security. For a moment in time, we became interconnected and tried as I might for personal hygiene for glitter. It didn’t go so well. And if I hadn’t had personal hygiene or cybersecurity hygiene, you just got covered in glitter. I give that as a visual.
And that’s what cybersecurity is, is when I shake your hand, you’re getting my glitter. When I connect up with you to exchange data, you get my glitter. And that’s what was happening with NASA is: we were giving you way too much glitter, whether it was in space when we would have to connect or when we were coming down here, or sending you data with our research projects or however we were working with you.
You weren’t just getting a packet of data, you were getting a very sparkly packet of data. And that’s what was putting other agencies at risk because of the way NASA was and wasn’t taking on cybersecurity.
27:33 – 27:49
Earlier we also spoke of the lessons NASA learned as it transitioned from the shuttle program to commercial launch providers.
So how have conversations evolved between NASA and its commercial partners to ensure that their hands are, as you suggest, remaining glitter-free?
27:50 – 28:59
Number one, NASA FAR has been modified that if you’re getting a NASA contract, you’re supposed to be doing your part for cybersecurity, amongst many other things. So the first thing is, it better start being in the contract. And then the second piece is it’s got to be enforced. The point of rules is that at some point when things go wrong that you can enforce against the rules and you hold everybody up. The third piece is risk, which to me is really important. When we work together digitally, which we all do, we’re passing along our risk to each other, which we’ve got to have a line-of-sight on that risk and keep an eye on it to manage and mitigate it.
We don’t get to zero. First of all, space exploration is highly risky and it will remain that risky. Just because we can see it all the time doesn’t change the risk of space exploration. It just means we can see it all the time. And that third party risk is now changing. And you’re just going to have to take a look at it. And NASA has looked at third party risk for quite a while. And some of it will watch but most of it. We’ve got to mitigate.
29:00 – 29:23
This next question goes back to the December 2025 executive order, which pushes commercial first acquisition and leaning on tools like OTAs and Space Act Agreements that we talked about earlier.
That same executive order also calls for identifying supply chain and industrial capacity gaps. What are these gaps NASA sees as needing to be filled? And how prepared are their commercial space partners in being able to fill them?
29:24 – 31:38
It depends on the gap. So from a launch capability, I think we’ve got that filled. One of the things is that there’s been a bottleneck just in terms of number of launch pads and so that’s getting fixed here. That’s not a capability thing. That’s just a – we need more launch pads. It also depends on what orbit you want to get to. Private sector is pretty good at building satellites to look at the earth and things like that. So we’ve got good capabilities there. You know, data back from space. That has been a choke point.
It’s been a choke point for NASA for a very long time. We got a lot of data that we can collect in space, but we can’t always bring it down. That is being worked on quite a bit, and we’ve seen some great strides by the major providers really coming up with amazing ways to do compute in space and bring down a completed product that doesn’t take as much of the pipe, which is just so amazing for the science that we can get.
So those are sort of some three big things that we’ve solved for, and that’s awesome. And working there, there are some advantages to computing in space for space use. That’s going to continue to get better. We have use cases, both civilian and military, national security. That’s going to continue to get better. And I think the commercial business will get improved.
On the human space side. There’s a few companies that understand what it’s like to keep humans alive in space. So that’s an area of growth and opportunity. And so you can start to fill that gap with former NASA people and we can do that. I think all in all there are some gaps because there’s some seams. But we’re well-positioned for that growth to happen and in that growth we’re going to learn about more seams and more gaps. And then we will begin to fill them.
The big however, and I worked in supply chain risk from a cybersecurity perspective: chips, compute power. Space is facing that. Because all that stuff that’s floating up there needs chips. And we need to make sure that those chips are of a good pedigree.
31:39 – 31:49
And to tie it back to the reorganization of NASA and its mission directorates, how will those changes tie back that to those gaps? Will this reorganization effort help facilitate the closure of those gaps and in any way?
31:50 – 32:44
Thanks for asking that. I think to the nuclear power. That is a gap that needs to be filled. My opinion. There are a lot of people that are not going to be into this nuclear power piece. I am because deeper space needs nuclear power. So that is in fact an industrial capacity gap that is being filled. NASA’s reorganization has set an organization out to help with that particular gap.
And so that is a gap that is being filled. We talked about other acquisition vehicles besides the typical procurement. NASA knows how to do that really well. So I think they’re just well situated with the number of people that they have. They are on a hiring spree. The new folks will have to blend in and understand NASA’s history of safety culture, and then bring their way of thinking and innovation and curiosity to help NASA advance as well.
32:45 – 32:51
And so why should industry be paying attention to these reorganization steps, particularly given NASA’s recent commercial-first approach?
32:52 – 33:55
First, I would ask them a question: do you want to be part of the Artemis generation? If you want to be part of the Artemis generation, then let’s get going. And this is one of the things I like to mention because I’m part of the Apollo generation.
But what we are seeing in front of us is the blossoming of the Artemis generation. So if a business wants to be part of that, then let’s take a look at NASA and where they are going, their five major objectives and what can you do to advance Artemis or nuclear power in space, or X-wings or science in space?
What can you do to advance it and be respectful of the fact that you are getting taxpayer money, and honor that money and honor a culture of safety, and then become part of history in the making? It’s really that simple.
33:56 – 34:12
Now, as a partner with Elara Nova and a member of its Cyber, Data and Communications sector, what role can and does Elara Nova have in this moment in time? Both for NASA as it reorganizes and its commercial space partners looking to be a part of its future?
34:13 – 35:25
Elara Nova has deep experience in space and a cadre of individuals vested in the mission of the United States government.
And I give that as an umbrella because they are bringing on more and more individuals, shifting away just the national security piece and more of my colleagues from the civil space side, but also civil space on the aeronautics side as well, where they can now offer a wealth of knowledge and a greater breadth of knowledge across aeronautics and space, which would allow our clients, commercial and government clients to have the opportunity to use our deep experience in space and in aeronautics to really advance their objectives.
And if I tie it back to Artemis, if their objective is to be part of the Artemis generation, then that means by hiring Elara Nova that they get the opportunity to be part of putting boots back on the moon.
35:26 – 36:06
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