The people who know how to qualify crew systems are leaving

An initiative to record practitioner knowledge while it is still first-hand, and put it back to work on the systems being built now.

TypeInitiative

Year2026

FocusPractitioner knowledge

ContextEvermay Future Fellowship

What is being lost

NASA’s civil servant workforce is down 22% since 2025. What goes with them is not in the documents: the judgement that decides which test is worth running, which waiver is defensible, and why a system that passed on paper failed in flight.

Procedures and drawings survive a retirement. The reasoning behind them does not. A team inheriting a system can read every requirement and still not know which of them were written after something went wrong.

How the initiative works

Record it while it is still first-hand. Structured conversations with the engineers, flight surgeons and designers who built and flew the systems being replaced.

Attach it to the hardware. Each account is tied to the system it concerns, so the next team finds it at the moment they need it rather than in an archive.

Put it back to work. The same people advise the teams maturing the replacements, so the transfer happens through practice.

The Library of Human Spaceflight

Sixty years of human spaceflight knowledge is at risk of permanent loss through federal defunding and the retirement of senior NASA personnel. The Library of Human Spaceflight is the collection side of this work: a place where that expertise is held, described and made usable, built alongside the commercial R&D lab that applies it.

Keeping a record of this kind is a practice with its own standards, and we are not inventing them. We are meeting the institutions that do this work to take their input on what to collect, how to describe it, and what it takes for a collection to still be legible in fifty years.

Smithsonian. Conversations with the people who hold the material history of spaceflight, on how an object, a document and a first-hand account belong together.

Library of Congress. Conversations on description, access and long-term stewardship of a national record.

Practitioners. The engineers, flight surgeons and designers whose accounts the collection exists to hold.

These are early conversations rather than agreements, and we will say more as they progress.

Why the Lab

The Lab already works in the gap between a prototype and flight hardware, which is exactly where this judgement is needed and where it is least written down. The people we want to record are the people we already work with.

The initiative is being developed as part of the Evermay Future Fellowship, 2026. If you built, qualified or flew crew systems, or you run a program that is about to lose that experience, we would like to talk.

Where this goes

The residency produces a publishable framework for this concept and convenes policy discussions in Washington on crew health commercialisation, accessibility standards and the governance of orbital resources.

The longer aim is a change in how this knowledge is treated: spaceflight knowledge stewardship recognized as protected public infrastructure rather than only proprietary intellectual property.

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