[1] Source: "NASA: Out of Orbit Program." Aired 2004.
[2] Submitted by: Col. Dyvyn Tramwell. Publicity documentary mis-filed under "Agriculture" at the Library of Congress.
[3] Uploaded to the archive: March 10, 2025. NotstalgiaArchive.org
Background
The Out of Orbit program began, as many regrettable things do, as an office joke. A few mischievous engineers put together a fake PowerPoint presentation about cross-training employees to ‘increase synergy’ and ‘broaden mission perspective.’
The plan was ridiculous, and management was supposed to immediately see through it.
Unfortunately, they did not.
NASA’s leadership enthusiastically approved the program, leading to one of the most surreal weeks in the agency’s history.
To everyone’s surprise and mounting horror, it quickly became apparent just how unnecessary certain job roles were, while the so-called ‘unskilled’ employees made some of the most significant contributions.
A cafeteria worker redesigned a faulty coolant system.
A junior HR rep instinctively corrected a calculation that had been plaguing an entire astrophysics department for years.
A janitor, given temporary access to grant proposals, managed to balance NASA’s budget in a way Congress had spent decades failing to do.
The real tipping point came when a receptionist, with no prior scientific training, managed to simplify a long-standing orbital mechanics problem over lunch.
The event triggered a bureaucratic panic that spread far beyond the agency itself. If a well-placed temp could solve a complex physics issue in minutes, what did that say about the supposed genius of NASA’s top minds? And, more alarmingly for Washington, what would happen if the same logic were applied to politicians?
Within hours, the Out of Orbit program was shut down permanently.
Official reports described it as ‘an interesting but ultimately unscalable initiative,’ though insiders knew the truth: the experiment had been too successful. Job security, not scientific advancement, had become the real concern.
The program’s documentation was quietly buried in the archives, and all future attempts at employee rotation were dismissed as ‘logistically unfeasible.’
To this day, NASA refuses to acknowledge that anything particularly notable happened during that week.
But those who were there remember.
Further reading
http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=GREwspcOspM
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