When you hear “NASA,” you probably think rockets, astronauts, and high-stakes missions in space. You don’t immediately think freelancers. But after almost 36 years at NASA and over a decade leading open innovation and open talent initiatives, Steve Rader has a very clear message for leaders and organisations:
“If your only talent strategy is recruiting and retaining full-time employees… you’re in trouble.”
This conversation with Steve for The Independent Workforce podcast felt less like an interview and more like a glimpse into the near future, one where independent talent, open innovation, and curated crowds are as essential as your internal teams.
Below is the story behind that shift, and what every company (and freelancer) can take away from NASA’s journey.
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The Moment NASA Realised It Needed the World
Steve’s NASA story started in a very traditional way:
- Mission control
- Flight software for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station
- Systems for the X-38 crew return vehicle
- Command, Control, Communications & Information (C3I) for the Constellation Program
He spent years doing exactly what we imagine NASA people do: building complex systems with world-class internal experts.
And then, everything changed.
Around 2010, Steve read a book about open innovation and crowdsourcing. It triggered what he describes as a kind of professional shock: “I remember coming away from that book thinking, ‘Oh my gosh. We’ve now tapped into human intelligence in a new way — and NASA needs to use this.’”
He started joining online crowds, participating in open challenges, and exploring how distributed talent could be used to solve real problems.
A few years later, he joined the part of NASA that would become the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) and the NASA Tournament Lab. His mission?
Help NASA and the U.S. government tap into external ideas, technologies, and experts at scale.
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A Tsunami of Technology (And Why No Company Can Keep Up Alone)
One of the most powerful ideas Steve shared is why open talent is no longer optional. He describes it as a “tsunami of technology”:
- Around 90% of all scientists who’ve ever lived are alive and working today.
- They’re building on incredibly powerful “building block” technologies like AI, drones, CRISPR, advanced sensors, and more.
- There are huge numbers of startups being created all the time—and even if only a tiny percentage succeed, that’s still a constant stream of new solutions.
In the past, if you were an innovator inside a company, you could go to conferences, talk to vendors, consult a few experts, and have a reasonable understanding of “what’s out there.”
Today? That’s impossible.
If you think you can Google the latest and greatest technology, then you really don’t have a good appreciation for how expansive the world is right now — and how fast it’s changing.
That’s where open innovation and open talent come in.
Instead of trying to control all expertise in-house, NASA began using curated crowds and platforms as a “statistical dragnet” across industries and disciplines. In Steve’s words, they discovered that: “The crowd almost always has the expertise you need. Your internal workforce almost never has all of it.”
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Why the Workforce Resisted – and How NASA Reframed the Story
Of course, this wasn’t a smooth, instant transformation. When NASA first tried to roll out open innovation, the internal reaction was… not great: “The idea was initially rejected by the workforce. There’s a Harvard Business School case study literally about NASA’s rejection of open innovation.”
Why?
Because NASA employs some of the smartest people in the world — people who joined precisely to be the innovators.
To them, outsourcing innovation to “the crowd” felt like a threat:
- “Aren’t we supposed to be the experts?”
- “Why would we hand big, important problems to people who aren’t as trained as us?”
Steve and his team realised they had a framing problem, not a technology problem.
They began presenting open innovation and open talent not as a replacement, but as a multiplier:
We said, look — going outside the organization is uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. If you don’t tap into external ideas and experts, the odds that you’re missing something critical go way up.
They shifted the narrative from “outsourcing our jobs” to “upgrading our starting point.” Open innovation gave NASA access to:
- New ideas
- New technologies
- New experts
All of which made NASA’s internal people more effective, not less.
The Freelance Turn: From Open Innovation to Open Talent
The real turning point came when NASA encountered something unexpected: a crowdsourcing and freelancing platform.
They first met Freelancer.com through its contest-based approach. Then they realised something bigger: contests were just one piece. Behind them sat huge communities of freelancers with highly specialised skills.
At the time, Steve recalls Freelancer.com having about 4 million users. Now? 80 million+.“That’s more than 1% of the world’s population on one freelance platform. That’s just crazy to me.”
The team also studied research from platforms like Upwork, projecting that by around 2027, more people in the U.S. would be working as freelancers than in traditional full-time jobs.
Steve’s conclusion was blunt:
If half of the talent is going to sit outside full-time employment, and your only strategy is recruiting and retaining full-time employees… you’re in trouble.
NASA began experimenting with bringing in freelancers directly — not just for contests, but as integrated contributors.
One of the most practical tests?
- They hired three freelancers to help handle peak project demand at the NASA Tournament Lab.
- They onboarded them.
- Trained them.
- Included them in team meetings and culture.
“They became part of our team. Honestly, I don’t think anyone thought of them as different.” This wasn’t just about capacity. It was also about upskilling.
Bring in a quantum sensing expert for a few hours → Your whole team suddenly understands quantum sensing better.
Steve calls this “work as a vehicle for upskilling” — the freelancer isn’t just doing the work; they’re raising the level of everyone around them.
Trust, Risk, and the Myth of “Safe” Full-Time Talent
If you talk to companies about freelancers, you’ll quickly hit a wall of anxiety:
- Can we trust them?
- What about IP and security?
- What if they disappear?
Steve doesn’t dismiss those concerns, but he puts them into perspective:
If you’re worried about someone stealing your IP, you should probably worry more about the engineer who’s been passed over for promotions for 25 years than the freelancer who’s building their reputation on delivering great work.
He points out that freelancers live on reputation.
Platforms track reviews, portfolios, job histories — what he calls the “digital exhaust” that becomes a modern CV.
On top of that, companies can design the work in a way that limits exposure to sensitive information. Not all work is core IP. Plenty of it is architecture, integration, marketing, interfaces, testing, or exploration.
In other words: “Risk doesn’t disappear with full-time employees; we’re just more used to it. With freelancers, the real risk is not learning how to work with them and watching your competitors move faster.”
Platforms as the New Infrastructure of Work
One of the most interesting themes Steve kept returning to is the role of platforms. They’re not just marketplaces — they are becoming infrastructure for:
- Vetting and matching talent
- Providing training and learning paths
- Managing reputation and track records
- Connecting experts and clients across the globe
For companies, these platforms like freelancer.com, upwork, freelancermap and others solve the discovery problem.
Even if you want to hire freelancers one-to-one, where do you find them? You’re going to end up on a platform anyway. The platform is where the talent lives.
And for freelancers, platforms offer something just as powerful:
- Agency – choosing the type of work they want
- Learning – building skills through real projects and communities
- Proof – collecting visible reputation they can carry forward
The Hybrid Future: Employees Who Freelance, Freelancers Who Feel Like Team
One of the most thought-provoking parts of our conversation was about blurring the boundaries between full-time and freelance work.
Steve shared how he started his own consulting and speaking work on the side of his NASA job — with full legal approval — once he saw that:
- His expertise was relevant far beyond NASA
- Outside work would expand his knowledge
- NASA would benefit from what he learned in other environments
“As soon as I started doing that, I started learning so much more about what other industries were doing. And I was able to bring that back into NASA.”
He believes companies are missing a huge opportunity by trying to tightly control employees’ outside activities instead of harnessing them.
Imagine a policy that says:
- You’re allowed to do approved freelancing or challenges on the side
- You agree not to share company IP or confidential information
- Every 6–12 months, you come back and share what you’ve learned and how it applies
If you want to upskill your people, giving them a forced training course is not your best bet. Giving them agency — and the chance to learn from real-world work — is far more powerful.
Is this a huge mindset shift? Absolutely.
Will most companies resist it at first? Definitely.
But the economics don’t lie.
The Economics: Why Fit-to-Task Beats Over-Hiring
Steve’s view of the freelance economy isn’t ideological. It’s practical.
You can literally pay a freelancer twice as much as your full-time employee and still come out ahead, because of all the overhead you don’t carry.
Think of the difference:
| Traditional full-time model | Fit-to-task freelance model |
| Salaries | You pay for exactly what you need, when you need it |
| Benefits | No long-term overhead if the work is temporary or specialised |
| Office space | You can try, test, and switch much faster |
| Underutilization | Company lifespans on major indices (like the S&P 500) have dropped from ~90 years to ~14 |
| Long hiring processes | Technology cycles are shortening |
| Long firing processes | Skills are fragmenting and becoming more nich |
This new way of working isn’t a nice-to-have. It may be the thing that saves the workforce — and many organisations — from becoming obsolete.
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So You Want to Hire Freelancers for the First Time?
At the end of the conversation, I asked Steve: “What advice would you give to a company considering hiring freelancers for the first time?”
His answer was concrete and actionable:
- Start with a real problem you’re struggling to staff: Don’t invent a pilot project. Use something you genuinely need help with — marketing, a technical exploration, a new tech area like AI or quantum sensing.
- Bring legal and procurement in as partners, not gatekeepers: Don’t just ask, “Can I hire a freelancer?” Frame it as: “We need to learn how to work with freelancers. Help us build a safe and effective way to do that.”
- Talk directly to platforms: Contact specialised networks. Use their enterprise support. They’ve already solved many of the problems you’re worried about.
- Expect some mismatches — but move fast: NASA swapped out a misaligned freelancer within weeks. In a full-time model, that might have taken a year. Build for experimentation and speed.
- Think hybrid, not either/or: Don’t frame this as replacing full-time employees. Frame it as augmenting your team, accessing expertise you don’t have, and upskilling your existing workforce faster.
A Final Thought: The Human Side of the Independent Workforce
Throughout our conversation, one thread kept coming back — agency.
- For companies, agency looks like having flexible access to the right talent at the right moment.
- For freelancers, agency is the power to choose work, clients, projects, and learning journeys.
Steve summed it up beautifully through the lens of the broader transition:
As the world gets faster and faster, this new way of working might be what actually saves the workforce — because it gives people a way to keep up, to keep learning, and to do work that fits them.
The future of work is not a distant concept. It’s already here — in platforms, in freelance careers, in hybrid teams, in leaders like Steve who’ve tested these ideas in one of the most complex organizations on Earth.
The question for companies isn’t: “Should we work with freelancers?”. It’s: “How fast can we learn to?”
And for freelancers isn’t: “How do I find clients?”. It’s: “How do I become the expert companies turn to when they’re finally ready to work this way?”
