Why was Dawn canceled? The answer is perhaps not all that clear, according to Mark Sykes, a co-investigator on the axed mission. Yesterday’s Congressional hearings stressed that smaller missions should not be sacrificed for bigger ones, yet reading Sykes account, this appears to be what has happened with Dawn, and only hours after the hearings ended. This story is interesting, and no doubt will continue to unfold.
Update: Mark Sykes has written an article to House Science Chairman Boehlert.
Update #2: According to NASAWatch.com, Dawn needs $40 million to complete, but will cost $10 million to kill. So, for a $370 million dollar mission, it’s getting canceled because of less than 10% of its total cost.
March 3rd, 2006 at 7:48 pm
With all the postings today about Dawn and the NY Times article about NASA funding and also how NSF has to try to handle more of the load, I’m really glad I decided to go teach at a private high school instead of going the post-doc and tenure route.
Must be really depressing to be a grad student or post-doc in the planetary sciences right now.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:22 pm
… or a scientist, or an education and public outreach professional…
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Oh dear… they are really killing science!
March 4th, 2006 at 12:08 am
They had $373 million to do the mission. According to the Discovery missions page on NASA’s website :
“The cost for the entire mission (design, development, launch vehicle, instruments, spacecraft, launch, mission operations, and data analysis) must be less than $299 million. The development time from mission start to launch can be no more than 36 months.”
So, they already went 74 million dollars over budget and were asking for another 40 million dollars, and were already several *years* overdue.
Russell and Sykes would be facing jail time for fraud if they were in the private sector.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Almost always, NASA missions use cutting-edge tech. On STIS, the camera I was on, the UV detectors were always behind schedule because nothing like thme had been built. When they came online, they were the most sensitive UV detectors ever built, and the performace was stunning (I loved it when I was able to work on the UV data; it was so much easier to work with than the optical stuff from the CCD).
The point is, NASA scientists/engineers/etc. try to work into the budget any problems, but they can’t possibly all be foreseen. And to be fair — and I’m not saying this is good practice — I’ll point out that a lot of private sector companies get away with worse.
March 4th, 2006 at 4:37 am
Yay for the private sector:
I grew up in the smiling metropolis of Huntsville, Alabama, host to oodles of space-program stuff. Because the same city incorporates Redstone Arsenal on the military side and the Marshall Space Flight Center on the NASA side, it manages to get “trickle-down” benefits from both directions. Even if science gets shafted, the Chinese restaurants where engineers always have lunch can keep going, because the guys building missiles eat at the same buffets as the people designing Shuttle payload modules.
Not that the “trickle-down” system works perfectly, of course: a quick glance at the housing projects, etc., will indicate that. The graft at the top of the defense contractors operating in town is enough to turn a libertarian into a Marxist. During the civil rights movement, when other Alabama towns were making themselves famous — Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham — the Powers Which Be decided they needed to protect Huntsville’s juicy federal funding by protecting its image, so they paid off civil-rights leaders. How much will it cost us not to have a march in this town?
When people ask me where I come from, I always tell them I was born in a New Mexico border town but grew up in the Heart of Dixie, in the one city ever to have its cultural level raised by an infusion of ex-Nazis. I’m sure there are a great many people, in Germany and elsewhere, who would feel greatly uncomfortable naming a town’s convention hall the Wernher von Braun Civic Center. (”Vonce the rockets are up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat’s not my department, says Werhner von Braun…”) But it was the space program’s colonization of Huntsville which, more than anything else, made that town a pale blue dot in a red state. Sordid ironies. . . .
(You don’t see “Get the US out of the UN” billboards in Huntsville; you have to drive to Birmingham to see that.)
On a completely different topic, why do you suppose these colliding galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are smiling?
March 4th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Someone clearly involved with the Dawn mission has posted interesting comments in an earlier blog entry.
March 4th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Hi- its me again. The minimum cost of of the “stand-down” according to the Dawn Independent Assessment team report was 14 million (standdown+startup) dollars. The NASA upper management has enough knowledge from other missions to know that one never saves money under such circumstances. So to hear complaints of “cost overruns” for this mission, knowing the role that the upper NASA management played in adding to those costs is grating on the ear, I must say.
One other point in the costs mentioned should be the hundreds of thousands of euros spent. Since two of the three Dawn instruments were European, NASA has dug itself a messy hole with its international partners (German Aerospce Agency, Italian Space Agency).
March 4th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
I have to wonder– the reason I keep hearing that we need to continue working on ISS is because of our foreign partners (and of course because so many people are working on it). Yet Dawn had many foreign partners, and was axed. I now fear for other missions which, previously, I figured were safe because of foreign partners. Also, GALEX was severely cut, even though it was working great, which makes me fear for other healthy, robust missions. If Dawn was cut, if NuSTAR was cut, if SOFIA was cut, what mission (besides HST and JWST) is safe?
March 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Big problem here is that you’ve already spent x millions of $ and to just junk it would be throwing away money.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:17 am
Phil: I think the ISS is overriding all of NASA’s problems, so I don’t think that one will suffer. But if those other missions are not part of NASA’s “Vision for Space Exploration” program then I would say they are at risk. There was no logical reason to cancel Dawn, the ‘cost overruns and technical problems” reason given is a smokescreen for the simple fact that Dawn is not part of NASA’s new change in direction (In addition to the US government’s other expenses which are crippling non-defense-related science).
The Dawn project head (Chris Russell) has chosen to fight the decision, so I suspect you will hear more.
March 5th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Wait Phil–did you just say GALEX was severely cut? In what way? Are they turning off a working satellite to save a little money?
March 6th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Dawn was an ion-powered thrust mission not requiring any special gravity assists. Its unusual propulsion system gave it a longer launch window. In fact if it missed its nominal launch window it could be slotted in later.
I think this mission may have become a victim of procrastination. Without a practical deadline for launch, the shortest delay was prone to being extended and spending beyond the program’s means could be rung up on a probe that hadn’t yet left the ground.
March 6th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Dean, I was referring to something that happened a couple of years ago. I’d have to look up the details in my notes, but as I recall, it had a big cut to funding after a year or so of operations. I may be misremembering.
March 6th, 2006 at 10:16 am
It is a bit unfair to blame cost overruns on a project when the costs are mostly attributable to delays and cancellations by Headquarters.
It’s also a bit unfair to blame NASA when the President and Congress give them a requirement to do something but not enough money to cover it. NASA is responsible for how they shuffle the deck, but the small deck is what was given to them.
Of course the President’s plan has always had a hole in it to my mind. End Shuttle by 2010 but not have a replacement vehicle in line till 2014? Hello, gap.
March 7th, 2006 at 12:01 am
The bad news is official now according to space.com :
http://space.com/news/060303_dawn_cancelled.html
From which I’ll quote aparagraph if I may .. :
“When word came last year of the stand down, Dawn’s principal investigator, Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) told SPACE.com that the mission could tolerate a later launch date – without any science impact. He remained hopeful that NASA would allow the mission to proceed to launch. “I am having a difficult time processing and accepting the cancellation,†said Lucy McFadden of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland and a Dawn team member. “With the success of the Discovery Program’s Deep Impact and Stardust missions, and the recent and exciting scientific results from the Hubble Space Telescope on Ceres…we were poised to emerge into the asteroid frontier with the Dawn spacecraft,†McFadden told SPACE.com. McFadden said that scientists can better understand asteroids as true protoplanets, “if we could only send the spacecraft there.†Furthermore, there are equally intriguing clues to the intricacy of Vesta, a very different asteroid that was also on Dawn’s trajectory, she explained. “There are hundreds of people in this country and in Europe who have worked on the [Dawn] project for four years and had committed another decade to it…and now we are dropped,†McFadden said. “What can I say? It makes me cry.â€
- Via Space.com item as linked above
Nothing about it on the JPL, NASAor Dawnhome pages as yet -they’re certainly not trumpeting the news.
I’ve now read in the Sykes letter linked to here that – get this – they broke the news to the Dawn projects head, Dr Russell at his mothers funeral. And as noted by the BA himself after Mary Cleave had testified before the Science Comittee w/o mentioning it there Do these people have any shred of compassion and honour? I doubt it.
I just hope it can somehow be revived – wonder if they could give all they’ve built to the ESA and get Europe to take over?
For those who might want to check the Dawn mission website is here :
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
No comments there on its cancellation yet but may be updated …
March 7th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
There’s no comments on any of our Dawn web pages because Chris Russell is still deciding the best strategy to fight the Dawn decision. Repropose the mission? Can some help come from ESA? Other ideas? From the European side, how should ASI and DLR treat NASA as a partner in the future? All of these questions are being discussed among the space agencies and high-level PIs. With three countries’ space agencies involved in the mess, the Dawn cancellation is a bit political.
Tomorrow we have a Dawn Payload telecon at our normally scheduled time, but I’m sure it will not be a discussion about sizes of nuts and bolts on the spacecraft but rather more information from the payload project to the engineers about the cancellation.
Personally, I think one good idea to finish the mission is to seek private funding from a Paul Allen equivalent, to find a rich and crazy space enthusiast who has 40 million dollars to invest in a vision about our solar system formation and two asteroids, but I’m not sure if the space science community is ready for that.. Anyone know if the Google heads are space freaks…?
And why didn’t Mary Cleave simply send Dawn to the Moon? Then it would have satisfied NASA’s new Moon and Mars agenda, she could say that bin Laden has terrorist training camps there to justify it, so then NASA could qualify for war dollars, and then the US government could say they are making the Home Planet better and safer for all.
(yes, the last paragraph was a joke.. )
March 8th, 2006 at 4:21 am
News/Rumours: ASI has offered to pay the additional costs for building DAWN, DLR might offer the ground control (in connection with ESA or alone I don’t know, but ESA has been asked if they want to participate).
Hehehe, NASA.. step aside.
We gonna take over.
Maybe there’s hope after all.
March 8th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Sorry, but if ASI has offered to pay, then please wait until the check clears! Money from the contract for the Roma Dawn science team which ASI signed in 2002 didn’t arrive until Fall 2005, which meant that: two students didn’t have any salaries for a year, ~6 people didn’t have travel funds to go calibrate the VIR instrument or attend US science meetings, one had to buy her own work computer, the personal credit cards for the team were maxed out, and all had three years of financial headaches. The VIR team pulled it together and built a great instrument _in spite of_ ASI.
March 8th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
yes, heard that only recently. This VIR team can only be admired for that amount of personal involvement, using their personal credit cards to fund a space mission.. Chapeau, and my fullest respect! That IS a hell of commitment..
March 10th, 2006 at 7:58 am
People who have visited the JPL web page are probably confused, first it says Dawn was cancelled, then the words disappear. That reflects the situation accurately because almost every day is a new development and the Dawn team(s) feel like they are on a roller coaster.
Presently the JPL Dawn people are working as if Dawn was not cancelled because … they never received an official Dawn cancellation letter from NASA HQ. The cancellation did not follow normal protocal, in addition, which is to have a ‘hearing’ where the team can hear the cancellation reasons and have an opportunity to respond. They had _no_ opportunity to respond, in fact, which is especially egregarious given that the words in the media for the cancellation gives reasons that are inaccurate or not representative of the real issues.
Last Tuesday the JPL director met with the NASA head, Dr. Griffin about the Dawn mission, and Griffin agreed to hold a meeting where the team can make their case. The meeting (at the moment unscheduled — but in the next few weeks) will be chaired by two people who have extensive robotic mission experience, so we expect/hope the outcome will be fair. The meeting should be quite technical and hopefully will address the points that the Independent Assessment Team made, which everyone feels was quite fair too. In fact all of the issues in the AIT report that could be a ‘problem’ for the mission have been addressed and are solved. Technically the mission is in very good shape.
The later brings up another point, which is that missions in any stage of development are a series of engineering exercises to be solved. Unfortunately Dawn is now being scrutinzed by people who have little mission experience, so that any engineering discussion of a routine problem is being magnified and blown out of proportion as a ‘big problem’. Sometimes the team doesn’t even hear about those issues until they read a press report, so how can one possibly correct such sideswiping? At this point there are so many inaccuracies about the Dawn mission that the team strongly feels that they must be given a chance. So we hope that the outcome will be well. Today, the Dawn team is quite optimistic, in fact, that the Dawn mission will survive this mess and go forward.
September 5th, 2006 at 9:53 am
Hmmm, as a general comment, it’s painfully obvious (and has been for quite some time) that NASA science is and is going to continue to suffer because of the Shuttle and ISS. Why should this be a surprise to American astronomers? The AAS was the only, to my knowledge, American science society to support the funding of the ISS by NASA. I vividly remember well known astronomers telling me at meetings that “oh, we have to support it, else NASA will never fund any science?”. (I can supply names that you will recognize!). Well, sometimes you get what you ask for and, rarely, sometimes you get what you deserve.