Forgive these rather long expository posts; I’ll get to real astronomy very soon, trust me. But I am reporting on what’s happening here in the order it occurs.
A fixture at these AAS meetings are what’re called Town Hall Sessions, where high-ranking members of some community come and talk to the astronomers. Directly after Mike Griffin’s talk, NASA held a Town Hall. Speaking were Alan Stern, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, as well as several other NASA folks.
Stern gave an interesting talk. There has been a lot of worrying in the astrophysics community recently that money is being taken away to pay for other things (like, future observatories being defunded to pay for going back to the Moon - and these were legitimate complaints, I’ll add).
However, Stern pointed out that that cost overruns across the Science Mission Directorate of NASA were almost $5.8 billion over five years. That’s nearly twice the amount of money taken out of SMD to fund other programs. In other words, if we could control costs, we wouldn’t have to worry nearly as much about funding cuts or funding transfers.
A few years ago, I heard Griffin say that these aren’t cost overruns, they are proposal underfunds. In other words, the teams proposing missions don’t ask for enough money. Shocker! That’s the environment of the way we fund projects: when you compete for missions, it’s very tempting to ask for less money than you need so that you might look more frugal (or at least look like you run a tighter ship) than your competitor. I’ll say that having been on several proposals for missions, I’ve never seen this personally, but I can see how it can happen easily enough. And it clearly does; many missions run overbudget. Sometimes that’s honest; it’s impossible to know all the troubles you’ll have later in the mission that will delay launch and cost more money. Bt it sure does sound like sometimes, a mission budget may be lowballed on purpose.
Stern’s talk was a stark contrast to that of Mike Griffin’s, though in essence he said many of the same things. Stern was far more positive, being clear that the astronomical community needs to work with NASA to keep costs down, and with that cooperation we can aid NASA hugely. I liked his attitude of cooperation more than Griffin’s attitude of chastisement. I think we need both attitudes, at least some mix of them. But I’d like more of Stern’s on the balance.
And I’ll leave this with some cool news: NASA recently announced that they will start accepting proposals for a new science mission. They ask teams to send in their Notice of Intent, that is, a letter stating the team will be sending in a proposal. When they made that announcement, they received 85 Notices of Intent. Clearly, scientists still have a lot of trust and support for NASA. I love to hear that; it takes years to get a mission put together and it’s good to see not only that NASA is opening up more mission opportunities, but also that that astronomy community is jumping on those opportunities.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Don’t worry about “long expository posts”. It makes me not regret too much not being able to go myself!
January 8th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Ditto. Keep up the posts like you are doing. You’re like a modern day Walter Cronkite when he did his “You Are There” shows.
I’d love to be there, but can’t. So I live vicariously through your postings.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I am so sick of NASA not having enough money, if we had spent even a tiny fraction of the money we spent on Iraq on NASA they would have more than enough money. The United States is super lame, no sense of priority whatsoever.
Of course, its much better to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on killing each other than it is to actually, say, advance our civilization. Here’s to more astronauts being strapped to underfunded ICBMs and blasted into space to perform underfunded missions. Space travel: on sale this week at Wal-Mart, prices still dropping.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
On the topic of overruns, I would like to recommend a book to the engineers here that I’ve recently started rereading. It is Augustine’s Laws, by Norman R. Augustine. He’s worked for Douglas, Martin-Marietta, and the Secretary of the Army. I have to admit that the book has an approving blurb by Donald Rumsfeld, but he apparently didn’t take the lessons in it to heart.
The book is a sardonically funny description of just what exactly goes wrong in all those aerospace programs — in other words, how NOT to run military R&D. There are also charts and statistics to back everything up. One of the topics is overruns, and the data used suggests that before 1983, only 10% of programs met their estimated costs. Want an 80% chance of not going over? You need to double the budget.
This means, of course that one in five programs spend twice as much money as they expected. Granted, this was written twenty-five years ago, but I’d like to know how true it remains…
“It turns out, according to Marcus Vitrivious Pollio, the architect and engineer, that the ancient ancestral law in the Greek city of Ephesus demanded engineers to file a formal cost estimate with the magistrate prior to initiating work on a public project. If the work was completed for the specified amount, the engineer was rewarded with decrees and marks of honor. An overrun of up to one-fourth was financed by the treasury without the imposition of penalty. But excesses over one-fourth were drawn from the engineer’s personal property which had to be pledged as security at the time of response to the RFP (Request for Proposal). As seen from figure 3, were such a practice to be reinstated some 25 centuries later, approximately 55 percent of the engineers would be spending their nights on the steps of the Parthenon.”
Augustine’s Third Law, AKA the Law of Apocalyptic Costing:
“Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.”
January 8th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Really fascinating…this low-ball budgeting technique goes on at all levels of government! I work for a local school board in the construction department. One of my main tasks is to develop budgets for new schools and renovations etc.. I insist on developing detailed, line item budgets that are as realistic as possible, and actually have a “snowballs” chance of covering the total costs that will be incurred. I am routinely pounded from upper management, elected boards etc., that “it can’t possibly cost that much” and “you need to to reduce that budget” despite the fact that my projects end up being completed on time and on budget. Meanwhile, a co-worker in charge of smaller projects under-budgets constantly using lump-sum “guesstimates” and therefore he is able to create at the beginning of each fiscal year a long list of projects that will be completed with the budget he has to work with. He is perceived to be doing more with less, even though at the end of the year he has only accomplished a fraction of the projects due to a “lack of funds”. Not that I’m bitter or anything!!
Thanks for the tip on the book Jennifer!
January 9th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I worked on a number of observatories. I was on the initial design team for Hubble (then called simply Space Telescope) but also worked on Solar Max, the Spitzer IRAC, GRO, IUE, OAO-C (Copernicus) and a number of others including some projects for JWST (back when it was known as NGST). Bloat happens. When NASA shows a willingness, it happens even more. For example, a calibration working group meeting roster listed 200 members. In contrast, the initial design effort had less than 20 people. The monthly operating cost for HST is half of the cost of the entire SMM repair mission and nearly 50 times the monthly operating budget for its predecessor, Copernicus.
NASA isn’t the only government agency to suffer this problem. DoD has it a bad case of it too. A large part of the problem is in the way government funding works. A situation will continue until the Congress starts demanding real accounting and accountability. However, the fact remains that overruns are convenient on so many levels. The contractor gets more money; the bureaucrats can use it to justify asking for more money (more money means more power and status in the bureaucratic world); and the congressman can promote a pet project for only X dollars knowing full well that is only a quarter of the real cost. The real nightmare of the bureaucrat is underrun! Of course, overrunning is publicly “abhorred” by all
NASA’s continued commitment to astronomy is encouraging. Public funding can be fickle, though. Keep your fingers crossed.
Welcome to democracy. Keep in mind there are many who think the money spent on NASA is a total waste when there are so many needy. As an institution, DoD will always be with us and will always get the lion’s share because far more people accept its necessity. If it wasn’t spending money on Iraq it just would be spend it elsewhere. Give it a rest.
January 9th, 2008 at 8:38 am
It also wouldn’t hurt to keep in mind that it was the U.S. ballistic missle program (a military venture) and the bureaucratic savvy of von Braun that led to the development of the space program in the first place.
NASA also got a big boost from the Cold War grandstand stunt to get to the Moon before the USSR. Most likely thanks to von Braun again.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Folks, you’re missing two things very badly indeed.
The first is the result of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s work on that disaster (you can Google for the Board’s report, and it’s in Barnes & Noble and Amazon). NASA crippled itself by not determining what the end use of the funding it received would actually be. Apparently, depending on the fiscal year, “use it or lose it” fundraising produced an environment with dozens of projects underway that had no hope of reaching space. Thus, the National Vision for Manned Space Flight. As Roger Tetrault said in his visit to Savannah River Site (producer of the isotopes for Cassini’s RTGs), “I don’t care if you agree with the ‘vision’, it’s important that we have one.” This is because it establishes a purpose for any funding.
The second is that if you really, really want to free up funding for your project, you should get it from assorted other Federal agencies, like HUD, not the DoD. Check their budgets. When Edmund Muskie and fans gutted Apollo with visions of starving Americans, the result was abandoned hardware for complete missions through Apollo 20 or so and the exodus of enthusiasts in the space business (can you imagine Gene Kranz or Kurt Debus on vacation over the Valentine weekend while Columbia’s wing was holed? Not me. But I guess that’s because I went to school with the sons and daughters of KSC ground crews).
And we still have starving Americans. The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.
Back to the future of manned space flight: don’t forget that many of the costs may be reduced with automation there, too. The Russians did nicely with Buran.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Radwaste, well said.
While the DoD gets most of the criticism for its size, the DoHHS (Health and Human Services, the “welfare” department, formerly HUD) is more than half of the national budget all by itself. It spends more than twice NASA’s annual budget EVERY DAY.
I use this to counter the “starving people” argument. If NASA’s entire budget was cancelled and put into HHS, it couldn’t even be measured.
Remember, too, that a large chunk of the DoD budget is R&D, and a lot of that technology filters into civilian space programs (the HST optics owe a lot to some PR satellites of the ’70s) and eventually into consumer items and medical treatments.
- Jack
January 10th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Radwaste, living up to his name, writes:
[[The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.]]
Yeah, right, Rad, all those unemployed people were unemployed because they wanted to be.
Have you ever considered trying to live in the real world?
January 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Barton, do you know what a “straw man” is? You’ve made one. If you can show the former NASA Apollo budget saving the life of an unemployed person - “those who have not won life’s lottery” is a favorite phrase of some who intend to be in control of their benefits - go right ahead. And you may chastise or praise Senator Muskie lavishly for being at the center of diverting those funds if you wish. That would save you the time here wasted in ad hominems.
“Radwaste” is my job. I will assume you have one, because you are posting here, but I must also assume that it has nothing to do with Federal funding or politics.
In the meantime, when you merely feed people who are unemployed, you get more unemployed people. Look around and count the project housing. Has it gone down? No.
Since Apollo was quit, different forces are at work producing the rich, the poor and the in-between. What Apollo and similar projects do is inspire people to be other than a simple wage earner. That’s the value of manned missions: showing people what can be done. Alas, most of the things the Apollo astronauts were doing remains a mystery to apathetic Americans, clamoring yet again to know what a politician can do for them.
January 11th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Welcome to democracy. Keep in mind there are many who think the money spent on NASA is a total waste when there are so many needy. As an institution, DoD will always be with us and will always get the lion’s share because far more people accept its necessity. If it wasn’t spending money on Iraq it just would be spend it elsewhere. Give it a rest
I think your wrong, there is absolutely no way the Bush administration could have justified the astronomical (pun intended) amounts of money to be spent in Iraq if it were spent on other things. Only pointless war could ever attract that amount of spending. But if your so sure that it would have been spent elsewhere, then what would be so wrong about giving some of it to NASA? Space exploration is like rock climbing, it shouldn’t be done with equipment simply because it was the cheapest available that fit within budget. If we can’t afford it we shouldn’t do it, though I suspect we could easily afford it if we would prioritize better.
The problem with people who think that NASA money is a waste is that many of them don’t actually realize the tiny amount of the federal budget NASA consumes. You give it a rest, find a necessary war we have fought since 1945. DODs necessity is a myth, like the myth that NASA spends huge chunks of the budget.
January 11th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
DODs necessity is a myth, like the myth that NASA spends huge chunks of the budget.
I should have qualified that last part. That DOD needs the giant budget it gets. Wasteful spending is a hallmark of the DOD, billions are wasted every year on programs that have shown little utility on the actual battlefield. The DODs ability to move from the Cold War stalemate to a 21st century warfare environment has proved poor, and that’s being generous.