Epic fail (and I don’t mean that against the engineers and scientists who are really smart and working their tails off- I mean that to the stupid bureacracy that is crafting NASA’s mission).

To anybody that thinks we’re going to be launching humans to Mars and getting them back sometime soon just think about what the MSL portends. We can’t even send another small robot to the planet on a one way mission on time and on budget (which we have successfully done a few times before- so it’s known science).

This mission was about real science and true discovery. This sucks. What is NASA doing? Have they figured out how to get people up to LEO and have them sit around looking at spider webs in zero g? Yes. mission accomplished. Woooooooopie….

At least they didn’t outright cancel it though.

It’s not just his letter, but the reaction to it as well. This has been getting a lot of press in space industry news, but the reaction is not necessarily supportive of his position. The New York Times on Dec 1 printed five letters from various people from the science and space industry reacting to the editorial. Most notable I thought was Zubrin, who blasted Stern’s idea, calling it “absurd.”

If you’re a contracting company, it’s in your best interest to not quite finish. If you perform well enough, you can press for a few more requirements that you could fill and make the mission more successful…if you only had a little more time and a little more money. I saw this as a government contractor plenty and often. It’s a system based on yearly disbursements, so you perform at 105% for 3/4 of the year, then pull back to about 90% near the year-end, lamenting that if you only had a little more time and budget you could more than make it up, and look how far we’ve come.

Cost overruns can spiral this way, seemingly gradually but adding up over time. During the 105% part of the year, you’re ahead so you don’t see a problem (as the government) with adding one or two more geegaws because, after all, you want to get your money’s worth. Plus, if you’re government and know you’re going to be reassigned you want your “legacy” projects to reflect how good you are at getting resources or projects, since you’re probably going to go and work for the same contracting companies you originally worked with as a government employee.

Nevermind that the bidding process encourages overestimates of work accomplishment and underestimates of cost, as well as encouraging companies to bill high and pay low when it comes to employees. All the profit is made up in “overhead” and low wages. One of my former managers even had a deal that he could keep the difference between the 50% overhead and the actual rate for the employee… (for instance, the employee is bid at rate (100%), and (50%) is overhead: if manager can get employee to work for 43%, manager keeps the 7% difference).

Contracting is a sick and sordid business model as it currently exists, which is part of the reason I’m against yet more “privatization.” Contracting companies have been gaming this system for decades.

“Informed speculation is that NASA is going to announce that the launch date for MSL is going to be slipped. One option that has been under consideration would be to launch MSL in 2010, park the spacecraft in a solar orbit (1 AU), do an Earth flyby in 2011, and then send it on to Mars. The additional cost for this option was estimated by NASA to be around $300 million. Another option would be to wait to launch until 2011 (directly to Mars) at a cost a few tens of millions above the cost of launching in 2010.”

canceling it now would be wasting the money already spent

is a fallacious (if very common) argument. It all depends on what is the best value to get from spending the money NASA has now.