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Stern Measures Keep NASA's Kepler Mission on Track
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 05:43 PM
from the playing-hardball-in-spaaaace dept.
from the playing-hardball-in-spaaaace dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA's new Space Science Division Director, Dr. S. Alan Stern, appears to be making headway in keeping in space projects like the Kepler Mission at their original budgeted costs. The New York Times reports that Stern's plan is to hold projects responsible for overruns, forcing mission leaders to trim parts of their projects, streamline procedures or find other sources of financing. 'The mission that makes the mess is responsible for cleaning it up,' Stern says. Because of management problems, technical issues and other difficulties on the Kepler Mission, the price tag for Kepler went up 20% to $550 million and the launch slipped from the original 2006 target date to 2008. When the Kepler team asked for another $42 million, Stern's team threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take it over using the equipment that had already been built."
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They need some corporate sponsorship (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, for the love of science, don't anyone take this seriously, m'kay?
Corporate Sponsorship rant (Score:2)
Last time I flew I couldn't believe how far that this idea had gone. There were advertisements on the bottom of the plastic trays that you stack your belongings in when you slide them through the x-ray machines.
Who in their right mind though that this was a valuable place to sell
Re:Corporate Sponsorship rant (Score:4, Insightful)
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No news here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody should be surprised at this 'news', the unmanned/science side of NASA is just as bad at estimating costs and meeting schedules as the manned side. Every couple of years a new broom comes in and makes a big show of trying to change things... but things never really change.
Keep this in mind when they start whining about how the Shuttle is eating up all their budget.
Re:No news here. (Score:4, Insightful)
But I still feel that belt tightening is overdue at NASA. No way we're getting back to the moon, much less mars without more clever thinking applied to off-the-shelf components. The most successful of recent NASA projects have been the most thoughtful and focused, not the highest spenders.
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Re:No news here. (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is confirmed by anecdotal evidence from acquaintances who worked at Dryden and elsewhere - NASA tends to operate 'open loop'. When an office/program is established, it gets what amoun
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While I agree some strict budget control measures are long called for, I'm afraid the above quote isn't quite true. I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of missions that fit your description: successful, focused, not big spenders. Mars Pathfinder probably, although it wasn't necessarily a really focused mission. It was primarily a technology demonstrator. Stardust, Deep Impact, Mars Odyssey, and
Preflight testing was scaled back (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is not about saving money on that one project. It's about changing attitudes and processes over the long-term -- towards accountability in estimation, planning, and execution. If a $500mm project has to fail because they couldn't plan and implement, that's not good for science in that area in the short-term. But it sends a message to all other (future) projects: NASA is getting se
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So, if I replaced "project" with "war", "NASA" with "Pentagon", and "science" with "nat
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At the same time, a careful analysis needs to be made of just how and why a project gets to be over budget. Was it poor planning, poor management, or
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Way to go guys ! You saved $42 million but increased the chance of the entire $500 million project failing due to not enough preflight tests! Good choice there ! Nice one !
Give that man a cigar! Here's a money quote from one of the first sites I'd googled for the initial Hubble failure:
The initial failure of the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of problems caused by relying on computer simulations. In 1990, when the orbiting telescope sent its first photographs back to Earth, the images were unexpectedly fuzzy and out of focus. NASA determined that the problem was the result of a human error made years before the launch: the telescope's mirror had been ground into the wrong shape. The mirror, tested prior to launch like the telescope's other separate components, functioned properly on its own. However, the manufacturers did not actually test the mirror in conjunction with the other components. The manufacturers relied on computer simulations to determine that the separate components would work together. The simulation didn't take into account the possibility of a misshapen mirror.
Because of the Hubble problems, NASA learned "a great lesson" about "the merits of actually testing a system rather than depending upon theory and simulation," explains Doran Baker, founder and vice-president of Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory.
From - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3797/is_199810/ai_n8814801 [findarticles.com]
That's just one slice, but not at all the whole story. I get too pissed off even thinking of the early Hubble days to grope further to substantiate, but NASA blew it on many, many levels of saving a buck and avoiding common-sense operational tests - and I say this as an ex-advisor for the Army and Air Force operational
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Leaving aside the serious issue of reduced preflight testing (*cough* Hubble *cough*), we're still paying $550 million (the 2006 budgeted amount) instead of $592 million (the requested total amount), a reduction of 7.1%. In exchange for those savings, we're getting 3.5 years of science instead of 4.0--a reduction of 12.5%. Way to go,
lowest bidder mentality (Score:4, Insightful)
They are forced to bid low and over charge later, if they don't some other company will do it and they will lose out.
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Re:lowest bidder mentality (Score:5, Interesting)
Historically, some of the stuff NASA was trying to get bids on was so far outside the realm of expertise of any possible bidder that no one would have been willing to just eat the cost overruns. So cost-plus contracts were awarded. It's become ingrained, and contractors have realized that they can simply threaten to not deliver if cost overruns won't be payed for.
There are some small aerospace companies that place fixed-price bids on NASA contracts, but none of the major ones do. Many of these companies are of the opinion that taking cost-plus work is severely damaging to the company mindset and correspondingly to its ability to function.
In general, I think fixed-price contracts would be a good idea. If you're worried about paying for a large project along the way, write the contract with intermediate deliverables, like test results from subsystems or prototype versions.
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Oh yeah that would be much better. Let's see how it would work. Company A bids on the manufacture of lets say a new space vehicle. Lets use as examples 3 components - say: Engines, frame, and navigation system. Company X bids and wins design of the space vehicle, fixed cost.
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Your argument sounds nice, but is equally applicable to any large engineering project, which are regularly done on fixed-price contracts. As such, there's something wrong with it. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what, exactly.
I've worked on a NASA contract doing rocket engine development as a sub-contractor. Our bid for the subcontract was fixed-price. Even that level of experience was enough to convince me that cost-plus contracts are a bad idea.
Most of what NASA does, while hardly trivial, i
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Now if you're doing something new, like say:
- Plunging into the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn with a probe
- Calculating the alignment of planets
- Putting a man on the moon for the first time
NASA does a lot more with new technology and non-routine eng
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Fixed-price contracts work for large companies, selling inexpensive products.
Smaller companies can't just eat the cost and recoup it in profts elsewhere. Large companies might not be able to either, with multi-million dollar contracts.
As such, you're guaranteeing that companies will never be willing to bid on a difficult or unique project, because they'd have to massively over-charge just to cover the risks.
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That's a very interesting thing to say, given that the companies doing fixed-priced aerospace work are the small ones, and the companies placing cost-plus bids are the large ones.
Project management and cost estimation are problems that can be understood and solved, even when R&D is involved. There's no magic involved. Well-managed companies can estimate costs even for work they haven't done before, take a fixed-price contract, and turn a profit.
If you want to get really cynical about it, you could
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The issue comes when a contractor has met some deliverables, and then decides that the later ones will be more expensive than they originally bid. NASA would have the clout to get fixed-price bids if they had the willpower and desire to require them; make no mistake, the problem exists on both sides.
Another driver for fixed-price contracts in all government areas is profit margins. If a company places the lowest bid, and then produces a good product while making a 50% profit margin (because they found a
Holy moly... (Score:2, Funny)
why isn't anyone saying this? :) (Score:2, Funny)
*: yes yes. irony.
Human Nature (Score:2)
Whilst I agree with trying to keep to a plan, by being so hardline this guy just sounds like yet another clueless project manager who think the people that actually do the work (engineers and scientists) are purposely trying to go over budget at any opportunity if it wasn't
Stern (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anyways, I don't know if you read the article, but Stern is a scientist, he's an astrophysicist. So he does (or at least
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Building a space probe and putting it into the correct place is engineering, not research. We've put enough of them in various places that by now, we should have a reasonable idea of how much various bits cost, and in such a case, trying to keep costs down is reasonable.
Once the probe reaches its target, that's when the
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You have no idea. The military-industrial complex in the United States is second to none it its unrivaled ability to generate cost overruns and squander funds. Really, there's nothing like it anywhere on the planet.
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That's why we need Kepler.
U.S. Military in comparison to what? (Score:2)
The U.S. military actually manages its budgets fairly well, in comparison to others. The Soviet's essentially bankrupted their entire economy trying to maintain a military that ultimately it could not afford. The screw-ups in the Soviet unions management ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union.
The private sector makes massive screw-ups too. Companies go broke all the time. They pay for their mistakes. All told, the desire for economic survival and profit ultimately makes the corporate sector more effici
Re:Staying within budget? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Throw in the additional workforce requirements, stir with a couple of meetings between parties and flavor with outlandish shipping requirements.
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Re:Staying within budget? (Score:4, Interesting)
For most applications, parts can be qualified for use in batches: take a few parts from the batch, test them to destruction, and if they meet spec, the whole batch is qualified. When I worked in a mechanical testing lab, strength-testing a bolt to destruction would cost (equipment + labor + overhead) $1.50. At the typical ratio of one part tested out of every ten thousand, that's a tiny fraction of a penny per bolt.
Military hardware requirements generally state that each individual part meet spec. This requires non-destructive testing. The company I worked for never did non-destructive testing, but the one time we were asked for a quote, it was $30 per part. If that's typical for the industry, it's obvious why the military was spending $100 per bolt.
Parent
Re:Staying within budget? (Score:4, Interesting)
Statistical Process Control, yes. You'll still do both destructive and non-destructive testing especially for a military application, but yeah, hundred percent testing is expensive as hell. I did a number of SPC data acquisition systems for fastener manufacturers (self-tapping screws, mostly) and they would typically test 20 parts from a barrel of screws. That was sufficient for commercial use but would hardly be acceptable in a military program. And load-testing a bolt? There you'll have to use a high-powered tension machine (Tinius-Olsen or something on that order, if it's a large part) and those things aren't exactly fast.
There are many other failure modes that a threaded fastener can suffer as well, and depending upon the specifics you might have to test for those as well. That's not including performance testing and design verification either.
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If we were to take your post and the previous one together and assume that the cost for testing a simple part (nut, bolt, screw) is now three orders of magnitide above the cost of the the part itself, then I wonder if mil-spec parts are really doing us any favors. Obviously people's lives are at stake in many of these cases, but when it isn't, I wonder if the overall cost of having to do it over due to part failure might
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The "when it isn't" part is already being practiced. Not every bolt the military purchased cost $100. The $100 bolts are being used (presumably) in the situations where failure has a high cost.
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If every bolt
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