Stern Measures Keep NASA's Kepler Mission on Track 73
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."
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.
Preflight testing was scaled back (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Corporate Sponsorship rant (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Stern (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Preflight testing was scaled back (Score:3, Insightful)
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 serious about money, so manage yourselves appropriately. And over the long-term, science in general wins, because more projects succeed, and money doesn't get reallocated from other projects to save the over-budget ones.
Because if they don't do this, eventually Congress will shut down (or radically reduce) the funding. And then they're all screwed, including the well-managed projects.
Re:lowest bidder mentality (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, greedy contractors abuse cost-plus contracts. They also abuse fixed-price contracts (by delivering just enough to get paid while essentially forcing the government to buy the next version of a substandard product in hopes of getting something that works better). The fundamental problem has more to do with an agency whose civil service management corps has become infested with wanna-be "executives" who are given authority over projects that they are grossly unqualified to lead. NASA needs to re-learn how to attract and retain people who are actually experts in their fields (that does NOT mean "hire business-school grads to throw money at contractors who claim to know what they're doing"), and it needs to figure out how to let them do their jobs with a minimum of political and bureaucratic manipulation.
Re:Stern (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No news here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:lowest bidder mentality (Score:3, Insightful)
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. The contract is in parts - part 1 is the engine. They are able to do this without large cost overruns. So they bid on the frame, and costs blow out big time. Now company X does not want to bid on the navigation system. It turns out that all other bids are much higher than the orginal cost. So what does NASA do? Ditch the project? Wear the overrun? How is this better? What if NO ONE wants to bid? A single contract would mean at least one company was obligated to provide the product.
Note also that with the above there's higher overall uncertainty about who's going to eventually build what. Integration costs would skyrocket. The overall future of the project would continually be uncertain. Whereas up front contracts mean people can start talking and planning earlier on. When you're talking about a project that already may take a decade to design and build, that's the difference between success and failure.
I know that in practice different companies make different parts of a vehicle, but the idea of breaking a product up into smaller chunks and letting companies bid or not on stages to manage their risk is stupid, whereas splitting the work based on a company's expertise may have merit (though you do wear integration costs).
Space exploration isn't cheap. Doing new things means there are cost overrun risks. The question is whether it's worthwhile. I believe it is.
Re:lowest bidder mentality (Score:3, Insightful)
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, is reasonably well understood. Yes, there is plenty of R&D to do, but there aren't any Apollo or Atlas-type leaps into the great unknown being taken. Even when it comes to design of significant rocket engines, satellite systems, and other space hardware, there are enough people that understand it well that NASA could get fixed-price bids if they really wanted them. These things don't need to be as outrageously expensive as they are, and cost-plus contracts are one (of many, many) reasons that they are.