“No” is a New World for NASA
“Four times they came for more money and four times we told them ‘no,’” Dr. Stern said. “When they came to believe I was serious and had my boss’s backing, they took it seriously. They quickly found a way to erase that bill.”
In order for NASA to financially survive, they have put into effect a new philosophy for their government projects at their original budgeted cost, something unheard of for quite awhile. Recently it has been found that beginning a project by private industries has many times been followed-up with the original budget being unsurpassed with a request for higher funding about three-quarters of the way done, forcing a higher budget for the project by NASA to get the completed project. We have noticed a trend for NASA to not pay further funding with projects almost done, and have wondered why.
Last April, NASA brought in a new associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate—Dr S. Alan Stern, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist—a man who lately is making many problems with researchers and contractors by forcing them to complete projects at their original budgeted cost by saying no to further financial requests. Stern went in front of
Congress right after taking office, outlining a tougher plan to keep NASA on track and hold companies responsible for several things:
*better estimating tools for costs cutting
*realistically priced missions
*new studies to better understand and reduce technology risks
Annually, NASA spends about $5.4 billion for their science program, which is divided among astrophysics, earth science and planetary exploration. Other major programs are the president’s request for returning humans to the moon, the space shuttle operations, and space shuttle replacements while keeping the science programs responsible for them to about 1 percent increase per year for four years, on their annual $16 billion dollar budget. This allows for approximately $3 billion dollars over the four-year span.
The first target for Stern was the Kepler 2001 mission to launch a planet-hunting telescope. A continuous price tag has went up for this due to management problems, technical issues, and company difficulties. This has changed the original launching date that originally was a March 2006 target to the end of 2008. NASA accepted from the Kepler team a 20 percent overrun which raised the price to $550 million, with the 2008 launching date, but last spring the Kepler team came to NASA four times requesting an additional $42 million dollars, and four times they were refused.
At the fourth request, Stern and his team threatened to open the project up to new bids so the problems could be taken over by other researchers, forcing the Kepler group to successfully come up a new plan which involved cutting back six months of the four-year mission and scaling back on the preflight testing.
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 5:20 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
