OIG: NASA NEO Program is Inefficient and Lacks Oversight
NASA’s Efforts to Identify Near-Earth Objects and Mitigate Hazards
“NASA has organized its NEO Program under a single Program Executive who manages a loosely structured conglomerate of research activities that are not well integrated and lack overarching Program oversight, objectives, and established milestones to track progress. In addition, NASA is undertaking NEO-related activities not managed by the Program and not sufficiently integrated into ongoing Program activities. Furthermore, NASA lacks formal agreements or procedures for NEO-related activities it conducts with other Federal agencies and foreign governments and has not taken advantage of possible partnership opportunities. Consequently, managers could not identify the level of resources required to adequately support the Program or explain how activities to which the NEO Program is contributing further Program goals. Even though the Program has discovered, categorized, and plotted the orbits of more than 11,000 NEOs since 1998, NASA will fall short of meeting the 2005 Authorization Act goal of finding 90 percent of NEOs larger than 140 meters in diameter by 2020.”
Is it appropriate to throw rocks at the NASA NEO program? If they can’t handle the little rocks what are they going to do about the big ones. 😉
Translation:
More meetings.
More paperwork.
More high ranking pen pushers.
Yep … someone saw there was suddenly a bigger pot of money so its time to layer on the no-value-added management layers. Lots of reviews. Metrics. Oh yah. Watch the graph of number of PowerPoint presentations and travel climb …
The main complaint or evidence of “deficiency” in the report is that they aren’t going to meet a 2005 congressional “mandate” to find 90% of objects > 140 meters by 2020.
It doesn’t mention that Congress didn’t fund the work to accomplish the mandate until 2009, four + years later, or consider whether the mandate makes sense or is technically feasible.
But lots of management bringing their valuable expertise to bear (and getting their cut of the funding pie), reviews, and metrics will fix that right up.
That was my reaction as well.
NASA’a Program to find and track NEAs (aka the Spaceguard Survey) has been extremely successful. The IG wants more oversight of the teams that are carrying out the research, but I don’t see evidence that more oversight will improve the survey. Spaceguard has relied on the motivation of individual search teams to optimize their discovery rate by upgrading their systems and improving their efficiency. Would a stronger top-down management approach really yield better results than the current approach?