OIG: NASA Simply Does Not Have The Money to Do Everything
NASA’s 2014 Top Management and Performance Challenges
“NASA Inspector General Paul Martin today released the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) annual report discussing the most serious management and performance challenges facing NASA. The underlying theme of this year’s report is sustainability. Specifically, the OIG noted that NASA’s ability to sustain its ambitious exploration, science, and aeronautics programs will be driven in large measure by whether the Agency is able to adequately fund such high-profile initiatives as its commercial cargo and crew programs, Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars 2020 Rover, and associated personnel and infrastructure.”
[quote]In what has become something of an unfortunate pattern, NASA began the
new fiscal year without a full-year appropriation, making long-range
planning more difficult.[/quote] from OIG report.
Is it possible to start the financial year at a time compatible with Congress awarding NASA’s budget, say April?
Nope – Congress sets the schedule for the federal budget; that way they can grand stand by not finishing their work on time. Interestingly, up until 1974, it used to start on July 1st; then they moved it to October 1st – right befor the election final push that leads them to go home before finishing. Maybe they should go back to July 1st – then they’d have all summer to pass continuing resolutions!
i think this report needs to be put on a list like this.
http://www.livescience.com/…
Where will NASA get its money for human spaceflight in the future? From commercial Space.
In the last week Elon Musk has decided to start a new money making activity for Spacex.
To me this is very important to the future of human space flight/exploration/planet, moon or space settlement.
Instead of just making money in commercial launch, Spacex is about to start making money directly from space.
Tell me, how much profit can Spacex make on one micro satelite per year? A million? 2 million? 3?
And he plans to launch 700 of them.
Isn’t Spacex still under Elons privite control?
Won’t most all the yearly profit from these satelites go directly to supporting Spacex’s Mars settlement program.
Doesnt Nasa just have to help Spacex to go to mars or the moon.
I sure wish Nasa was building a moon lander instead of all that Orion SLS crap.
Yes, SpaceX is being kept private. Musk does not want to go public until he has a production Mars transport in service. It is essentially impossible to follow crazy dreams when you have a zillion owners, SEC oversight, and the need for quarterly profits.
He uses internal cash and venture capital investments .
It’s worth pointing out that a strong CEO is supported by shareholders- Steve Jobs comes to mind.
Steve Jobs was ousted (temporarily) by John Scully. Now Scully says that was a mistake.
“Where will NASA get its money for human spaceflight in the future? From commercial Space.”
indirectly, though. from taxes.
“Tell me, how much profit can Spacex make on one micro satelite per year? A million? 2 million? 3?”
depends on the cost of each of the 200 – 250 pound satellites, and on how many users sign up for satellite-based internet services. and how much it will cost to provide those services. my guess is that your guess is pie-in-the-sky high. they won’t be making billions in revenue from “very low cost” internet services without a truly massive user base.
“Won’t most all the yearly profit from these satelites go directly to supporting Spacex’s Mars settlement program.”
most of the yearly profit will most likely have to go to paying the people who will be needed to run and manage an enormous network of 700 satellites that’s providing internet services to remote areas around the world.
“Doesnt Nasa just have to help Spacex to go to mars or the moon.”
no, it doesn’t.
“I sure wish Nasa was building a moon lander instead of all that Orion SLS crap.”
A moon lander without a rocket to launch it or a crew module to fly people to it? well that would be just silly.
Falcon heavy is your launcher. Dragons are your crew module. Silly is building this crap you already have for billions of dollars that you can’t afford to fly.
FH will be able to launch a Dragon to lunar orbit but Dragon’s life support wouldn’t last the whole trip (from what I understand). Also it wouldn’t be able to launch a lunar lander to TLI.
We have made so much progress on SLS/Orion. I don’t believe it is the right call to throw them away.
If we are going to do anything BEO (without sacrificing ISS and CC) the budget needs to be increased. It doesn’t need to be increased that much ($3 Billion extra would be enough to have around 2 SLS launches per year plus keep everything else).
Honestly I think the best option to go with would be an EML-2 exploration gateway. A presentation I saw recently showed that it would only take 3 SLS Block IB launches to get the station in place along with a reusable lunar lander.
Unfortunately the prospects for a $3B increase are not good.
Well Congressman Culbertson has hinted at a potential increase of around $3 Billion having bipartisan support. I agree with you that the prospects for that are not good for the near future but NASA’s budget is going to have to be increased just to accommodate ISS and Commercial Crew.
If the next administration decides on a moon first approach I think there will be more support for a budget increase.
Musk is planning to build 700 of these. He will build them like cars. What’s to stop him from building 7000 or 70,000 and driving down the cost of internet service on earth.
Your guess is that my guess is pie high in the sky. Neither you or I has a clue.
How many people will be needed to run this vast service? How much can be automated?
Satellite-based internet service suffers from two problems: latency and upload. It can be maddening.
Lower orbit satellites help, but the speed of signals- slower through atmosphere than vacuum- rule the roost.
If many of the flock fly low I’m wondering if that could solve the upload problem? Wondering what’s so magic about the 700 number? Are these satellites like moving cell zones that swap off to the ground customers as they orbit. Or will most of them be in geo over one place on earth?
They are in LEO and act like moving cell towers, much as the Iridium satellites do. The real question is how the larger number of satellites will provide some advantage over iridium.
Couldn’t possibly be in GEO. Too much juice for a handset to talk to them. Have to be as low as possible- the lower the better. That could be one reason for 700 of the: attrition.
Attrition is probably the correct answer. I don’t know how their approach to survivability has changed or if it has at all, but I don’t expect to see long lives out of their satellites based on what I’ve seen.
“What’s to stop him from building 7000 or 70,000 and driving down the cost of internet service on earth.”
the law of diminishing returns.
how many people needed is dependent on how many people sign up for his internet service. the biggest driver of number of employees required will always be customer service.
http://www.nasdaq.com/artic…
there’s a pretty good thread on NSF about this, suggest you read all 11 pages of it: http://forum.nasaspacefligh…
Thanks 🙂
This will be the most disruptive thing Musk has done yet, and he will use this money to help pay for his Space exploration. This is way more important than whether or not NASA gets more money to waste on SLS/Orion or not.
he will only get money if people sign up to use this satellite internet service. just the act of launching satellites doesn’t magically make you money.
there are already satellite internet service providers. current satellite internet is very slow, coverage is spotty, connecting with the satellites is iffy, and there are few people who use it.
he will have to offer superior service for a lower price. he will have to pay thousands of customer service people, advertise this new service in nations around the world, and persuade millions to sign up and use it.
that costs money, and all of it will have to be paid for before allocating extra money for SpaceX’s deep space ambitions. it will be several years before this satellite internet service provider is profitable. so any other SpaceX plans will have to wait for extra funding.
Read @John_Gardi tweets on the use of ground Stations.
By the time SLS/Orion makes its first human Space flight 2021 Musk will have a profitable world internet service.
By 2021 how many billions will public space have pissed away on, Orion/SLS, that could have been spent on real space exploration?
So, where is the evidence that there will enough customers paying for his service? Where is the evidence that he will even be able to achieve the performance from his internet satellites that he says he’ll achieve? Where is the evidence that his satellite internet service will even be flying by then?
There are a lot of things that have to happen before those satellites fly, and there are a lot things that have to happen for that service to be desirable by enough customers to be profitable. Just being an idea of Elon Musk’s doesn’t make mean that all things will happen as he or you predict.
You’re confusing proposed ideas with proven ideas and ideas already put into action.
If Musk can produce satellites that can be easily received without concern regarding antenna position or visibility this could be an advantage for mobile service. If the uplink speed is reasonable and costs are competitive with landlines it could be a factor in fixed location service. I presume the large number of satellites is an attempt to avoid the need to maintain each satellite in a stable orbit. Nevertheless unless the service is both faster and cheaper than Iridium by a significant margin this could be a difficult business model.
You are right, current satellite service stinks. And Musk obviously has a plan to provide better service.
Captian Obvious
Idea
Musk is building a barge to attempt a landing on, next month before doing any f9r testing in mexico? Perhaps he should do these tests off his barge or one of the two other barges he should be building now for falcon heavy.
SpaceX is building one barge. for possibly two test landings. i imagine the barge will be decommissioned after testing is complete and the first stage begins returning to the launch site.
barges aren’t deep water vessels.
My 78 and 81 honda both traveled to the US on deep sea barges?
wow. let me be the first to tell you that cargo ships aren’t barges.
*edit* most cars shipped overseas are carried in specialized cargo ships, such as this:
http://www.blogmercante.com…
and these are barges:
http://images.fineartameric…
He might have a plan for better service, but does he have a plan for better physics?
Sounds like Iridium, act 2. Look how well that worked out.
Um…congratulation for being captain obvious?
NASA has no coherent plan for what it wants to accomplish. That is mistake numero uno.
Orion is the prime example of wasteful spending on a system that not only has no bonafide mission, but also has very limited capabilities.
ISS is not too far behind. It is not that its not a great system representing great capability, it is; but the management has had no bona fide plan for its use. The current crop of managers have been in place for twenty years, yet with no plan for utilization!!! How did we get a bunch of do-dos in there who had no idea that once assembly was over we needed to be seriously exercising this system’s capabilities as a lab? That was always one of its prime intended purposes.
How are you going to be successful and spend your limited dollars wisely if you have no concept of what you ought to be doing? This is not a personnel problem where you need to immediately lay off the lower level civil servants so you can higher newer and younger people; this is a management problem. Its a leadership problem. You need to figure out a plan.
The Elon Musks of the world are not being successful because he has some special moxie or because he has corralled all the best engineers. He is successful because he knows what he wants to do and he is implementing his plan.
“NASA has no coherent plan for what it wants to accomplish. That is mistake numero uno.”
Dude, the entire federal government has the same problem.
We are an incredibly rich country- richer by far than may be obvious. Stunningly, maddeningly rich, as the great Douglass Adams might have said.
And yet students struggle to get an education with usurious interest payments, roads and bridges crumble, and citizens die or lead hobbled lives because health care is beyond reach.
Example: a sane energy policy enacted in the 1970s could have had us in a sun-powered hydrogen economy by now and saved, at the very lest, two trillion dollars in war costs, thousands of dead US soldiers (who are by and large abandoned after they leave the armed forces with a hearty “thanks for your service!”). Two trillion dollars fighting against 15th century knuckleheads over piles of sand. Let them have it.
Instead, energy companies have gone absolutely wild fracking the whole fucking country so we are buying cheaper gas at the cost of polluted ground water.
We maintain far more nuclear weapons than needed for deterrence. We defend Europe. Europe!
We have a huge standing army ostensibly for defense from what- Canada? OK, hyperbole, but the size of the defense budget isn’t-well, defensible.
The SecDef said last night they will spend $10 Billion to upgrade our nuclear weapons. NASA wants what? We just don’t have the money!
Argh.
While you are correct about most of the government, not too long ago NASA was different and could figure out where they needed to place their resources and their focus. It appears that NASA has now lost its way.
Point taken.
NASA has no coherent plan for what it wants to accomplish.
NASA has had several possible plans, studied internally and well developed. They all died when sent to the White House over the last 6 years. In addition, Congress has forced SLS on them and prevented them from doing one major cost savings operation: cut staff. All the staff reductions have been contractors, and as a result there were a lot of CS staff with nothing to do besides pester contractors.
You could CRAC a few centers and save a few billion in salary and administration and then dump it into SMD and HEO.
#justsayin
Space X, via Elon, is committed to something much larger than itself.
You see evidence of this in his progress, his people, their passion, their ingenuity, etc.
NASA is not committed to anything larger than survival of the workforce. You see evidence of this in reports just like this one.
We’ll see how well this commitment works out when there is a catastrophic/massive failure. It’s going to happen, goes with the business, and based on what I’ve seen of their QC/reliability, to the extent that it isn’t obfuscated by the company, it won’t take too long.
The report says,
“Specifically, NASA’s estimates for the cost of the commercial crew transportation services are based on the cost of a Soyuz seat in FY 2016 – $70.7 million per seat for a total cost of $283 million per mission for four astronauts. However, the Program’s independent Government cost estimates project significantly higher costs when NASA purchases flights from commercial companies rather than from Russia.”
Huh? Commercial crew, including SpaceX, is going to be *more* expensive than the current Russian rides??? Does anybody here know what figures were used to reach that conclusion? Or, as has happened before, am I misunderstanding what the report is saying?
The report appears to estimate that the number of people going to the ISS on NASA dollars will be greatly increased under commercial access, 4-6 flights per year x 4 NASA passengers per flight – ~24 per year vs only 4 seats per year on the Soyuz. So cost will increase; of course this is also a major benefit for ISS productivity, but it still has to be paid for.
OK, I guess that kind of makes sense. A Falcon ISS crewed mission would cost something like twice the current Falcon uncrewed resupply mission and NASA would buy, as you say, several a year.
The numbers, in that scenario, work. But I’d want to see evidence for “the number of people going to the ISS on NASA dollars will be greatly increased under commercial access” bit.
Interesting stuff.
Not mentioned is the fact that politicians only pay heed to OIG findings when those findings align with the politicians’ political agendas.