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Space & Planetary Science

NASA OIG: DSN Has Budget and Technical Challenges

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 26, 2015
Filed under ,
NASA OIG: DSN Has Budget and Technical Challenges

NASA OIG: NASA’s Management of the Deep Space Network, NASA OIG
“Although DSN is meeting its current operational commitments, budget reductions have challenged the Network’s ability to maintain these performance levels and threaten its future reliability. … If budget reductions continue, DSN faces an increased risk that it will be unable to meet future operational commitments or complete the upgrade project on schedule. We also found that NASA, JPL, and DSN have significantly deviated from Federal and Agency policies, standards, and governance methodologies for the security of the Network’s IT and physical infrastructure.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

18 responses to “NASA OIG: DSN Has Budget and Technical Challenges”

  1. Rich_Palermo says:
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    It’s unfortunate that these national treasures, and DSN is one, need the OIG to point out the effects of continued budget slashing. If any budget is restored, I wonder how much will be diverted to the IT paranoia vs. replenishing and updating the hardware that keeps us in touch with our eyes and ears in the solar system.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    I agree. The most significant problem faced by the DSN is the slashing of its budget by Congress in order to fund pet projects.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      Pet projects don’t have *squat* to do with this.

      This is the effect of Sequestration – the budget-slashing trick by certain members of Congress (we all know who they are) to basically gut government. It’s pushing us down the fast track to irrelevance and it needs to stop.

  3. John Campbell says:
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    When I have operated computer “labspace” facilities, as budgets decrease (and no one wants to invest in “infrastructure”) one of the first things triaged out are “information assets”… a/k/a “documentation”.

    No one wants to pay a line item named “security” or “OS patching”, either, so there’s a lot of pressure to triage out security work.

    Bean-counters are notorious for mistaking brownian motion for progress.

    [VOICE=”Jeff Foxworthy”]
    “If you think the best reason to have a swimming pool in your back yard is to lower your fire insurance rates… you just might be a bean-counter.”
    [/VOICE]

    Somehow too many organizations — If I can use the word “organization” for so many corporations and instituional entities — forget that risk has to be factored into cost equations. Somehow risk becomes either an intangible or an externality. TANSTAAFL.

    When the human race finally goes extinct, spreadsheets will be the culprit; After all, with spreadsheets you need not kill millions in order to make people statistics.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      “…forget that risk has to be factored into cost equations”

      Back in grad school I had a couple of semesters of accounting and distinctly recall the opposite.

  4. LPHartswick says:
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    This is completely ridiculous. If we wish to be a space faring country we have to have the ability to communicate with all of our human and robotic missions. We need to not only pay for our current DSN but an expanded
    one with increased capacity. If we wish to accomplish anything worth while in the next 60-100 years were going to have to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. We need to do more than one flagship mission a decade, and that will require a few basic services like increase band with free communication, oh and by the way a network of the solar weather satellites to provide an early warning network for all missions beyond the magnetosphere.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      There’s no surprise that space infrastructure is crumbling in a country that can’t build a modern airport or rail system or even keep existing bridges up to date, a country with stunning wealth that can’t learn to put money away for a rainy day and keeps borrowing to pay for foreign wars.

      Keep in mind the big picture: we are run by folks who worship Reagan: “the government IS the problem”. By refusing to fund projects they create a self-fulfilling situation. “See! I told you the government sucks!”

      We are in for a very long ride. Decades will pass before our self-confidence becomes expressed in confidence in our government. And we vote those gerrymandered assholes out. I’m 66 and won’t see it.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        I agree. It will be very difficult to convince the paxpayers to voluntarily pay more for even as popular a program as spaceflight.

  5. savuporo says:
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    All while rest of the world is investing and building out more robust and modern DSN networks. EU, China, India all have been investing and keep investing building out better networks. India didn’t get to Mars with a walkie talkie and a sextant, and China is playing sharp shooting with asteroids – see Chang’e-2

    • fcrary says:
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      While true, India did get to Mars using NASA’s Deep Space Network. They used a mix of their own stations and the DSN, but the DSN was what they used primarily around the time of orbital insertion.

  6. BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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    It’s call living within your means and it seems most households can and governments of all persuasions can’t.
    Cheers

    • cb450sc says:
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      No, the closest analogy would be that you rent an apartment and assumed the cable feed came for free, then are surprised when a bill shows up. This happens all the time – people propose missions just assuming the telecom is available and magically paid for by some other branch of NASA. But everyone makes that assumption, and no one ever actually pays for it. With all the existing planetary missions and science missions to L2 we really need to be making the jump to hybrid optical/radio telecom to get extra bandwidth, but again no one wants to pay for it. I’ve been watching for years people trying hard to piggyback laser telecom on funded missions to try and get this started.

  7. PeteK says:
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    Why in the age of $100 cell phones do we need to keep paying higher prices for DSN. The price of a small SBand radio has dropped from $1M to a $20K why cant we get an order of magnitude price reduction in our DSN and increase in service. Space is hard but so is consumer electronics. Put the motivation into the systems to lower the price not raise fiefdoms

    • Rich_Palermo says:
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      It take large arrayed antennas, atomic clocks, ruby masers, and a helluva lot of smarts to detect attowatts from 35 year old spacecraft beyond the heliopause.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      The DSN must be kept up to the state of the art to support essentially all space exploration beyond low earth orbit. It isn’t a commodity task. Simply cutting funds by a tax cut happy Congress will undermine everything else

    • cb450sc says:
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      What you’re saying might be partly true in LEO, but not for what the DSN does. Those giant antennas cost money, to get away from them requires a some other technology leaps (like optical laser telecom), but that also requires a big investment in facilities.