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NASA Cancels Space Act Agreement With B612 Foundation

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
September 30, 2015
Filed under , ,
NASA Cancels Space Act Agreement With B612 Foundation

NASA Terminates Space Act Agreement with B612 Foundation for Sentinel Spacecraft
“NASA spokesmen Dwayne Brown and Dave Steitz confirmed via email that NASA terminated the agreement with B612. Steitz explained that B612 had not met an important milestone in the SAA — starting Sentinel’s development — and NASA therefore terminated the agreement because “due to limited resources, NASA can no longer afford to reserve funds” to support the project. “NASA believes it is in the best interest of both parties to terminate this agreement but remains open to future opportunities to collaborate with the B612 Foundation,” he added.”
Keith’s note: This certainly sucks. Odd that NASA gave up this easily. Curiously NASA is promoting a #JourneyToMars program with a fantasy budget and rockets whose launch dates slip year after year. But wait: B612 was going to pay for the spacecraft. NASA only had to use it.
If you read the actual Space Act Agreement between NASA and B612 these two articles pretty much rive everything else:
“ARTICLE 3. GATES Four Gates are identified that constitute milestones in the determination of the benefit to NASA from the Sentinel Mission. In the event that the Sentinel Mission does not fulfill a Gate, NASA will assess the impact thereof to the NASA benefit from the Sentinel Mission to determine whether or not to proceed with this Agreement. Any follow-on agreements or modifications agreed to by the Parties in the course of implementing the Sentinel Mission as described herein shall be fully incorporated in this Agreement and shall constitute a modification of this Agreement in Accordance with ARTICLE 24 Modifications.
ARTICLE 6. FINANCIAL OBLIGATIONS There will be no transfer of funds between the Parties under this Agreement and each Party will fund its own participation. All activities under or pursuant to this Agreement are subject to the availability of funds, and no provision of this Agreement shall be interpreted to require obligation or payment of funds in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act,(31 U.S.C. § 1341).”

So B612 pays for, builds, launches, and operates Sentinel – and all NASA needs to do is provides the things needed to use it, collect data etc. NASA can walk away from this agreement at any time and B612 does not get a penny from NASA. I can tell you that there are others (i.e. traditional space mission vendors like APL, JPL, etc.) who tell people that they’d be building a spacecraft like Sentinel (but paid for by NASA) if it were not for the fact that NASA keeps saying “No, no we’ll just use Sentinel”.

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

13 responses to “NASA Cancels Space Act Agreement With B612 Foundation”

  1. Robert van de Walle says:
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    Oh, Keith. It’s generous of you to set aside the same brush you use to tar others who don’t fulfill their contractual obligations.

  2. NASA Taxpayer says:
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    NASA claims that “due to limited resources, NASA can no longer afford to reserve funds” to support the project. But how much does NASA spend to keep track of an inactive Space Act Agreement? 1/10th of one FTE? An agency with thousands of underemployed FTEs can’t afford a fraction of an FTE to maintain an asteroid-tracking space telescope agreement that is aligned with the agency’s only human space exploration (sort of) mission to look at an asteroid boulder in lunar orbit? Is planetary defense really that low a priority at NASA? Has NASA given up on getting any utility out of ARM? With no funds exchanged, does it matter if an unfunded Space Act Agreement partner misses a milestone? It’s certainly going to cost less in time with the agency’s lawyers to maintain the existing agreement than to terminate it, draft a new agreement, and negotiate signatures if/when B612 obtains funding. Why not just move the milestone date back? And how is B612 supposed to raise funds when even a non-contributing partner terminates its relationship instead of just changing the date on a milestone? Goofy and wasteful.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      “An agency with thousands of underemployed FTEs” I’d like to see some evidence behind this broadly-damning comment.

      • NASA Taxpayer says:
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        Just walk around offices at GSFC, JSC, or MSFC. There isn’t enough work to go around. Just look at usage rates for various wind tunnels and facilities at ARC, GRC, and LaRC. There’s not enough modeling projects to go around. Just look at how little flies at DFRC. There’s not enough experimental flight vehicle projects to go around. Just look at how many PEs, PMs, and PIs there are in the STMD compared to actual funded technologies. There’s not enough money to go around. You have to be blind to not see that NASA’s Apollo-sized institution and workforce has not matched is budget and mission for decades. (To be clear, this statement is damning of national and agency leadership, not the workforce itself.)

      • NASA Taxpayer says:
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        Of course, if you need anymore evidence that the NASA workforce is grossly underutilized, just look at what NASA awarded the day after it terminated B612’s SAA — an internal JPL asteroid tracking space telescope project (NeoCAM).

    • kcowing says:
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      This is really an odd decision.

    • AstroInMI says:
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      The link says “Its primary purpose was obtaining NASA technical consulting and agreement for B612 to use NASA tracking facilities for Sentinel after it was launched.” I assume that NASA technical consulting isn’t free. That said, I don’t know how civil servant pay works so I’m open to someone explaining that.

      • NASA Taxpayer says:
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        It has nothing to do with how civil servant pay works. The problem is that NASA isn’t expending much of anything on this agreement yet. Nothing has launched, so no NASA tracking facilities are being used. And B612 hasn’t hit their first design/development milestone, so there’s no significant drain on NASA technical consulting about those tracking facilities. At this point, one or two civil servants may need to telecon weekly with B612, but that’s like an hour or two a week at most. Almost nothing in terms of the agency’s budget. But what will cost a lot in terms of the agency’s lawyers’ time is terminating the agreement, drafting a new one down the line, and then negotiating signatures on that new agreement. It’s stupid to terminate at this point. Just amend the agreement with a new milestone schedule.

    • cb450sc says:
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      That’s not it. With this project on the books, it creates a future lien on the budget, which then has to be carry-overed into all future budgets. NASA’s science budget is in very dire straits – many active missions are on the yearly chopping block for want of just a few million. That may seem tiny compared to the overall NASA budget, but just like the federal budget there are a lot more mouths to feed than people realize. NASA has about 100 birds in the air right now, and every one of them wants to live.

      • NASA Taxpayer says:
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        Update the milestones and move the lien to the right to make way for other missions. There’s no need to terminate and eliminate.

  3. eddrw2014 says:
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    Also, it’s only 1 less than B613, which can’t be good.

  4. Brian Thorn says:
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    It still sounds like a vitamin to me. A better name might have helped their cause a little.