Mars InSight Gets Green Light for 2018 With Costs Still Unknown
NASA Targets May 2018 Launch of Mars InSight Mission
“NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to study the deep interior of Mars is targeting a new launch window that begins May 5, 2018, with a Mars landing scheduled for Nov. 26, 2018. InSight project managers recently briefed officials at NASA and France’s space agency, Centre National d’tudes Spatiales (CNES), on a path forward; the proposed plan to redesign the science instrument was accepted in support of a 2018 launch.”
Keith’s note: According to this release “The cost of the two-year delay is being assessed. An estimate is expected in August, once arrangements with the launch vehicle provider have been made.” That is 6 months away. But NASA is already going ahead with this plan without knowing what the actual cost impact will be. Nor has any plan been released with regard to who pays for all of these delays. But, due to the way that MOUs are crafted between space agencies, no money ever changes hands. As such, U.S. taxpayers will ultimately be stuck for the delay costs that are the direct result of French mistakes. In addition, no one from NASA will talk about the impact of these additional costs will have on other missions awaiting selection – nor has anyone bothered to explain how this decision affects subsequent missions such as Mars 2020 or missions currently in operation at Mars. More creative budgeting on the #JourneyToMars.
NASA Mars woes could delay other planetary missions, Nature
“Some wonder if the mistake may cause NASA to tighten the reins on future projects. The most recent call for Discovery proposals, made before the problem with InSight occurred, mandated that no more than one-third of instrument costs could be spent on foreign sources. “The word on the street is that NASA’s a little more wary of collaborating with groups that they don’t know so well or don’t control directly,” says Elkins-Tanton.”
Question @LockheedMartin – What do you charge #NASA per month to store this spacecraft? https://t.co/4TJ1VFbAcP
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 10, 2016
So we got a reschedule flight to Mars for 2018. But at what cost? Did we just sacrifice the next or next 2 Discovery mission opportunities to cover the cost overrun on the Insight mission.
Insight is a Discovery mission. I doubt the extra costs will double or triple the bottom line. So I can’t see it being a total sacrifice of the next or the next two Discoveries. But I also wouldn’t be shocked if the next Discovery selection slips by a year. And the rumors I heard about possibly selecting two missions for flight are just that: Rumors, and unfortunately, I can’t call them credible ones anymore.
And you and I pay for French mistakes?????
The latest Discovery AO prohibited foreign contributions exceeding 1/3 of the payload cost. So next time, we’ll just have to pay for the American mistakes.
Since no funding was exchange. No.
However without the French contribution, Insight would most likely gone over the individual Discovery mission budget cap.
I wonder why it takes so long to figure out the storage costs. It’s not like they haven’t already had a heads up?
The article says the cost of the delay will be known “once arrangements with the launch vehicle provider have been made.” I’m not sure what the termination clause on a launch contract looks like, but I’ll guess some lawyers are working on it (and adding to the cost of the delay in the process.) I’m fairly sure the launch provider would be happy to pocket the money spent gearing up for a 2016 launch, and then charge NASA the full price for a 2018 launch. I’m also fairly sure NASA would rather pay less, on the grounds that they aren’t really starting over from scratch. I’ll guess the difference in in the vicinity of $100 million, which is more than enough to get lawyers involved.
I imagine they know approximately the cost. If they announced an approximate cost and then revised it, critics would get on their case. They probably have to go through an official ETC before they can announce an official cost.
Right. Because NASA cost forecasting is so accurate…. NOT!
So how much more is the delay going to cost versus what NASA hoped to save by partnering with France? Cost sharing is cited as one of the principle reasons for international participation on space programs, but the dirty little secret is that quite often the increased costs to NASA for dealing with international participation exceed whatever cost savings NASA is actually able to achieve. Unfortunately, rarely does that ever get exposed so dramatically as in this case. Hopefully this can serve as a warning to not take for granted the notion that joint ventures save money.
“how much more is the delay going to cost versus what NASA hoped to save by partnering with France?”
Reminds me of major projects where one manager finds a way to save costs and from their perspective it does. However, later implementation costs have to be done by someone else.
“dealing with international participation exceed whatever cost savings NASA is actually able to achieve”
Sometimes the money costs are much more, i.e. inviting the Russians on the space station, but there is huge political benefits. As I see bringing them onboard is a major peace dividend. Think about how things would have been if they were not. I can say with high confidence there would be no space station. Now there may have been good intentions with intl partnerships, maybe the money cost got a bit too high.
No, you are quite correct: It’s never free. Just getting a TAA to deal with import/export/ITAR issues is expensive. I’ve seen missions which had to develop two, mostly redundant, systems to send data from JPL to the instrument teams, just to make sure the Europeans didn’t have access to ITAR-controlled engineering data. And instrument accommodation, power, etc. have to be provided even if the instrument itself costs NASA zero.
But sometimes it’s worth it. In addition to the political side someone else mentioned, there are a whole bunch of good scientists who don’t work in the US. Personally, for the sort of thing I do, I’d want someone from either Liege or Leicester involved in an instrument to study outer planet aurora. If you wanted to land something on the moon, you might even want to talk to the Chinese (even if that might involve explaining things to the House committee on un-American activities…)
I think the French would probably argue that they absorbed some costs waiting around for their instrument to be put on JWST as well as keeping an Ariane 5 on hold for the launch. Ironically, when it was decided that NASA could accept a “free” Ariane 5 launch of JWST instead of buying a heavy-class Atlas V, the Atlas was still run by Lockheed. That was like 11 years ago. And NASA did it only to turn the (then) $150-200mm launch budget into free reserves for the already-exploding telescope costs. Which got overwhelmed by an order of magnitude by further cost growth.
La plus ca change, plus le meme chose. (Pardon my rusted-out Francais.)
I read a few weeks ago the additional cost was 150 million.
That is about what the chatter in the NSF forum says.
Of course the whole mission is still dependent on a working seismometer which will now be in-house at JPL also according to the NSF chatter.
Folks, lets not get too hung up blaming the French. There are plenty of examples of NASA by itself missing schedule milestones. And even when they don’t miss a launch window to MARS they mess up the english to metric conversions. At least the bad sensor that the French are building was caught on the ground.
I really get tired that story about the english to metric conversion error. As a collector of anomaly and failure stories, I keep reminding people that it was much more complicated (and embarrassing) than just unit conversion. By my count, there were four or five serious mistakes, and without all of them, Mars Climate Orbiter would have been fine. Only one of the mistakes was the unit problem. (And, since it was in the small forces file, it was something no one has good intuition about; the usual sanity check of whether a number is a few times to large to be right doesn’t apply.)
However nasa transition to international units has been seriously proposed since the beginnings of the space station program, over thirty years, without much progress being made. It’s just a small change but seems impossible organizationally. nasa should be a leader in aviation human factors, where is a serious look at measurement units in aviation? Those who do not remember the mistakes of the past are comndemned to repeat them.
Just as in the free market of commerce, a free market of ideas will arrive at the most efficient solutions for its needs when left free from external diktat. Engineering does not need its choice of tools governed by any laws other than those of physics.
So we should disband the FAA and get rid of the National Airways System, Air Route Traffic Control Centers, Towers, etc? Everyone can fly where they want. Why have speed limits on the highways? Why regulate the radio communications bands? My feeling is that we need rules, and should discuss what they should be. But at some point a decision must be made.
How is telling an engineer what tools to use to perform his calculations in anyway related to the FAA directing airplanes not to hit each other or the FCC telling radio stations not to talk over each other? There is no equivalency in your examples at all. The legitimate and necessary regulations you cite as FAA, FCC, & DOT functions are focused on preventing an unacceptable end result. The limitations on the choice of engineers in unit selection that you are calling for is about regulating the path to get to the same result and therefore unnecessary and in the end unenforceable.
Remember that the US has always recognized the metric system as its official unit of measure. But that silly thing called freedom means that people continue to use what works for them.
A failure due to confusion over units may be an “unacceptable end result” and a customer may reasonably require everyone involved to use the same system of units to prevent this. I think that is appropriate whether the customer is a private entity or a government. (And please don’t get me started about mils versus millimeters.)
Instead of mils, we should be using 1/128ths and 1/256ths of an inch. Ironically the mile is said to be exactly 1000 paces of a roman soldier, so in a sense it is also metric.
It did not work for Air Canada 143.
http://hawaii.hawaii.edu/ma…
But it makes pundits with no real knowledge of what they are talking about feel so clever about themselves to thump their chests and scowl at those stupid engineers that can’t figure out the metric system…
The reality is the root cause had nothing to do with the choice of units. Unit conversion is one of the simplest calculations that can be made, but anyone can, and will, and has made mistakes in the simplest of calculations. The real error was that the project management processes lacked the robustness to catch and correct errors in a timely manner.
That covers another two or three of the four or five I know of. But you can add that there was not a conversion error. LMA failed to provide the numbers in the units specified by the customer, and failed to say a single word about the units of the supplied values. No unit conversions were involved, because one party didn’t bother to and the other party was unaware that any conversion was necessary.
Yes.
My projects are always part of a much larger group effort. And even though often I’m team leader, there’s plenty of incentive for other team members to “sanity check” my specifications. In fact, I depend on being part of a team to catch those inevitable errors.
On the other hand writing a book with your name on it and with the help only of an editor (who has no knowledge of the subject matter) is a good way to loose sleep, as many here can attest.
Actually, that’s one thing that scares me but few people understand. If I present something at a meeting about spacecraft or instrument operations, I tend to make suggestions and add, “but someone should check my numbers, I might have gotten it wrong.” Most people think it is a complement when they say, “Oh, we don’t need to, we trust you.” That’s more frightening to hear than most people realize.
mmmm, plenty of smart and constructive comments here, from people who don’t know anything about the stuff…. Curiosity wa delayed by 2 years, who cares now?
The MSL/Curiosity delay cost about $400 million. That’s just the delay, not the whole mission. That’s also the price of an entire Discovery mission, and I can think of three Discovery missions which have, apparently, been more scientifically productive than Curiosity. Are you seriously saying that people worried about wasted money and opportunities (at the half-billion dollar level) “don’t know anything”?
Apparently he problem was a bad weld in the vacuum chamber for the seismic detector resulting in a slow leak which was detected quite late in testing. According to news reports JPL will now fabricate the vacuum chamber while CNES will continue to work on the seismic instrument itself, so some hardware cost is being shifted to nasa.
Are you sure the costs will be shifted to NASA? I know I’m one of the people who points out the policy about no money crossing the Atlantic, but there are some exceptions. One is a commercial purchase of parts. I can use NASA money to buy a MCP from Hamamatsu if Photonis doesn’t have one that’s right for the instrument I’m building. CNES can buy a HV801 from Amptec in the US, if they can’t get a comparable part in France. Could JPL supply a custom vacuum chamber to CNES as a commercial purchased part?