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OIG To NASA: Empty Goals, No Strategy, Not Enough Money

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 6, 2017
Filed under ,
OIG To NASA: Empty Goals, No Strategy, Not Enough Money

NASA’s 2017 Top Management and Performance Challenges, NASA OIG
“… In the long term, NASA’s plans beyond EM-2 for achieving a crewed Mars surface mission in the late 2030s or early 2040s remain high level, serving as more of a strategic framework than a detailed operational plan. For example, the Agency’s current Journey to Mars framework lacks objectives; does not identify key system requirements other than SLS, Orion, GSDO, and a Deep Space Gateway; and does not suggest target mission dates for crewed orbits of Mars or planet surface landings. If the Agency is to reach its goal of sending humans to Mars in the late 2030s or early 2040s, significant development work on key systems – such as a deep space habitat, in-space transportation, and Mars landing and ascent vehicles – must be accomplished in the 2020s. In addition, NASA will need to begin developing more detailed cost estimates for its Mars exploration program after EM-2 to ensure the commitment from Congress and other stakeholders exists to fund an exploration effort of this magnitude over the next several decades. Finally, NASA’s decision whether to continue spending $3-$4 billion annually to maintain the ISS after 2024 – roughly a third of its exploration budget – will affect its funding profile for human exploration efforts in the 2020s, and therefore has significant implications for the Agency’s Mars plans.
“… The rising cost of the SLS Program also presents challenges for NASA given the program may exceed its $9.7 billion budget commitment. The Agency plans to spend roughly $2 billion a year on SLS development but has minimal monetary reserves to address any technical challenges that may arise for EM-1 or EM-2. According to guidance developed at Marshall Space Flight Center (Marshall), the standard monetary reserve for a program such as the SLS should be between 10 and 30 percent during development. The SLS Program did not carry any program reserves in fiscal year (FY) 2015 and only $25 million in FY 2016 – approximately 1 percent of its development budget. Moving forward, the SLS Program plans to carry only minimal reserves through 2030, which in our view is unlikely to be sufficient to enable NASA to address issues that may arise during development and testing.”
“… Despite the extension, in October 2015, we reported NASA will not have enough time to mitigate several known human space flight risks for future deep space missions. Accordingly, the Agency needs to prioritize its research to address the most important risks in the time available while also ensuring a spacecraft originally designed and tested for a 15-year life span will continue to operate safely and as economically as possible. While the amount of research being conducted on the ISS has increased over the past 8 years, several factors continue to limit full utilization.”
“… The selection and balance of NASA’s science missions is heavily influenced by stakeholders external to the Agency, including the President, Congress, the science community, and, to a lesser extent, other Federal and international agencies. The President and Congress provide direction through the budgeting and appropriation processes, which has a strong influence on the composition and overall balance of the Agency’s science portfolio. The science community – as represented by the National Research Council (NRC) – establishes mission priorities based on a broad consensus within various science research disciplines. These priorities are set forth in the NRC’s decadal surveys on the subject matter areas encompassed by the Science Mission Directorate’s four divisions … Managing differing priorities from numerous stakeholders and funding changes on a year-to-year basis (which we described as “funding instability” in a September 2012 report) can lead to inefficiencies, resulting in cost increases and schedule delays that can have a cascading effect on NASA’s entire science portfolio.”

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

41 responses to “OIG To NASA: Empty Goals, No Strategy, Not Enough Money”

  1. jb says:
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    I just had a thought….cancel SLS and problems solved 🙂

  2. DJE51 says:
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    I think that for legislators, believing in the SpaceX vision is like drinking the cool-aid… They would love to believe it, but the consequences if it does not materialize are unacceptable. So, they are maintaining the SLS for now, but if they could believe in the SpaceX BFR/BFS, then they would cancel the SLS. They need an off-ramp, a slowing down, just to see what SpaceX is capable of.

    • jb says:
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      depots and FH could easily replace SLS. If FH is successful..we will know soon.. it could easily make SLS obsolete. If NASA is willing to invest in depots that is. Depots are a real enabler for space flight.

      • DJE51 says:
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        No need for depots, just timely launches to refuel any spacecraft that needs it. No need to leave fuel in orbit any longer than needed.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      But even without SpaceX the SLS is not needed. The Atlas V could do it, you just need orbital refueling and a modular approach built around the CST-100. The problem is NASA designed the Orion so it needed a big rocket and now NASA is just doing an expensive recreation of Apollo 8. How sad.

      • DJE51 says:
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        As Michael Griffin said, “yes you could go back to the moon without a heavy lift rocket, but why would you?” However, now that we see how much the SLS is costing, the “why would you” is sort of self evident.

        • Paul451 says:
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          If Mike Griffin said the sky was blue, I’d assume it was raining.

        • Mark says:
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          Where did he say that? Not that I’m doubting, just would like it for future reference.

          • DJE51 says:
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            Sorry, Mark, I could not find the reference. He made a lot of speeches after initially rolling out the ESAS results (Exploration Systems Architecture Study). This was in 2005 or around there. I found some similarly expressed sentiment during my searching, but not that quote, which I read during that time, and it stuck in my head. I have probably para-phrased it.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Atlas is a helluva rocket, to be sure; but the price tag puts it out front at the Visitor Center.

        I’ve wondered, though, just how profitable Atlas (and Delta, alas) are for ULA; put another way, could an aggressive re-think bring these rockets into a more competitive stance vs. SX, or do the design and fabrication make both rockets fundamentally different in some way.

        • unfunded_dreams says:
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          I don’t understand – the “official” cost that I’ve generally seen for an Atlas V for commercial launches are in the $100M range, dependent of course on the number of SRBs. That’s more expensive than Falcon, but you get 20 Atlas V launches for every year of SLS development.
          Also – FWIW – ULA has been shedding personnel like wildfire. They are re-building themselves in an effort to be more competitive with SpaceX. Given ULA’s reliability, if a launch is really $100M, that looks like a good value.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          They are, but there are probably also improvements in the manufacturing process that would reduce cost IF the flight rate was higher and justified it. And it is still a bargain compared to the SLS.

        • Paul451 says:
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          Atlas is a helluva rocket, to be sure; but the price tag…

          Compared to SLS?

          [Edit: ULA’s gotten the base price for Atlas V for NASA/DoD down to $130m or so. (Plus “support services”, which adds more.) Even if we go back to assuming $250m, you could have launched 6 or more for every year of SLS’s development. Or about 40 so far. Which would be wildly unnecessary, but it’s interesting for a quick’n’dirty comparison.]

        • fcrary says:
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          I suppose there are some things you could do to make an Atlas or Delta more competitive, but there are limits. You definitely couldn’t take an expendable first stage and retrofit it for landing. That would be a profound change to the whole mechanical design.

          In terms of production, replacing a RD-180 with a 3D printed engine is no harder than replacing it with a AR1 (which may or may not be realistic, but the idea is floating around.) SpaceX gets some benefit from doing as much as possible in house, while ULA subcontracts heavily. That’s not something you could change without some serious restructuring.

          But I think the best argument against an improved Atlas or Delta comes from ULA itself. They decided that a new design (Vulcan) is a better idea than making changes and flying an Atlas VI or Delta V.

  3. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I guess IG is telling people what a lot of us have known. Orion was apparently a mistake, unneeded once Dragon 2 or Starliner fly. SLS mainly keeps $$ flowing to a couple states, and keeps NASA and Thiokol working. Whether it ever flies is secondary. Gateway was as small and inexpensive a place they could come up with for Orion to have a place to visit. There is no bonafide rationale for it. No one is going to Mars in a NASA spaceship, certainly not anytime in the next few decades.

    The idea that the taxpayers should just keep paying for it is what is wrong. Let the government, or a commercial company sell bonds or stock shares so if someone thinks there is value in it, and money to be made, they can invest. This forces the establishment of a meaningful plan or forces bankruptcy very quickly. I don’t mind government investing in exploration, but taxpayers should not be expected to carry the entire burden.

  4. Michael Spencer says:
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    And so the drumbeat begins.

    Redirecting NASA towards a more sustainable approach to HSF and human expansion will necessarily involve huge changes to the SLS/Orion program.

    Problem: SLS/Orion represents a huge sunk cost. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in life it’s this: money has momentum.

    NASA does not possess the immovable object to stop the irresistible force that is SLS, and so was never ever going to do change direction without a large amount of off-Agency prodding…err, support.

    This report is just the first; soon you will hear mumbling, even among Congressmen and Senators (some Senators, anyway), eventually joining what will become a tidal wave.

    Someone will need to lead this move. Does the new Administrator have the chops? That depends on whether he’s more interested in tea-leaf reading. Or leading.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Likely it won’t rock the boat until after the next election. By then SpaceX and Blue Origin will hopefully have made enough progress to provide the political support needed, especially if SLS hadn’t flown yet or has a bad first flight.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Exactly so: SX/BO need more of a track record. and it’s coming.

        Some things that really bug me, Thomas:

        • Comparing launchers based on throw weight s tempting, but it’s incomplete. But let’s go with it: what makes SLS so much more expensive? I mean aside from the overhead delta associated with various govt bull. I’m looking for a technical answer here: does SLS have something that FH doesnt have? Is there new technologies? Or what? WHY is the development cost eating $2B a year? Is there anything inside that lovely tube that’s dramatically different from FH?

        • And here’s the clincher: millions of man-hours spent on SLS bu America’s best and brightest, folks using significant portions of their 40 year professional lives building, sweating, loving SLS. This is nothing more than criminal. And a heartbreaking human tragedy writ one family, onc career at a time.

        • Another way to compare: what could all of those very bright people have done with proper leadership?

        I need a drink.

        • Richard Brezinski says:
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          In rough numbers, every $1 billion is 5000 man-years, or about 165 professional careers used up. So SLS is costing something like 3300 people’s careers.

        • fcrary says:
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          At least for SLS block 1 or 1B, I can’t see anything significantly better than a Falcon Heavy, other than a high-energy upper stage.

          But budgets for such things tend to be very elastic. Just consider the review process for some minor subsystem. An engineer come up with a design that suits the requirements. Would you want someone to check his numbers? Yes, definitely. Is it good enough to simply having him run it past the engineer in the office next to his? Probably. But would it be better to have him write up a report, circulate it to a dozen other engineers, then prepare and make a presentation to them (in case they didn’t bother to read the report) and have them issue a formal review? That’s definitely more likely to catch a mistake, and reduce the odds of exploding something on the test stand. Do the benefits justify the costs? Well, if you have the money, who cares? That’s the sort of logic that makes projects expand to fill the available budget, no matter what that budget is.

        • Paul451 says:
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          I’m looking for a technical answer here: does SLS have something that FH doesnt have?

          It should have slightly more BEO/cis-Lunar “throw” than FH, thanks to the LH/LOx upper-stage.

          But that advantage also falls to the $/kg metric. If you can launch many tens (to low hundreds) of alternative launchers for the same price as development and the first 4 launches of SLS, then using those alternatives could have lofted SLS-class modules to pretty much anywhere in the solar system. Which makes SLS’s slight extra oomph completely redundant.

          what makes SLS so much more expensive? […] WHY is the development cost eating $2B a year?

          Every single part of SLS took “Shuttle technology” (insanely complex, fragile, bespoke ’70s tech; highly tuned to the Shuttle’s launch system) and had to completely re-engineer it for SLS. And they literally didn’t know how. So they’ve invented or re-invented entire new systems in order to adapt and shoe-horn completely inappropriate technology into a new design.

          For example, Boeing didn’t know how to make the tanks. They weren’t Shuttle ETs. They had to change the alloy and wall-thickness, and so traditional friction-stir welding technology didn’t work. They had to completely reinvent FSW. I haven’t seen an update in the last 12 months, but at that time they still hadn’t figured it out yet. They were producing welds that failed unexpectedly in a too-high number of samples. But the defects couldn’t be detected non-destructively. Four out of five welds might be fine, but you didn’t know which four until you cut all five open or tested them to failure.

          The SRBs have virtually nothing in common with the Shuttle’s SRBs. They didn’t just add a segment, they had to redevelop the whole system.

          Similarly, Orion was meant to be just the Apollo capsule, scaled up. Unlike SpaceX with Dragon, NASA deliberately kept the same shape and wall-angles. But it turns out that capsules don’t scale like that. So they’ve had to re-re-engineer Orion just to get it to work. Then the mass budget blew out, and (thanks to the necessary size of the LAS-motor, thanks to the risk from SRBs) they’ve had to constantly go back and re-re-re-engineer it to shave mass.

          SLS/Orion is an example of a bad design being saved (sort of) by the efforts of very clever people. Like the Shuttle before it, which was eventually made to work, but the initial bad design destroyed the point of picking that design.

          (The Shuttle was meant to be a routine, low-cost “space truck”. But the design was so far beyond-the-state-of-the-art, it became a fragile, expensive piece of engineering genius. SLS was meant to be cheaper/better than any alternatives proposed, but the bad design means it too will be expensive, fragile, and involve any number of exquisitely clever examples of engineering brilliance.

          By contrast, Falcon is a space truck. How many times have you been told that SpaceX hasn’t invented anything new?)

    • Paul451 says:
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      SLS/Orion represents a huge sunk cost.

      It’s extraordinary how often that is seen as a reason to defend, rather than condemn, a program. Humans are weird.

    • George Purcell says:
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      Launch Europa Clipper, hope it doesn’t blow up, and call it a day. Maybe build another monster for Voyager 3 to Neptune.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        A Neptune orbiter has been popular among planet scientists for a long time. Could they hope to live long enough for it to get there.

        • George Purcell says:
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          Be interesting to crunch the numbers for SLS for a direct launch to Neptune to see if Triton + a bunch of propellant could get a probe with a decent science payload into orbit with a mid 20s launch arriving in the early 30s. If not, next Jupiter assist isn’t until 2033 with an arrival of 2040 and that should not need SLS. Either way, I guess current Gen-X folks could still be on the team.

          • fcrary says:
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            NASA recently had a science definition team do exactly that. The report is online. Just google “OPAG” and “Ice Giant”. They looked at a whole bunch of options, for both Uranus and Neptune missions. Their conclusion about SLS was:

            “While not enabling of the science we wish to do, the availability of SLS would allow (see
            Appendix A).
            • Reduced flight times and/or increased delivered mass to either ice giant. This allows
            additional tradeoffs between cost and science return.
            • Two-planet, two-spacecraft missions on a single launch vehicle. While there is no
            scientific penalty to launching two-planet missions on different launch vehicles several
            years apart, there may be programmatic benefits to utilizing a single SLS launch vehicle.”

          • Paul451 says:
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            “Two-planet, two-spacecraft missions on a single launch vehicle.”

            Hasn’t the window for that already passed? Uranus is already well ahead of Neptune, and it ain’t gettin’ closer in my life-time.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’m sorry, I quoted a part of the report’s conclusions which wasn’t quite clear. They very specifically said that there is no way to get a spacecraft to encounter both Uranus and Neptune (with a launch date between 2024 and 2037, which was what they were told to consider.) So their comment about SLS was not a Voyager reflight.

            What they were suggesting was a pair of spacecraft which would launch and go to Jupiter together. At Jupiter, they would split up and make very different flybys. One would end up on the way to Uranus and the other on the way to Neptune.

            Note that a similar idea was once suggested for a “fire and ice” mission, with the Jupiter gravity assists dropping one very close to the Sun, for something like the current Solar Probe Plus mission, and the other spacecraft getting a gravity assist to send it to Pluto. That works in theory, but it isn’t how were ended up doing it (or being about to do it, for SPP.)

          • Paul451 says:
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            What they were suggesting was a pair of spacecraft which would launch and go to Jupiter together. At Jupiter, they would split up and make very different flybys. One would end up on the way to Uranus and the other on the way to Neptune.

            Ah, wasn’t thinking slingshots.

            (Were these intended to be flyby missions or orbiters?)

          • fcrary says:
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            The report covered all sorts of permutations of flybys, orbiters and atmospheric probes. For the two-spacecraft, SLS launched idea, they said an Uranus and an Neptune orbiter, with a minimal payload, should be possible for $3 billion, but favored larger spacecraft, which would put the cost above $4 billion. They also said something similar could probably be done with two launches of a smaller launch vehicle. But they also said multiple launches was outside the ground rules for the study.

            Personally, I think they could do a little better; they estimated payload capabilities, mass and power based on analogy to previous missions and instruments. Some of the analogies were developed a decade or more ago, and the state of the art has improved.

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      Personally I have always been for SLS and against Orion.

      SLS is, or would be, great if there were something to use it for. But building one SLS every year or two, and not having anything for it to launch is a waste. Until it is needed we would be better off flying 2 or 3 smaller vehicles in place of one SLS.

      I’ve never liked Orion. It does not meet requirements for anything except another Apollo style mission and no one needs any more of those. It is a poor design poorly implemented and its a throwback to an earlier era. But besides all that, it is now OBE. Dragon and CST100 have made it redundant and unnecessary. Maybe if Orion had been developed on the planned schedule and at the planned cost, we could have been saying the same about Space-X or Boeing’s offerings but Constellation/Orion is about 5-8 years behind the power curve, and about a year from now after test flights by the other two, it is time to put Orion out of its misery-and stop spending my tax dollars on it.

  5. Richard Brezinski says:
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    Hopefully the Vice President and the new Administrator will take an active role in figuring out the proper responsibilities of the government, (NASA), versus everyone else in human space flight. It is something that the NASA people really cannot or do not like to face, because they have built in biases. The NASA HSF hierarchy, all of whom came from operations, have said for years that NASA’s role is ‘space operations’. This is backwards from how government normally operates. Usually the government maintains technical expertise in systems, integration and some operations, but hires a contractor to drive the bus. In Apollo the ratio was 10% NASA to 90% contractor. NASA was responsible for strategic and tactical planning, and for ensuring contracts were written, awarded, and implemented properly. But if all the NASA people are planning the next EVA, who is doing the long term planning or the systems development? Don’t ever structure a program like ISS in the future-where Goldin edicted he did not want anyone with experience managing any part of ISS-you got a really poorly performing, outrageously expensive program, organized backwards, with NASA personnel who had zero experience and contractors running without adult supervision. Figure out NASA’s appropriate long term role, not just in technology and engineering, but in science and the things that make spaceflight worthwhile. In an effort to control spending, NASA management keeps cutting that part out-unfortunately the science and utilization was always a very small part of the budget. So they killed that in order to try and show they were good stewards of the taxpayers dollars, while they kept funneling money into their operations organizations which are bloated and poorly performing-really how many people do you need training 3 or 4 astronauts each year? More than half of HSF works in operations support. The Gateway idea is another stupid operations founded concept. Why do you need a mini-station at the outskirts of cislunar space? To prove the technology? How is the technology any different from that on ISS and why can’t ISS be used for this purpose? You are really going to put 3 or 4 astronauts on this mini-station for a few months at a time. Mainly the differences are isolation (they’ll go stir crazy with little to see or do) and radiation. If you want to test new systems and capabilities, maybe ion propulsion for example, do it with a prototype deep space transit vehicle that can operate leaving from and returning to ISS. You’ve invested in ISS so why ditch it when it can be useful-because you are funneling too many dollars into operations? Reassign people into technology development areas. Use some intelligence. It is time for a realignment.

  6. tankmodeler says:
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    None of this is a surprise.
    NASA continuously wanders from year to year without firm funding, stable objectives or even consistent management. This Congress/President, it’s the Moon, next Congress/President it’s asteroids, next Congress/President it’s Mars. With a 30+ year development and funding cycle yet a 2-4 year political cycle it’s absolutely impossible to do _anything_ when critical decision are driven politically and are bedded so firmly in the politics of individual districts.

    And in a democratic country I don’t see how it can be any other way. Democracies are short term policymakers. Autocracies are the only governments that can plan long term projects.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Disagree on one point: NASA funding is pretty dependable, even being bumped fairly frequently (OK, bumped mostly for pork, but still).

      No, it’s not a money issue. My god what could Elon or Jeff do with a steady $18B a year?

      • tankmodeler says:
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        I agree that the ~18B a year overall is relatively stable, but Congress continuously switches that money around within NASA to support, or not, the “program of the month”. NASA doesn’t get to decide what to do with that money, Congress or the President redirects every couple of years and programs really can’t get traction or momentum.

      • Mark says:
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        The overall funding is steady, Congress likes to shift it around though.

        Another thing is, neither Elon nor Jeff would get $18 billion. A large part is spent on stuff other than space exploration as NASA has a fairly wide mandate.

      • fcrary says:
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        Since they are fairly smart, I don’t Mr. Musk or Mr. Bezos would take $18 billion per year. It would be very hard to expand their companies and use that much money well, and there’s a big risk of getting into the habit (corporate culture) of solving problems by throwing money at them.

  7. BlueMoon says:
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    It’s like the movie “Groundhog Day.” The calendar advances, yet NASA always remains 20 years away from crewed missions to Mars, and worse yet, now seems stuck on always being 5 years away from the first Orion crewed flight.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Ever wonder how analogous the SLS/Orion situation might be in the broader government? What other cognates exist?

      It’s enough to make this liberal very nervous.