Just imagine the media telecon #NASA will have in a few years about the Deep Space Gateway thing and how its costs have risen, launch dates delayed, etc. and how this is linked to @NASA_SLS delays which are spread across a decade — just like #JWST At least @NASA is consistent.
The question I'd love to ask (but won't since no one at @NASA can answer) is whether #NASA actually has the funding to do everything on its plate – @NASA_SLS@NASAOrion#JWST#JourneyToMars#BackToTheMoon ISS, Mars Sample Return, Europa Orbiter/Lander,
Its hard to believe that the NGST started out in 1996 with an $500 million estimate. At its $8 billion dollar cap that is a 1600 percent cost overrun. And its now long past its originally proposed 2007 launch date.
Transatlantic talks on space telescope Tony Reichhardt
“NASA hopes to build the telescope for around $500 million, beginning construction in 2003, with a launch planned for 2007.”
Its actually amazing to think NASA as been working on the NGST/JWST since NASA Watch was founded. And all this for a mission only expected to last for 5-10 years.
It would be interesting to see what that 1996, $500 million concept looked like. I know, in the case of MSL/Curiosity, the $600 million Mars rover endorsed by the planetary Decadal Survey was not as complicated (or capable) as the roughly $2.7 billion mission they actually flew. WFIRST is (or was) pretty different from the mission the astrophysics Decadal Survey endorsed. And when NASA says something about cost overruns, it isn’t relative to those original concepts. It’s usually the cost at a much later stage, like Key Decision Point C which is after they have a preliminary design which has been formally reviewer.
There’s a constant tension between the two extremes in spacecraft goals. After Cassini (whose budget seems quaint now) everyone was horrified and we swore we would never put all the eggs in one basket again. Hence “Cheaper, better, faster” (pick one). After a few mission failures under that philosophy, we swung back to the other pole. When everyone realizes the budget can only support one big project at a time (within a division, anyway) there is a tendency to glom on, and that project has to become all things to all people. I completely believe this same effect is being seen with WFIRST right now.
That’s not quite fair. Both the planetary and heliophysics Decadal Surveys have insisted on the need for a balance between large and small missions (at least the current ones, and the previous Survey in the case of planetary.) But one problem with the big missions is the tendency to think it’s so important that all sorts of extra care is appropriate. If it’s going to cost $7 billion, why not spend an extra $500 million to make really, really sure it works? That logic can make costs spiral out of control, and (worse) is based on the idea that, with enough time, effort and money, you can eliminate all risks of failure.
If “really, really” sure means a Class A mission instead of Class B, you’re probably talking about something like $3 to $5B more, not $500M. Just look at JWST.
I once asked someone who’s build instrument for the whole range (Class D to A.) He didn’t know of anyone who’d compiled the statistics, but his gut feeling was Class A/B is about a factor of two to three more expensive than C/D. I included that (with warnings about the source) in a presentation at last year’s Low Cost Planetary Missions conference. An auditorium full of aerospace engineers and scientists didn’t question it, so I guess that gut feeling wasn’t too far off.
The one example I could get numbers on seems to confirm that. GRACE, the Earth-orbiting high precision gravity mapper, was developed as a proof of concept and technology demonstration. I’m fairly sure that was Class C. If I did it right, it cost $170 million in FY17 dollars. GRAIL, a Discovery mission which was basically GRACE going to the Moon, would have been Class B (Discovery missions always are, to the best of my knowledge) and cost $405 million. GRACE-FO, the for-real-not-demonstration follow on mission, is $432 million. That’s a factor of 2.4 to 2.5.
Anyway, within Class A missions, I didn’t mean there was only a $500 million extra cost. And it isn’t a single, one step process. It’s lots of smaller deltas, and they add up. Someone can argue that doing X will only add $50 million, and that’s worth it for added reliability on a $5 billion mission; then something else comes up, and another $50 million is definitely worth it for a $5.05 billion dollar mission, etc. That can go on and spiral into a few billion when it’s all added up.
I mentioned this before. I was at Goddard viewing the Webb and one of the project managers was telling us how sophisticated the telescope was and how much we would learn. He ended the discussion with “and the U.S. spends more on potato chips than the cost of the Webb”. To which I said, “but the U.S. likes potato chips”.
One could say something similarly ill-informed about, say, Special (and General) Relativity and the like; an understanding of which is central to the function of GPS.
These days it appears that nearly all of the big names in physics and/or cosmology has written books for the general reader, some more accessible that others. I’ve found that Frank Wilczek’s “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” not only touches on complex issue but manages to put modern concepts into millennial perspective.
Coming in a bit late, but I just noticed Keith asking *the* key question: “…whether #NASA actually has the funding to do everything on its plate – @NASA_SLS @NASAOrion #JWST #JourneyToMars #BackToTheMoon ISS, Mars Sample Return, Europa Orbiter/Lander…”
The answer of course is no, they don’t, and won’t, and something will have to give. Either some of these projects will have to be cut, or NASA’s traditional very-expensive way of doing business will have to change.
Or, in my view the most likely/practical solution, a mix of the two: Killing the most obvious large boondoggle(s), and elsewhere modifying NASA’s traditional organizational methods to drastically cut costs (in part by not pursuing risk-reduction quite so far up the diminishing-returns curve.)
And as Keith may be implying, nobody at NASA is politically able to directly say so. (Though many seem to be acutely aware of the problem, reading between the lines of much that’s come out lately.)
Some projects have a quantifiable and definite goal, e.g., James Webb, others do not, e.g., DSG and maybe SLS.
Its hard to believe that the NGST started out in 1996 with an $500 million estimate. At its $8 billion dollar cap that is a 1600 percent cost overrun. And its now long past its originally proposed 2007 launch date.
https://www.nature.com/arti…
Transatlantic talks on space telescope
Tony Reichhardt
“NASA hopes to build the telescope for around $500 million, beginning construction in 2003, with a launch planned for 2007.”
Its actually amazing to think NASA as been working on the NGST/JWST since NASA Watch was founded. And all this for a mission only expected to last for 5-10 years.
It would be interesting to see what that 1996, $500 million concept looked like. I know, in the case of MSL/Curiosity, the $600 million Mars rover endorsed by the planetary Decadal Survey was not as complicated (or capable) as the roughly $2.7 billion mission they actually flew. WFIRST is (or was) pretty different from the mission the astrophysics Decadal Survey endorsed. And when NASA says something about cost overruns, it isn’t relative to those original concepts. It’s usually the cost at a much later stage, like Key Decision Point C which is after they have a preliminary design which has been formally reviewer.
There’s a constant tension between the two extremes in spacecraft goals. After Cassini (whose budget seems quaint now) everyone was horrified and we swore we would never put all the eggs in one basket again. Hence “Cheaper, better, faster” (pick one). After a few mission failures under that philosophy, we swung back to the other pole. When everyone realizes the budget can only support one big project at a time (within a division, anyway) there is a tendency to glom on, and that project has to become all things to all people. I completely believe this same effect is being seen with WFIRST right now.
That’s not quite fair. Both the planetary and heliophysics Decadal Surveys have insisted on the need for a balance between large and small missions (at least the current ones, and the previous Survey in the case of planetary.) But one problem with the big missions is the tendency to think it’s so important that all sorts of extra care is appropriate. If it’s going to cost $7 billion, why not spend an extra $500 million to make really, really sure it works? That logic can make costs spiral out of control, and (worse) is based on the idea that, with enough time, effort and money, you can eliminate all risks of failure.
If “really, really” sure means a Class A mission instead of Class B, you’re probably talking about something like $3 to $5B more, not $500M. Just look at JWST.
I once asked someone who’s build instrument for the whole range (Class D to A.) He didn’t know of anyone who’d compiled the statistics, but his gut feeling was Class A/B is about a factor of two to three more expensive than C/D. I included that (with warnings about the source) in a presentation at last year’s Low Cost Planetary Missions conference. An auditorium full of aerospace engineers and scientists didn’t question it, so I guess that gut feeling wasn’t too far off.
The one example I could get numbers on seems to confirm that. GRACE, the Earth-orbiting high precision gravity mapper, was developed as a proof of concept and technology demonstration. I’m fairly sure that was Class C. If I did it right, it cost $170 million in FY17 dollars. GRAIL, a Discovery mission which was basically GRACE going to the Moon, would have been Class B (Discovery missions always are, to the best of my knowledge) and cost $405 million. GRACE-FO, the for-real-not-demonstration follow on mission, is $432 million. That’s a factor of 2.4 to 2.5.
Anyway, within Class A missions, I didn’t mean there was only a $500 million extra cost. And it isn’t a single, one step process. It’s lots of smaller deltas, and they add up. Someone can argue that doing X will only add $50 million, and that’s worth it for added reliability on a $5 billion mission; then something else comes up, and another $50 million is definitely worth it for a $5.05 billion dollar mission, etc. That can go on and spiral into a few billion when it’s all added up.
I mentioned this before. I was at Goddard viewing the Webb and one of the project managers was telling us how sophisticated the telescope was and how much we would learn. He ended the discussion with “and the U.S. spends more on potato chips than the cost of the Webb”. To which I said, “but the U.S. likes potato chips”.
One could say something similarly ill-informed about, say, Special (and General) Relativity and the like; an understanding of which is central to the function of GPS.
These days it appears that nearly all of the big names in physics and/or cosmology has written books for the general reader, some more accessible that others. I’ve found that Frank Wilczek’s “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” not only touches on complex issue but manages to put modern concepts into millennial perspective.
It’s dead Jim.
Coming in a bit late, but I just noticed Keith asking *the* key question:
“…whether #NASA actually has the funding to do everything on its plate – @NASA_SLS @NASAOrion #JWST #JourneyToMars #BackToTheMoon ISS, Mars Sample Return, Europa Orbiter/Lander…”
The answer of course is no, they don’t, and won’t, and something will have to give. Either some of these projects will have to be cut, or NASA’s traditional very-expensive way of doing business will have to change.
Or, in my view the most likely/practical solution, a mix of the two: Killing the most obvious large boondoggle(s), and elsewhere modifying NASA’s traditional organizational methods to drastically cut costs (in part by not pursuing risk-reduction quite so far up the diminishing-returns curve.)
And as Keith may be implying, nobody at NASA is politically able to directly say so. (Though many seem to be acutely aware of the problem, reading between the lines of much that’s come out lately.)
Interesting times.