NASA’s $349 million monument to its drift, Washington Post
“In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. Then, NASA did something odd. As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially “mothballed” closed up and left empty without ever being used.”
Keith’s note: Under the FY 2016 budget Mars Opportunity shuts down in FY 2016 and Mars Odyssey shuts down in FY 2017. Both spacecraft still work. Funny how NASA, Congress, and the White House can spend hundreds of millions on an engine and test stand facilities that will not be used – but keeping still-useful Mars probes operational for a few million is not possible? Where is the logic in that? The “State of NASA” is confused – and adrift – if this is what passes for a good space policy.
Keith’s update: According to Dave Radzanowski NASA is looking to zero out LRO, Opportunity, Odyssey etc. in FY 2016 BUT that this happened last year as well and NASA looked at the missions and eventually found the money to keep them going. That said, its a little bit like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football. They do this every year with small missions. Everyone screams, they find the money, and nothing gets cancelled. You have to wonder why they do this in the first place since they already know that they will fund these missions. Again, this speaks to a lack of strategic thought – the sort of thing you’d expect within an agency that is adrift.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

26 replies on “This is Why People Think NASA is Adrift, Charlie.”

  1. Not to mention “Mars Future Missions” = 0.0. I thought we were going to put boots on Mars! That’s not a future mission?

    1. there’s no definite proposals for either future manned Mars missions or future robotic Mars missions, so there’s no budget for them.

      they did the same thing with last year’s budget proposal as well.

      http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloud…

      they are probably calling attention to the fact that there’s no funding for Mars’ future exploration, so please give us some if you really want us to go to Mars.

      1. Doug

        No proposals for manned or robot missions too Mars?

        SLS is our Mars program

        We need to wait for SLS to go to Mars!

        What’s this talk about commercial crew being delayed till 2018 if they don’t get so much money??

        SLS got less than they wanted. So where they going to suck it from to fix it???

        1. SLS is not a Mars program, it is a launch vehicle without a well defined mission, let alone a funded mission. SLS is currently a very expensive “launcher to nowhere”.

          1. I thought was cool that Bolden pointed out how important commercial was to going to Mars. Seems he gets it.

          2. The SLS is the only hope for human space flight. It is the Obi-wan kenobi rocket. We have been stuck in LEO since 1972. The opponents of the SLS are killing any hope of a real space program.

          3. There is another source that is actually building and testing engine hardware, designing the rocket, and is planning on publishing the plan this year.
            The SLS, beyond a pair poorly characterized and poorly funded cis-lunar missions next decade has zero forward momentum, no real funding, no real missions, and no capability.The SLS is not the OB1 rocket, it is the Jar-Jar Binks.

          4. Incorrect. An expendable BFR (big fracking rocket) is not the only way to send people beyond LEO. Refueling depots can be used to refuel an (empty) upper stage and allow it to continue on its way. Even ULA has written some interesting papers on using the Centaur upper stage to test cryogenic refueling technologies on existing EELV flights.

            Also, there is nothing inherently “expendable” about a liquid fueled rocket engine. At a minimum, they are test fired once before being used on a launch vehicle, so they’re already being reused at least once.

    2. Seems like the the plan is to wait for Musk to release his plan for Mars while keeping everybody happily employed with money for Orion and SLS. You never know, we may get to dump a few giant boosters in the ocean yet?

    1. Multiple antennas can increase your resolution to nearly the equivalent of the spread of your little antennas. For an orbital array, the equivalent of a single dish 14,000kms or so wide, provided you can determine their position well enough to do the interferometry.

      But for deep space comms you really need raw “bucket” size. That means a big dish, or enough little dishes to equal the dish area of a big dish. So take a DSN array, work out the dish area, divide by the size of your little antennas. That’s how many little antennas must be looking at the target. Double or triple that to allow for orbits, and then multiple it by the number of targets you want to track simultaneously. That’s how many microsats with little antennas you will need.

      1. At what distance do you need a deep space antenna? Is the moon deep space? Is Mars? And if you were going to make bucket type antenna what type of material is required. Could it be inflatable like a Bigelow hab? Can it be very light weight? Can it be segmented and made up of many flat shapes? Wonder if dragon trunks will ever be modified to be satellites? Or fairings ever get hauled to orbit for reuse? Top of a fairings about the right shape?
        Sure would be neat to have work shop up there salvageing/assembling stuff. What would it take to control lunar bots from wingos office and not have to go throw big old expensive systems?

  4. This year-by-year near-death experience is similar to what happens to non-tenured public school teachers.
    Since the budgets never align with the school year the newer teachers all get RIF (Reduction in Force) notifications in the Spring.
    They then have to sweat out the summer unsure of whether to stick it out or apply for a job elsewhere. Very hard on the old Acid Reflux…

    1. I thought that was just intrinsic to our basackwards educational system where I live. State law requires our teachers to receive either a contract offer or a layoff notice by the end of the school year. Non-tenures can’t be offered a contract unless funds are in place, so if there’s any glitch in the budgeting process they have to be laid off, even if it’s virtually certain they’ll be called back. Stupid.

      1. Couple that with the movement to remove tenure protection from all teachers, not just in the first 2-4 years.
        Image if every year when you go on vacation you get a layoff pink slip.
        This layoff may or may not get cancelled, depending purely on a fractured political process which you cannot control and which is totally unrelated to your job performance.

        EVERY YEAR.

  6. This is called the “Washington Monument Strategy”. When you don’t get the budget you want, you take something highly visible and public and threaten to shut it down. So the Parks Service will shut down the Washington Monument rather than, say, freeze pay and cut travel expenses – the kinds of things a private company will do.

      1. Yes.

        “The term was first used after George Hartzog, the seventh director of the National Park Service, closed popular national parks such as the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon National Park for two days a week in 1969. In response to complaints, Congress eventually restored the funding”

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

        but it’s not just the National Parks, similar things have happened in many different places whenever budget cuts come around. You probably remember that a lot of national parks were closed and popular public areas were fenced off during the 2013 sequestration, and for the same reason. the WWII war memorial was a highly publicized example, it’s a public area that you can just walk up to normally, but it was fenced off.

      2. Well, then the government shut down. the Park Service not only closed the gates of Mount Rushmore, they went up and down the nearby public roads and put cones to block all the vantage points. They put barriers up to block access to the WWII memorial on the mall.

  7. The problem goes much deeper than that. Not only is there a lack of an articulated long-term strategic plan, but I would counter that the US year-by-year funding process is antithetical to large projects that take a decade (or several) to be completed. So the quoted example is the every (usually two) year scramble for extended mission funds, but that goes to not being able to maintain momentum in the congressional process over that timescale. How do you even start a conversation about needing extended mission funds for a mission that will probably still be working past the primary mission, but you can’t guarantee it?

  8. I will also add the uncertainty in funding, and the degree to which it is obvious that NASA projects are treated as political footballs by congress, is a real morale killer.

  9. NASA’s Planetary Protection Office is in battling the planetary science missions. Internal dissent of the PPO Andromeda Strain pseudoscience is punished.

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