Letter From Senate Budget Committee Chair Michael Enzi to NASA About SLS/JWST delays/Cost overruns
“I am troubled by continued reports of cost growth and schedule delays involving major projects of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that could jeopardize future missions. … I am concerned that the persistent cost growth and schedule delays identified by GAO put at risk vital NASA misions and taxpayer dollars. Therefore I request your responses to the following questions: … please provide your response in writing by August 14, 2019. Additionally I ask that your staff provide my Budget Committee staff with quarterly briefings on the status of GAO’s open recommendations.”
Mocking Cost Overruns And Schedule Slips At NASA (Update), earlier post
“As NASA Administrator Bridenstine noted in testimony before the Senate yesterday “NASA has not been good at realistic budgets and schedules. We need to get better at that. … We have a long history at NASA for cost and schedule not being set in a realistic way and that leads to a lack of confidence in people – such as this committee.” Whether it is Webb or Mars landers or SLS NASA has some major work to do to restore confidence in its budgeting and program management.”

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 🖖🏻

49 replies on “Senate Budget Committee Concerned With NASA Costs And Delays”

  2. That’s actually a pretty harsh letter. The words are polite and consist of reasonable questions. But the undertone is different. I think Senator Enzi is using “conserned” as what lawyers refer to as a “term of art.” He seem to be using “concerned” to mean seriously unhappy and possibly very pissed off.

    1. Yep. A foundation is being provided, layer by layer; an historic track record that can be used when the big showdown comes, which surely it will.

      1. That’s my take; plans are in motion and the next, inevitable SLS failure or delay could be the end of the program.

        1. I have very mixed feelings about SLS, mostly when reflecting on countless able engineers and others, all pouring a professional lifetime into this rocket; and their families as well.

          1. I’ve heard a suggestion that Boeing and the other contractors haven’t put their best people on it. Like, can’t fire the C-team so put them to work generating the money on the cost-plus program.

          2. They are being marched down a canyon, with no known exits, and now less and less light at the bottom where they must march. They and their families are fed and housed and clad by Congress tossing supplies over the canyon rim ahead of them, so that they must march forward to get them. The hope of an exit dims with every day’s march, and an extending schedule, with Shelby calling out from the Canyon rim, “Don’t worry Jody, …we’ll keep on funding you”.

            Not a good future.

          3. That of course is the real tragedy of SLS/Orion/Gateway, all of the years good dedicated engineers and techs have wasted on them when they could have been doing productive work. Someone should be forced to answer for it.

  3. I think it is obvious to everyone who compares how NASA and its contractors make progress with how someone like Musk makes progress, is that NASA and its contractors are slow rolling their efforts and the American taxpayer. There is no real desire to fly when they can just keep making an effort and not have to show anything and for as long as they keep it up they keep getting paid. I think that was what you got when you changed out experienced capable NASA managers for those who had no genuine experience ever designing or building anything. Not only that, since they lost the Apollo/Shuttle generation in the transition, the people they replaced them with never got the requisite guidance. The ‘new guys’ do not even know what it took to do the job.

      1. Unfortunately it goes with the territory when you work for a government agency. It’s why Elon Musk is able accomplish so much in such a short time. It is well to remember the first satellite SpaceX launched in orbit on the old Falcon I was only in July 2009 and now, a mere decade later, he is building the Starship/Super Heavy. The last time NASA moved so fast was during Project Apollo when they burned through money like it was water.

  4. I am concerned that the persistent cost growth and schedule delays identified by GAO put at risk vital NASA misions and taxpayer dollars.

    ——-

    Wow! An actual concern of citizens making it into a government document.

    As I said in the other post, Bridenstine has been given an out with SLS and I hope he uses it.

    1. Actually, Senator Enzi has announced that he will not run for reelection in 2020. I can imagine a good cop, bad cop game, where no one loses any political capitol. In fifteen months, Mr. Enzi will not care what Senator Shelby thinks of him. Mr. Bridenstine can be “regretfully forced” by the Senate Budget Committee to do things he would “never” have done on his own. I have no idea if they are actually playing that game, or even thinking of it. But it seems plausible to me.

          1. It just shows how little politics has changed from the time of Niccolò Machiavelli or even ancient Mesopotamia.

  5. I don’t agree with Bridenstine claim that NASA has set unreasonable cost and schedule targets for Orion or SLS. Remember these were supposed to be achievable because they were using proven technologies. Orion was “safe, simple and soon” because it was based on Apollo-no advancements in technology required. SLS was based on Shuttle. Nothing previously has taken as long as Orion and SLS. ISS was a close second for the same reasons; inexperience. Even Shuttle which was under a very constrained budget and had several advanced technologies was completed in far shorter time. 20 years ago when Russians claimed US was delaying their Mir activities, in response, NASA got their act together and met challenging schedules. Too bad all the earlier people responsible for Apollo, Shuttle, and even US involvement on Mir are no longer in the program.

    1. Bridenstine is playing the hand he was dealt (of course he signed up for it so no tears).

      Hopefully the management changes he is making will be fruitful.

  6. Look, does anybody take any of the Republicans in the Senate seriously anymore? After all, Mitch McConnell doesn’t even trust them and won’t let them vote on anything (unless it’s to approve right-leaning judgeships or for tax busting giveaways that blow trillion dollar holes in the budget, then it’s OK). I mean, I’m not saying that NASA management shouldn’t be scrutinized over their performance (particularly when it comes to schedule and budget), but by these guys? Gimme a break!

    (Funny how, in the strange world we now live in, being sardonic is also one of the best ways of being truthful…)

    1. No more serious than they take the Democrats with the nonsense they say. Really, outside the beltway, both political parties are seen as being self-serving with little regard for the voters, being too occupied with throwing mud and dirt on the other party and bringing home pork than taking care of the nation’s business.

      And there is data to support it. CNN’s most recent poll shows only a 20 percent approval rating of Congress while 75% disapproved. Approval ratings haven’t been above 30% in over a decade. The fact that there is no real choice is why the majority of the voters have stopped voting in mid-year elections. In 2018 the turnout was at a 50 year high because of the hype and still only 47% showed up to vote. In the 2014 Congressional elections it was only 37% voting.

      Members of Congress know that as long as they are able to get the party robovoters to the polls they will stay in office forever and no one will care about their records.

      1. I get tired of this “both sides are to blame” hooey. The Democratic House passes legislation, and lots of it. They are willing to back up what they say. It’s then the responsibility of the Senate to have their say by considering the House legislation and voting on it.

        Yet those bills get stalled because McConnell won’t bring them up for a vote; instead the Senate is basically giving up its legislating role and simply becoming “an approval factory for President’s Trump’s judicial and administrative nominees”:

        https://tinyurl.com/yxl6zlj4

        Basically, the Senate Republicans are scared of actually going on the record about what they believe in or want because, frankly, they know that what they want is unpopular. If the American public doesn’t see this, it’s because the news media doesn’t do enough stories like the one above.

        (Sorry, Keith, nothing about NASA here. So let me tie that in by alluding to one of your favorite images. Those who want real progress about moving NASA forward are out of luck, this Republican-led Senate is too busy sticking their collective heads in the sand.)

        2. It takes two to tangle and the House should try to work with Senate more, like they used to, before passing bills they know won’t get any support. So yes, BOTH parties are to blame for bad space policy and everything else.

          1. OK, I’m not going to continue this discussion after this, because it does not relate to NASA in any way (and I’m not sure Keith will even let this through). But here goes:

            1) The gun control bill had enough support to pass the Senate, but McConnell wouldn’t allow it to the floor (this is particularly pertinent right now).

            2) The bill to do something about Russian interference in our elections had enough support to pass the Senate, but McConnell wouldn’t allow it to the floor.

            3) In both instances (and more) none of his Republican colleagues (even those who supported those bills) had the nerve (courage, or simple decency, whatever way you want to phrase it) to go against him (and Trump).

            So let me just say that the past few weeks (actually years) have shown us that this country now has only one actual political party (an imperfect one, yes, but it’s still a political party). The other “entity” that calls itself one has shown itself to be a religious cult.

          2. You see it from one side, the Republicans from another, (and would probably say the Democrats are the “cult”) and those of us in the middle say “A plague o’ both your Houses!” to take a line out of Shakespeare.

            But really it is just the same partisan politics that has been going on since the first Congress and why President Washington warned us about political parties. Sometimes it gets real nasty, like now, other times the two sides seem to find it easier to find common ground. But then that was the intention of the founders of the Republic, to force folks to work together, instead of demonize each other, to reach a compromise that most are able to support.

            It is why it is so hard to get any good space policy going, and hard to kill off a program like the SLS or Orion once its etablished. There is too much fear if you take the pork away from one group of Congress Critters they will take away yours.

        3. This is a Space Forum. Please comment on Space-related matters, even from a progressive view-point. Welcome to the future where non-progressives have no trust at all in policies and bills from progressives. This is what the last 50 years of progressive politics has earned. Get used to it.

  7. They cancelled NPOESS due to Nunn McCurdy, there are no sacred cows. Playing EVMS and baseline games can be dangerous. Consider that NPOESS was a critical element of US weather forecasting. Bridenstine making these statements is a smart move because it is possible that he will get one “kitchen pass” for SLS/Orion. JWST is too far gone to do anything about but you can be sure the next mid-flagship or flagship will be under intense scrutiny.

    1. How was Venturestar canceled? Do some projects require Congressional approval for cancellation or can Administrators cancel under certain circumstances?

      1. VentureStar was never really an offical program. The X-33 was, but it’s funding was limited and required Lockheed funding as well. When it reached the end of NASA funding and Lockheed refused to put in more of its own money, it just ended.

    2. In fact, Europa Clipper, the next planetary flagship, descoped one of the core instruments (the magnetometer), replaced the PI, and transferred all hardware responsibility from the instrument team to the project. The instrument ran into some technical problems, and had been blowing through revised budget after revised budget.

    3. For the record, NPOESS wasn’t cancelled due to Nunn McCurdy, it was descoped. The program continued to fumble along after that for a number of years until Obama killed it in 2009 (or maybe 2010) and told NOAA and the DoD (basically the Air Force) to go their separate ways. NOAA immediately created the JPSS program and went back to the “tried and true” methodology that worked for them before for POES and GOES (and the follow-on GOES-R), namely contract with NASA to be responsible for development of the satellites and instruments, launch, and early orbit checkout before handing things back over to NOAA for operations. The DoD (again, the Air Force) floundered around for a long time and only within the last couple of years has seemed to get its act together.

      1. due: capable of being attributed : ASCRIBABLE —used with to

        NPOESS satellites would not be launching until 2014, at the earliest. The projected cost of the NPOESS program had more than doubled to $13.9 billion at the time of the Feb. 1 announcement to scrap the system.

        So semantics I guess, but if it had not had cost growth it would not have been terminated and redirected to JPSS and AF program.

        From testimony in 2006:

        Mr. EHLERS. Well, I can assure you you don’t have an endless
        stream of money. That is why we are having the hearing.

        Mr. EHLERS. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        It is—Frankly, it is not a very happy occasion, and I also don’t
        particularly enjoy sitting here like a bunch of attorneys grilling potential criminals. That is not my intent at all. Frankly, as a scientist, I would be more comfortable sitting around a table looking
        at a bunch of charts and numbers, and trying to figure out just
        what you decided, and why you decided it.
        DECISION-MAKING PROCESS AND COST TARGETS
        But I understand the Chairman asked the question about cost,
        and I want to just narrow that down again. As I understand your
        response to him, you didn’t have a specific cost target. In other
        words, you didn’t meet, say okay, this is the biggest cost we can
        do. How, you know, what can we put on it? So, if you didn’t have
        a specific cost target, how were decisions made to terminate sensors, and how were decisions made to decide which sensors were
        going to be terminated? This reminds me a little bit of what we
        went through with the Space Station, which started out with a
        grand vision, and as costs kept up, we kept cutting, and now, we
        have ended up with something that I am not sure is all that usable. I am not drawing a parallel here, but it seems to me that has
        been the process.
        So my question is how did you make the decisions as to which
        sensors to terminate, and how does that fit into the whole big picture of what we are trying to accomplish here? I am looking for
        help from anyone.

        And a blistering one:
        GUARANTEE OF PLAN
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Lautenbacher, do you own a home?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. Sorry, I didn’t hear the question.
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Do you own a home?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. I own a home. Yes, sir.
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Yeah. Just kind of pretend that I came from
        the homebuilding business, and I came to you and said I want to
        build you and your wife a home, and you are interested in me
        doing that, and you said let me tell you about the last job I did.
        It cost twice as much as I told the people it was going to cost. They
        got two thirds of the square footage that we had agreed to, and
        that we removed most of the amenities from that, and by the way,
        I still haven’t finished that project, and it has been going on for a
        number of years. Are you ready to sign up a contract with me?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. Not the way you have put it, no, sir.
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Yeah, well, I think that is where this committee is today, is that you are bringing us a plan with a very poor
        performance, right, and I think that, you know, we are already $3.2
        billion into this project, and we can’t pull up data from one satellite
        yet. Is that correct?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. No satellites have been launched yet,
        that is true.
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. No satellites have been launched. And so, I
        think the question that I have is do we have a failed plan here?
        Because you have not been able to execute this plan. It is over
        budget, you under-delivered, and yet, you have come back to saying
        today, and saying we have got it all figured out, and yet, we are
        going to reduce it by two satellites, we are going to remove some
        of the bells and whistles that we originally promised on this.
        And so the question I have is, how can I be assured, as a United
        States Congressman, that you have a plan that you can execute?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. We would certainly like to sit down
        with you and your staff and explain that to you, because we think
        that the plan will work, and that we have accommodated the issues
        that we had. All known deficiencies have been covered in one way
        or another, and I am not asking you to trust us. I am asking you
        to let us show you.
        MISTAKES LEADING TO CURRENT PROBLEMS
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Well, I guess the question that I have is, and
        it is a systemic problem, is how did we get to this point? In other
        words, when things weren’t going well, why didn’t we decide to
        make management changes, when we realized, my good friend Mr.
        Gutknecht really ruins my day, because while I am gone, he tells
        VerDate 11-MAY-2000 23:24 Feb 15, 2007 Jkt 027970 PO 00000 Frm 00053 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 C:\WORKD\FULL06\060806\27970 HJUD1 PsN: HJUD1
        50
        me for this great performance, we paid a $200 million bonus to
        somebody, and I just—I am perplexed here how you guys sitting
        there can tell us that things are going to be okay, when in fact,
        things aren’t okay.
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. The contractor bonus was reduced to
        zero for the last round. We have been making management
        changes for the past year and a half, to improve the fidelity in the
        reporting of the program. The program was optimistically estimated in the beginning, and it was lightly managed, and we have
        been working hard in the last year and a half to recover to an area
        where I think we have the confidence, and hopefully, can gain your
        confidence that it is under control.
        Mr. NEUGEBAUER. How do we get that other $200 million bonus
        back, that we shouldn’t have paid to begin with? That is—I think
        that is one of the questions I would have. Hopefully, now, we realize that we shouldn’t be paying bonuses, but it appears to me that
        we shouldn’t have paid $200 million, and somebody owes the American taxpayers, and we have to be clear about who owns this
        money, whose money this is, and you gave $200 million of the
        American taxpayers’ money to someone who was not performing. I
        mean, how do you justify that?
        Admiral LAUTENBACHER. You

        1. 1) I’m not disagreeing with the fact that excessive cost growth was the downfall of NPOESS (actually, the downfall really was due to the reasons for the excessive cost growth, but that’s a long story), I’m just setting the record straight. The Nunn McCurdy caused descoping of the NPOESS program occurred in 2006. NPOESS wasn’t killed until 2010 and it wasn’t a direct effect of Nunn McCurdy.

          2) Again, to clarify what happened, money wasn’t redirected to an existing program called JPSS. The civilian JPSS program was created out of the NPOESS disaster and money was separately allocated to it. It’s important to note that JPSS is a NASA run program, under contract from NOAA (and NASA was well positioned to create JPSS, since they were already in charge of and managing the NPP program). So, in order to bring cost and schedule under control, the government (NOAA) dropped the disastrous DoD SSPR paradigm and went back to the POES/GOES paradigm.

          3) The Air Force program created from the NPOESS ashes (the Defense Weather Satellite System) was a complete bust because the DoD had a hard time figuring out what they wanted and needed that was separate and distinct from what JPSS already would provide (and, in fact, is providing to the DoD today). That program was cancelled in 2012. However, in the last couple of years their Weather System Follow-on Microwave program is making progress in developing a microwave instrument that will make measurements that will complement those already obtained from JPSS.

          4) As a final irony Raytheon, which was Northrop Grumman’s main contracting partner on NPOESS and was responsible for the development of the VIIRS instrument (the one that was probably the main source of cost overruns on the NPOESS program), has been attempting to get the Air Force to buy more copies of VIIRS as part of their follow on weather satellite systems. If you look up the meaning of chuztpah, you’ll see the Raytheon logo.

  8. Does anyone have a link to what a mission to the Moon would look if only Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, or Vulcan is available?

    Has anyone in the private sphere or NASA actually developed some idea of what to do?

    1. Elon Musk’s plan is to not waste time using outdated technology like the Dragon2 or FH. His plan is to just get the Starship to the Moon using refueling in LEO. Simple and sustainable. It’s why Elon Musk has put his best engineers on it and is moving at flank speed.

      If NASA wants to by a few seats when it’s ready, fine. If not he will find others who want to go and sell them tickets to the Moon. It’s called capitalist and it’s what American industry does well.

      1. “flank speed”- does anyone know the derivation of that phrase? Nautical, of course, but how does ‘flank’ fit in?

        1. I was told, long ago, by a retired naval officer, that it was the term for the high speeds used in flanking maneuvers in combat, in particular where neither side expected to be able to “cross the ‘T’ of the other line of battle”, because the situation did not allow it.

          1. Fits SHS, moving at high speed and flanking the SLS/Orion/Gateway. ?

            And once they start flying from Kennedy it will be impossible for Old Space to ignore it.

          2. Reading (and listening) widely in the space community, I’s say that nobody from American ‘old space’ to the Europeans, Japanese, Indians, and Chinese are ignoring what’s happening.

            They are pretty much standing around the campfire with no sense of how to deal with it. But they are quite aware.

    2. I don’t think I’ve seen any actual presentations or statements on the subject. Mr. Musk may be thinking in terms of Starship, but NASA would not. If SLS goes away, they’ll want something either proven or at least mature enough to be confident that it will be available. They’d use Falcon Heavy since it’s flying, but I can’t see them the program on Mr. Musk’s “aspirational” schedules. Vulcan would probably get a free pass; it isn’t flying but it’s being developed in a way which would convince NASA it will be ready on time. (Not that I’m saying it would be ready in time, just that they approach ULA is using is one NASA is comfortable with.) I’m not sure about New Glenn.

      In any case, with vehicles of those capabilities, it would have to involve on-orbit propellent transfer. Operationally, probably on-orbit propellent storage as well; that relieves schedule pressure over launching the primary spacecraft(s), tankers and crew in short order. I suspect NASA would want to retain Gateway, but without SLS, its orbit could be altered to make life easier on the lander. But other than that, there’s just too much trade space to really say.

    3. Isn’t that the current NASA plan (minus the part of launching Orion on SLS)?

      So it goes like this:
      1. Launch Gateway PPE and Mini Hub to NRHO using FH/NG/V
      2. Launch elements lunar lander to NRHO using FH/NG/V, the lander is assembled and docked to Gateway
      3. Launch Orion on SLS to dock with Gateway and transfer astronauts to lander
      4. Lander goes off doing its business, after it’s done it returns to Gateway, transfer astronauts back to Orion, Orion return to Earth.

      For a mission without SLS, you just need to replace step 3 with launching Orion on FH/NG/V or replace it with launching Crew Dragon on FH.

    4. This could be helpful:
      http://www.thespacereview.c…
      Additionally I saw something by Robert Zubrin, and pretty sure it was on the same site, in which he talked about just such an architecture.

      And, I heard an interview with Dr. Zubrin over on the interplanetary podcast; I’ll search for it if there’s interest. (By the way, that podcast is an ‘official’ arm of the BIS, and very we’ll worth your time; aside from the occasional silliness that only the Brits can do well, it’s a terrific source, particularly since it includes the space-related efforts of other, non-US agencies, which too often receive short shrift. We Americans can be a little monolingual…).

      https://www.interplanetary….

      Finally, I have a dim memory that this subject was discussed on The Space Show in the past few months.

  10. Start with explaining why SLS was sold as easy upgrades from heritage shuttle technology when every part was redesigned.

    1. It’s not in the same league, but the Mars 2020 rover was sold as being just a reflight of Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity, with new and different instruments. Except for everything else, which have driven up the costs to more-or-less the same as MSL. Let’s face it, NASA has a real credibility problem about managing costs. Not just with habitually going over budget, but with all the initial claims about how and why it will be different this time.

      1. I suspect that most of the cost of spacecraft built with “heritage” is in the actual hands on labor in constructing and integration and test – you don’t get economies of scale until you’ve done dozens of them (the standard aerospace “Wright” curve typically says #2 costs 85% of what #1 cost, and that’s a true Build To Print). You might save some money in Phase B (design), but probably not in Phase C and D. And it’s not like instruments and their control/data needs are in anyway standardized – so M2020 would need redesigned interfaces and redesigned software to accommodate that.

        Add to that the issue with the long “cycle time” between missions, and you wind up with parts that are no longer available, vendors that have changed, etc. MSL leveraged designs from MER, which in turn leveraged designs from Pathfinder. So M2020 inheriting a design from MSL might easily find that the ICs that were the hot ticket in the 1990s aren’t available any more.

        Any “shuttle derived” or “Apollo derived” designs will face this problem, infinitely worse, because there haven’t actually been any intermediate missions to test things out.

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