Bolden/Elachi Plan: Take Work Away From Others And Send It To JPL
NASA is taking JPL workers for granted, Schiff says, La Canada Valley Sun
“NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who visited JPL on Wednesday, said the agency will try to restructure its Mars program in order to save jobs and preserve skills developed during past Mars missions. JPL Director Charles Elachi explained that administrators might transfer other projects funded by the 2013 NASA budget to JPL. Schiff said shuffling jobs misses the mark. “I’m not at all comforted by what I hear from NASA,” said Schiff. “It’s not about substituting other projects to keep people busy. It’s about doing things no one else in the world can do. If that talent pool leaves, putting it back together later is going to be darn near impossible.”
Op-ed: Don’t gut America’s planetary science, op ed by Reps. Adam Schiff and John Culberson
“Slashing NASA’s budget for exploring the solar system would be a serious mistake that would threaten our nation’s hard-won and long- held leadership role, and would come at a terrible time, now that China and other nations are rising to challenge American primacy in space. Meeting that test is good for science and good for America; by exploring other worlds, we remain competitive on our own.”
NASA chief pledges Mars help, Pasadena Sun
“Although he offered little detail, Bolden said that NASA will attempt to restructure its Mars program in ways that would save jobs at JPL and preserve its Mars exploration brain trust. “There are a lot of things about going to other planets that nobody knows, except here,” said Bolden. “We will be working with folks here at JPL in trying to restructure our robotic Mars exploration program.” JPL Director Charles Elachi said the administrative restructuring could involve bringing other NASA work funded under the 2013 budget to JPL, but specific projects have not yet been identified.”
Keith’s note: I wonder if the White House knows about this. This can’t be a real solution i.e. taking work from other NASA field centers and sending it to JPL to offset White House-directed cuts in Mars work – at JPL. Other NASA facilities are facing cuts, why shouldn’t JPL? Giving preference to a FFRDC (JPL) over NASA (government) field centers? I don’t think so. Also, what sorts of promises are being made to the other centers affected by 2013 budget cuts? This is a zero sum game at the end of the day – Bolden can’t promise the same thing to more than one center – or can he? I doubt this idea will ever get pass the “Oops, I misspoke phase. Stay tuned.
Keith you have this exactly right. My guess at motivations here is “to save the crown jewels” as a simplistic alternative to “spread the pain”.
JPL/Caltech tends to cater to DC egos, and the egos cut them slack – it’s convenient. Billions in convenience. Kind of like “one stop shopping”.
The compliment to this is to talk to the reps in the districts with other NASA centers and other competing research groups – they are used to this.
However, the damage done by the FY2011 battles in the refunding of SLS is being exploited for this end. Having just triggered a desperate attack by a casual question about a joint JPL/Caltech/UCLA planetary project, it would seem that there is a uncertain future at JPL, even though they’ve gotten way more than they should have … and still feel they are not getting enough.
Bottom line – JPL is an FFRDC like others. Not “crown jewels”. Nor is SLS.
And using “test like you fly” combined with optimizing launch costs has resulted in ambitious missions always massively overrunning schedule / budget. So either don’t be so ambitious, or transition the mission to make the launch as originally scheduled with a test mission as much like you would fly, so that you secure as much as proven unambiguously. In this way you keep from having the cost growth of what supposedly was done, adding a ceiling to the overrun while reducing the forward risk position of the final launch, for the much less cost of an additional launch.
And then if the test launch gets to be so unsubstantial as you close in on when you are to fly it … well you know for certain what your budget has yielded, so you won’t be depending on dubious testimony of “experts” who also really don’t have a clue as to forwardly fund indefinitely a mission.
JPL/Caltech caters to DC?? The opinion here is usually the exact opposite – that JPL is severely hobbled by our distance to the beltway, compared to our primary competition. Likewise, the CA senators are ambivalent, if not openly hostile, to the space program. There’s no fairy godmother here to force funding of her district’s projects. That our local congressman promised to raise a fuss was a real surprise to me. First open indication that anyone cared. I am still baffled by anyone bashing JPL. Yes, there have been overruns, every mission I’ve been on has overrun by 10-25%. But honestly, JPL’s overruns are nearly an order of magnitude below that of JWST. That is what is eating everyone’s lunch.
WRT “JPL’s overruns are nearly an order of magnitude below that of JWST.” I guess you were on vacation when MSL went $1 billion over and was delayed 2 years …
No, I was there. And you seemed to have missed that JWST is now $7 billion over budget and delayed by close to a decade. Don’t use the JW moving signpost, you need to look at the original NGST proposal. I am pretty sure that 1 << 7.
I thought MSL’s overruns came out of the Mars program, or at least the planetary budget. I thought SMD delayed and canceled future missions because they thought that MSL was too important to lose. As far as JWST, I think it is counter-productive to blame JWST for the death of the Mars program. They are doing something hard, but that is also very worthwhile… Things sometimes go over budget because we do a lot of shit that’s never been done before. I’m not saying that to make excuses, we have a duty to the taxpayer to control costs. But sometimes people make mistakes that have to be fixed, and that costs money. This forces NASA to make tough decisions whether to keep funding tasks to solve very, very hard problems or to give up on very worthwhile missions and throw money already spent away.
Why do so many space advocates think that JWST has to die just so the Mars program can live? We can’t let ourselves succumb to infighting, we need to stick together and fight for JWST AND Mars AND Europa. Congress likes all three programs… Even if the White House and the NASA Administrator don’t see the value in these missions, people in Congress do (and many of them don’t even have anyone working on these programs in their district). And the cost of funding these programs won’t make a dent in the country’s budget problems one way or the other.
Those of us at NASA need to make sure tax dollars do something worthwhile and just aren’t burned with make-work tasks to keep people employed. We need a space program not a jobs program. Shifting work around to keep people employed, fixing infrastructure, and all this sort of crap is the wrong thing to do. We need to focus on work that puts things in space. That’s why the country pays for us. Focusing on jobs over missions reduces our value to the taxpayer and is just taking us further down the death spiral.
How big were overruns on ISS? On Constellation? On Robonaut? On Hubble? On the F-35?
NASA needs the equivalent of a DoD BRAC. Too many centers, too few dollars doing real work, most spent on keeping the employees paid. That said, JPL is notorious for stealing intellectual property and dollars. When I was in industry, we would not let JPL in the front door, as we knew they only wanted our knowledge so they could apply it themselves.
JPL is notorious for stealing intellectual property
… unsurprising for an FFRDC. Converting more centers to FFRDC’s increases this side effect.
NASA needs the equivalent of a DoD BRAC
Understandable. Pragmatic. But beware the law of unintended consequences.
Suggest you attempt to simulate BRAC with each center . You may find some surprises with each case of this. Some due to legacy facilities/equipment. Others due to the role of a center in the specific region.
Military bases went through this as well, but the nature of NASA centers is much less mobile than armed forces, who are largely mobile by definition/need.
This is why it continues to be unresolved. My experience is that having “all healthy centers” funded and BRAC are both unrealistic when you try to put them into action. I wish this wasn’t true but it is.
So likely what will happen is largely … what has happened. Some unhealthy centers. Others asymmetrically financed. Over the long term, given how activity increases/decreases, the health of centers changes, and as they exceed a moribund limit BRAC happens.
That said, JPL is notorious for stealing intellectual property and dollars.
That’s a pretty big charge to level. If this really happened, you should contact JPL’s general council.
Sometimes it can looks like your ideas were stolen because someone else was already working along the same lines. You don’t want to assume the worst from the get-go… you need to look into it with an open mind to try and figure out what really happened. Another thing to remember with claims like this is who really owns the IP. If NASA paid for it, the government can often reassign it however they want… they assign JPL IP to other NASA centers all of the time. And sometimes they move missions from other centers to JPL. But NASA needs the freedom to move stuff around for various reasons that the rest of us don’t want to understand so we can bitch about the hundred ways we’ve been screwed over.
I’ve personally had things that I’ve been working on “stolen” by other centers. So what? NASA isn’t in business to build monuments to my own personal genius. NASA is trying to explore space… once upon a time that was enough for most of us. We need to step back and try to regain the perspective we had as starry-eyed kids… we need to stop fighting with each other and work together so we can pull NASA out of these doldrums.
I said IP because it was a short, easy to use expression. 35 years ago, we had a contract with JPL. After a couple of reviews, it became obvious that most of the JPL attendees were there to learn as much as they could about our technology, and could care less about how we were performing on the contract. And their intent was to perform the next phase of the program in-house. We had been warned by other contractors that this would happen. So we stopped allowing them in the plant. I understand what you are saying, but it does not apply to the situation I am discussing.
35 years is a long time to hold a grudge. There are a lot of different people now, and everyone I work with is very careful to be fair to contractors… and most IP flow that Iv’e seen is from JPL outward (as it should be)
JPLers as a group are incredibly dedicated to scientific exploration. I’ve worked with a bunch of people who make sacrifices in their personal lives for the sake of the mission… to outsiders MSL may be over budget and too expensive, but on the other side I saw the people who worked on MSL and how they worked crazy long hours (for years) and poured their hearts and souls into that thing. Every time there was budget problems they thought there was a very real possibility of losing everything that they worked on… there was no sense of entitlement. …and they didn’t always get a lot of support from other JPLers because a lot of them saw the MSL overruns as eating into other missions. Although I don’t know anyone on JWST, I assume that they are going through the same thing.
We’ve got to all stop sniping at each other and work together to make the case for why its worthwhile for Congress to fund our space adventures.
How about looking into a concept for a Mars science surface package that was proposed by Lockheed Martin (Martin Marrietta at the time) that was to be the follow-on to the Viking landers. The science package proposed was to have an APXS, TES, pancam, etc…. JPL sat on the proposal for years, then what did they build all by themselves??? Yes the MER rovers with almost EXACTLY the same science package proposed by Martin. Did Martin get ANY credit for that proposal? – NO
I would say that Stuart Gray’s remarks to a more recent program show that the overall behavior has not changed. And JPL is not unique, as someone else pointed out, the FFRDC, such as MITLL, plus NRL, Sandia all have the same reputation. Industry must tread lightly in working with any of them.
I’m sorry, but I am familar with the proposed Martin follow-on to Viking, and the MER mission is not even slightly similar to it. As for the science package: JPL didn’t make the science package; this was bid on and provided by Cornell. You could complain to them about stealing thirty-year old ideas from Martin– and while you’re at it, complain about their stealing the scientists, too, since some of the MER science team are the same scientists.
In any case, the MER science payload couldn’t have been built in the 1970s; the technology was very different then.
Sturart and brunnegd… I don’t know what happened with the MER science payload but I can tell you how science payloads usually come together.
For a PI-led mission the science team decides on the key science questions and the instruments trace from those questions. The IP in that case is generally thought of as belonging to the science team and to the people who developed the instruments… whoever designs a flight system for the instruments would have the IP for the flight system, but not to the payload unless there is some other agreement. Science teams occasionally change who they propose mission concepts with from time to time, but that doesn’t mean someone is stealing the science team… Scientists aren’t anyones property to steal. Even scientists who are employed by JPL, APL, GSFC, etc. are free to be part of missions led elsewhere.The other way is in the flagship style where a mission is developed with a strawman science payload. This payload is developed by a science team that NASA puts together, and NASA is thought to be the owner of the science concept in this case. If the mission is selected, NASA will put out a call for instruments to be part of the payload, and the instrument teams own the IP for their instruments. And whoever NASA picks to build the flight system builds the flight system… and that may not be the same team that convinced NASA to do the mission. NASA picks who builds directed missions through their own special sausage-making process… but they can do that because it is NASA’s concept to do with as they please. So if you think the MER team stole your idea for the instrument suite, I encourage you to contact the scientists who came up with the science investigations that your suite was derived from and see if they had a role in MER. If it appears that their ideas were stolen, talk to them and see if they feel the same way. If so, talk to the MER PI, and if he doesn’t offer a satisfactory explanation, I can tell you how to start and ethics investigation at JPL… but just don’t jump to conclusions. Chances are that nobody’s ideas were stolen, just that is was a long and convoluted process to convince NASA to do another Mars mission after the Mars Observer failure.
I invite you to explain the differences between the “Inside Jupiter” proposal to the “Juno” Mission.
One was told that it was impossible using current technology, the other was given a Thumbs up and then launched.
I witnessed this exact same behavior from JPL.
When I was at Lockheed Martin, JPL said that we were “Industrial Partners” on the Flagship “Europa Orbiter” project. We developed detailed plans and designs for the spacecraft. Once we handed them all of the documentation, they said “Oh wait…. We think we will develop this in-house (at JPL)… we dont need a partner”.
If I had been the head of LMA at that time, I would have kicked all of the JPL systems engineers out of the building and off the network.
There have been umpteen different designs for the Europa Orbiter over the years and the project has been cancelled and restarted numerous times. I know where the current design came from, and it wasn’t LMA. When JPL gets designs from LMA, they are firewalled off and not shown to anyone who isn’t working on that project. JPL takes the relationship with LMA very seriously and would not do anything to jeopardize it.
Sorry if you were part of a proposal that didn’t go through… that’s just the nature of the business, it doesn’t mean anyone “stole” your design. I’m sure whoever as in charge of LMA at the time knew what is going on when JPL solicits input for a make/buy decision.
However, LMA keeps knocking down JPLs door trying to participate in missions like Moonrise just a year ago. If JPL was so terrible, why do businesses continue to fall all over themselves to partner with them.
“How about looking into a concept for a Mars science surface package that was proposed by Lockheed Martin”
Stuart,
Was the Mars science surface package from an unsolicited proposal, or in response to an RFP. If it was an RFP, then JPL may have been contractually entitled to use the Martin-developed plans and designs. I have nothing to suggest this was so; I’m just considering possibilities.
Steve
I completely agree, brunnegd; for more effective spending, NASA needs a BRAC for the Centers, possibly transforming some to FFRDCs.
Reasonable given the role in communities as a FFRDC. The problem is that there are other activities that don’t fit the role. It would be more convenient to ignore these, but they are considerable.
Attempts to evade this with public/private partnership, spinoffs, sales … don’t work either because they bring on other issues too.
And, JPL as an example of a FFRDC has surely demonstrated downsides of that form as well.
This post has a really slanted point of view. Over-all in the NASA budget is close to flat (as Bolden says, “flat is the new up”) and the science budget is also close to flat. So if Elachi attempts to keep JPL funding also flat to avoid lay offs how is that “taking work from other NASA field centers?” At worst, it is attempting to avoid having the JPL budget moved to these other centers, and if you read the quotes carefully it is never stated that the “work” described has already been allocated to a particular center.
Read what Elachi said – he openly talks about taking Mars work from elsewhere and bringing it to JPL. Where is “elsewhere”?
Isn’t it normal that when a program is gutted for NASA to take the little parts of the job from far-flung centers and consolidate them at the main center for that program… To NASA thinking, it doesn’t make sense to have an empty core. I imagine if NASA gutted something like electric propulsion for example, they would want to pull all of the remaining work from other centers back to Glenn.
I don’t see this statement as controversial, just an observation of how NASA does things… probably stated to console people who are working their asses off right now and just had the rug pulled out from under them by the White House.
Rendering talent and experience down to simple economics is ridiculous, and only rears its ugly head when times are tough and money is short (or in the corporate world when a few greedy people want even more money for themselves).
Who will land us on Mars if not JPL? Who will track the deep space missions if not JPL? The sentiment that we need to keep talent and experience at JPL is quite a valid sentiment. It’s fine to bash JPL, but be very careful what you wish for – I present Fobos-Grunt as an example.
Now look, JPL is a fine, talented organization, but if they
feel they are being constrained then perhaps they should strike out on their
own. Surely they have the capability to
do that.
Actually they can’t. They are still a NASA center with a charter that specifies what kind of work they could do. For example, if they propose something to DoD they have to prove “uniqueness.”
I have two responses to the notion that JPL will be taking projects from other Centers.
1)”When pigs fly!”
2)Taking from Henny Youngman, “Take my wife—please!”
Well, I left JPL after 18.5 years because of these cuts. And every year it is getting worse. As for the difference between JPL and other NASA centers, JPL actually has a technical staff that does most of the technical work in house. Civil Service centers have the technical work mostly done by contractors. A lot of what is done at JPL is unique if not to the world at least to NASA. Our NAV team is exceptional. So is the DSN. Yet the DSN engineering has been cut to the bone. And DSN is part of NASA’s crown jewels.
Now Obama is going after what JPL/NASA does better than anyone else by miles: Mars. For a President who claims to be for education, this is very bad precedent. And Charlie Bolden is only a puppet as far as I am concerned. I don’t think he has the leadership and the vision to create a strong institution. As of now, NASA looks like a beached whale. No direction. Lots of fat. About to die.
NASA long term planning is poor -a result of the politics of funding. Ironically, the best science comes from Hubble (and upcoming Web) and the Planetary missions that are pitted against each other. The big goofy elephant in the room is the science poor manned flight (ISS and shuttle and its replacement) programs. The poor planning of the manned flight projects is evident -we need the Russians to get to ISS.
This is crap. NASA took from JPL (cutting the Mars Program) and gave it to JWST. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
By all means, lets fund Chinas space program.
http://www.foxnews.com/scit…
And to all the FOXnews haters, here is a direct link to the report to read it yourself.
http://oig.nasa.gov/congres…
Webb should be killed now (using the same litmus test used for CxP) and JPL should have work taken away till they can get their house in order. This excessibe bleeding of money and tech has to stop.