Senate Appropriators Increase NASA Budget
Senate Appropriators Increase NASA Budget, Save SOFIA, Transfer Two Programs from NOAA to NASA, SpacePolicyOnline
“The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its FY2015 Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) appropriations bill today. The bill would increase NASA’s FY2015 budget by $439 million to $17.9 billion. While that figure is very similar to what the House approved, it would be allocated within NASA quite differently in some cases. Among the differences, the Senate committee would transfer two programs – Jason-3 and DSCOVR – to NASA from NOAA and increase NASA’s earth science budget accordingly.”
NASA budget bill could include a poison pill for SpaceX, other commercial companies
“With NASA under the thumb of the Russian space program, Congress continues to play political games with the space agency. On Thursday the U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Committee unanimously approved the fiscal year 2015 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. This means they agreed upon a spending plan to fund NASA, among other agencies.
But buried within the bill could be something of a poison pill for a company like SpaceX. Allow me to explain.”
It’s almost incorrect to say “increases NASA budget” if major part of the increase goes to SLS program only. Out of some $400M “raise” SLS gets $300M
I agree. Any budget increase for SLS now is going to have to be paid back three times over after it is cancelled.
Thank God, it needs it.
Now the requirements have been changed it may be in SpaceX and OSC benefit to walk away from the CRS2 contracts and CC Agreements. Then publicly resubmit bids:
a. About 3 times bigger using the new level of bureaucracy.
b. The original amount for the original amount of bureaucracy.
The Tea Party can then have fun asking what other NASA and DoD have bureaucracy costs that exceed the cost of the work. After all if the accounting system is half competent it should routinely calculate its own cost to the nearest cent. Expenditure on bureaucracy is the one cost that is directly controlled by the government and its rule book.
Why the “Tea Party” in particular?
Both the Republicans and the Democrats have been authorising other FAR 15 contracts. The old warning about people in glass houses not throwing stones applies. The opposite of ‘transparency’ may be coverup.
The “Tea Party” voters are trying to cut taxes. That means reductions in Government spending. By making a fuss over a billion dollars can be saved and the USA still gets the manned trips to the ISS.
Oh, I see. It was a party endorsement. That puts the comment in perspective.
More of a paging and assigning of work.
To say that the tea party is trying to cut taxes is disingenuous at best; the goal is to starve government.
But how could you explain the problem to Tea Party voters without using Bible verses and Fox Newspeak?
1. The ‘Tea Party in Space’ people are more sophisticated than that.
2. As for the rest of the Tea Party no need, we are complaining about politicians sinning. To explain it we just have to find where the Bible bans the appropriate sin. Samuel chapters 11 and 12 cover miss using political power for personal gain. (The gain is money and power rather than love but it is still personnel gain.)
3. For the Fox viewers a group of politicians are helping a defence contractor price gore the government. With its rivals tripped up Boeing can charge extra for the paperwork.
1. Yes, they are more sophisticated than that, but they’re already on board with the Newspace agenda, so their support is a given.
2. The rest of the Tea Party hate science in general, so they would neither understand nor particularly care about government sabotage of space development.
3. Fox viewers would probably think the speaker was some kind of Satanist if they speak polysyllabically and show blasphemous knowledge of the heavens.
Any other baseless bits of left-wing nitwittery you care to trot out while you’re on a roll?
The politicians have ordered the rocket scientists to do some totally unneeded thing. Pure waste.
Meetings and paperwork are not free. Someone has to pay for them. On a government contract the ‘somebody’ is the government, which then proceeds to transfer the cost to the taxpayers.
So the taxpayers are buying these documents. To comply with all the rules each document will cost several thousand dollars. Repeat several thousand dollars for each document.
No one will be reading these waste documents. The rocket scientists do not need them to design the rocket.
The manufacturing people do not use the paperwork to manufacture the documents. Nor do they need the meetings.
The accountants have a different set of paperwork so they do not need them.
The managers do not need then either.
So no one will be reading these very expensive documents.
On a fixed price contract where the cheapest bid wins the company directors do not want the extra cost. It is not accidental that this paperwork is normally only produced on cost plus contracts.
However a company may be willing to sabotage its rivals by getting a requirement for the writing of the documents and associated meeting into law.
As for transparency if a reporter asks to see the receipt for a bag of washers costing a few cents they can probably produce it. Now ask for the receipt for the several thousand document describing the bad of washers and the government probably cannot produce the receipt.
This law change is a price gore, act of sabotage and possibly an act of espionage. The general public is being made to pay for it and because it is waste will also lose by it.
I wondered the same thing. The income delta between ULS and SpaceX on a per launch is so huge it’s easily financed if necessary. Walk away, then do an open bid, undercutting by 10% instead of the much smaller current prices.
Plainly Elon really does want to open space for everyone. Beyond self-sufficiency, it’s not so much the money.
If CCtCap starts after September does NASA have to reject any bid that contains Russian engines?
Boeing’s bid may end up being invalid because it uses an Atlas 5.
We could end up in the situation that everyone has to rebid.
Interesting story on that at Florida Today.
http://www.floridatoday.com…
Commercial Spaceflight Federation weighs in, saying the “certified cost and pricing data” requirement would bollix up the Commercial Crew contracting, delaying things for a year. They also say it would increase overall program overhead and cost.
Shelby, FWIW, denies he’s just trying to defend SLS hometown pork, and claims “We’re looking for transparency.”
The depressing/infuriating Shelby effect in full force here. Throws an extra half billion at SLS/Orion but won’t come up that last 30 million to fully fund Commercial Crew. And just to twist the knife he throws in a poison pill. Considering their rockets would launch 2 of the 3 CC contenders, one wonders why the ULA is spending so much time whining about SpaceX but not making a peep about their own hometown Senator working overtime to take money out of their hands.
Because ULA is owned, and ultimately controlled, by Boeing and Lockmart.
We should be doing both for God’s sake. That increase is a joke and completely insufficient.
Both? Surely you don’t mean do CC and SLS/Orion? That’s a complete waste of money. SLS/Orion are outdated and irrelevant to any future LEO or BEO efforts. If they do eventually fly, they’ll be decommissioned immediately since they’ll be too expensive to operate and if NASA (gasp) keeps them both going then there certainly won’t be any budget for anything else.
If they were such great projects, why is it that there are no funded missions or payloads?
NASA has plenty of budget to do what’s required to open up space and support science as well. It’s just the way that they do it that swallows their budget and produces so little.
Cheers,
My name is not Shirley, and I find it more rational than basing the entire US space program on the beating of one man’s heart no matter how bright you think he is. Perhaps the government that spends money like a drunken sailor on every other pet project should like Lincoln said “think a new” and fund space exploration appropriately. I think 25 billion per year should keep all projects on tract. He just recommended an additional 2 billion per year as a result of poor policy on border security. Besides Elon is such a genius of brawny capitalisim, he wouldn’t want to dirty his hands with government money.
So, a company like SpaceX doesn’t know how much their product costs? I find that hard to believe. Any company with an accounting system should be able to answer the requirement so I don’t get how it puts anyone at a disadvantage.
Under a fixed-price contract all that counts is price and product. How much SpaceX spends on labor, procurement, travel etc is irrelevant. If SpaceX can save money, it gets to keep the profit for its next project. Second, Senator Shelby isn’t asking Musk how much his rocket cost, he’s asking for “certified price data”. This generates piles of paperwork that run all the way down the supply chain and for parts of the vehicle produced in-house will require millions in new administrative cost for every launch. To what end? Will it change the final cost or the final value? All he’s trying to do is drive up the cost of SpaceX launch vehicles to make them less competitive with those produced by his personal favorites.
It’s about control as well as cost. The very fine-grained data “Certified Cost And Pricing Data” provides about a vendor’s process traditionally gives old NASA very fine-grained control over the process.
The fact that this increases costs dramatically even before the vendor starts being summoned to endless meetings over the precise thickness of gold-plating to be applied to the newly-added customer-mandated kitchen sink is not likely the only intended effect.
Returning to the traditional ultra-detailed old-NASA control of the process, regardless of the cost consequences, is I expect also on the minds of some who have Shelby’s ear on this.
I think the key behind-the-scenes player here is Orbital. Shelby’s poison pill affects them as well as SpaceX. Also, Orbital wants to get EELV certified and compete with ULA along with SpaceX. That’s two places Shelby and Orbital now butt heads.
Given Orbital’s recent merger with ATK, one of Shelby’s key corporate allies has now, effectively, defected to the other side. If Orbital can swing the influence of the Utah delegation against Shelby instead of for him, it could make a big difference.
Orbital also has a nuclear option: it could walk away from the SLS solid booster contract. That would bury SLS immediately.
Between the Russian counter-sanctions that have blind-sided ULA and the ATK acquisition by Orbital, the political deck has been radically reshuffled and re-dealt in the last 90 days. The formerly ascendant “Forces of Darkness” don’t have nearly as many high cards as they used to. The key indicator will be whether or not the Shelby language is still in the NASA budget bill when it comes out of conference. I think Shelby may be overplaying a weak hand this time.
I do not know the Senator and have never spoken to him so I have no insights as to his motives but if I was a betting man I would speculate it is an attempt to make sure Musk is not subsidizing the SpaceX pricing to drive out his competitors. Nothing to hide, nothing to lose.
I still don’t see how this is such an onerous requirement for SpaceX to meet. If they plan to do much business with the feds they should get accustomed to it or just go straight COTS.
SpaceX does. It can also answer on Mrs Thatcher’s “Single sheet of paper”.
This amendment will replace a worker by a worker and a civil servant to see what the worker is doing.
Of course Shelby wants to cripple SpaceX and save the SLS. SpaceX must be stopped at all costs, so that the bloated government bureaucracy can continue to suck dollars out of the US budget and go nowhere. Drag NASA behind the barn and hit it in the head with an ax, and let’s get back into space.
Our politicians at work. For good and very bad.
Not “ours” – whatever Richard Shelby is, an American is not one of them.
More interesting stories on that at Arstechnicaa
http://arstechnica.com/scie…
and the Houston Chronicle
http://blog.chron.com/scigu…
with a hat-tip to instapundit for the pointer.
Senator Shelby should demand transparency from the SLS program instead.