(Update) SMD Planetary Town Hall: Time For Planetary Scientists To Job Hunt
NASA Planetary Science Division Research and Analysis Program Restructuring Virtual Town Hall
“The Planetary Science Division announces a virtual town hall presenting the Research and Analysis Program Restructuring. The town hall will be held on Tuesday, December 3, 2013, 12:00 noon to 4:00 pm (EST). A presentation by Jonathan Rall will be followed by a question/answer period. The town hall will be live-streamed with participation available to anyone having Internet access.”
Keith’s note: Follow comments on Twitter in real time here
Keith’s note: From the comments section: “Michael H. New: [personal, non-official, comment] The degree to which the field shrinks is driven by the budget and the number of hard-money positions available. Regardless of how PSD’s solicitations are organized, when the budget is flat and there are few hard-money positions available, people will be forced to leave the field. [end]”
New also posted this: “Michael H. New: Do you want us to predict the number of funded PIs in FYxx? A very, very, rough estimate is to take your favorite R&A budget estimate and divde by $125,000 which is not a bad approximation for the overall average annual award size. This estimate, of course, ignores all year-to-year variations in the actual budget and how that propagates from year-to-year.”
NASA Statement on Planetary Research and Analysis Restructuring
“The following is a statement from NASA’s Planetary Director Jim Green on Tuesday’s virtual town hall meeting with the planetary scientific community. During the afternoon call, he outlined and answered questions about the proposed agency restructuring plans to consolidate some of the supporting research and technology activities to ensure a balanced planetary science portfolio for the next decade.”
Comments Transcript: NASA Planetary Science Division Research and Analysis Program Restructuring Virtual Town Hall
“NASAWATCH: Is SMD management reading what the Twitterverse is saying about this Town Hall? Audience of followers exceeds 100,000 and includes journalists.”
This virtual town hall meeting underscored the need to choose the commercial alternative to SLS and even possibly Orion, too. The loss of funds in the planetary sciences, to do research upon the terabytes of data that SMD produces is in stark contrast to the NASA funds being wasted on Constellation-SLS/Orion. The Town Hall revealed that there is insufficient funds to maintain the existing staff of planetary scientists. While some undergrad/grad support programs remain, where would those new researchers be placed? SLS or Falcon Heavy: the choice amounts to $Billions that would permit maintaining or expanding the planetary program and SMD as a whole while providing a more effective means of undertaking human exploration. There is no NASA manned mission concept for the first flights beyond LEO that could not be designed to use Falcon 9 and Heavy. While the American space science community is in peril, HEOMD is continuing with a pork barrel project. Supporters of NASA must realize that replacement of SLS (and maybe also Orion) is inevitable by commercial alternatives and sooner will be better.
Except that nobody in Planetary science community has spoken out about HEOMD vs SMD budgets at all. I’m not sure what they are afraid of.
There was some grumbling about “yet another mars rover”, and note that the official statement manages to use the word Mars three times !
I agree. There is general consensus that SLS/Orion is a poor allocation of scarce resources but no one pushing for change. We need to speak out!
But as you might guess, even those who are desperate for money do not want to criticize the powerful politicians who control the budget by saying another major program should be cut. Perhaps they are afraid “the nail that stands up will be hammered down”.
Damn right the Planetary Science Community is afraid of HEOMD. Experience shows they are right.
Well don’t forget JWST.
There is no commercial replacement for JWST. Its pure science but with horrendous management errors. Project Director is still an open slot. How much of the overrun is due to Northrop Grumman and how much due to NASA? I’d really value the chance to understand how each cost overrun unfolded. No blame can be put on politicians or upper management decisions from HQ. Lets hope nothing fails on JWST, six months or a year into the mission. At the Earth-Sun L2 point, no one is going to pay for a repair mission.
Upper managment let the costs blow out by failing to monitor and demand cost control. Congress continued to fund it and again not demanding cost control.
As for repairing it, that can’t be done. There’s no spacecraft capable of getting there and well again, JWST has not been designed for on-orbit repair.
I agree that they let it get out of control.
“No blame can be put on politicians or ….”
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/499…
The report shows that the causes were: no reserves for ‘threats’ in the baseline program, flat budget deferred work (doubles or triples deferred costs?), and the departing 2008 Congress cut the FY09 budget by 100M (see figure 5.3).
The difficult areas were worked first, the program status in 2011 reflects this emphasis: Mirrors and Instruments were >90% complete. Sunshield 10%, Spacecraft bus 25% Assembly/Testing 3%
“Unlike Hubble, JSWT cannot be serviced and so post-launch opportunities to rectify problems are not available to us. Since JWST operates as such a cold temperature and is so large, the testing regimen is *comprehensive and lengthy*. A full sized sunshield would be too big for any cryo chamber, so 1/3 scale model was developed”
With the moon first as the only strategy (2005 Constellation and SLS), no plans were made to send the crew to L2 and hence HSF lost a great opportunity to perform servicing BEO.
Yes, JWST was not designed to be repaired, but wait a minute. In July 2013, NASA issued a change request to fly SLS/Orion 70,000 km past the moon on a 25 day flight rather than repeat Apollo 8 lunar flyby, right close by to JWST. Now think about that: SLS/Orion slips to 2017, JWST in 2018, and SLS/Orion/crew in 2021 now headed to L2 without a mission.
Many architectural studies over the decades have included a L2 Gateway as part of a logical infrastructure. For example:
http://www.sciencedirect.co…
and that included:
“The primary objective for human missions to SEL2 will be telescope assembly and servicing. Most of the large telescope elements will probably be sent to SEL2 robotically using low-energy trajectories, and
inserted into halo orbit prior to departure of the crew.”
There is no love lost in recognizing your description of how politicians escalated the cost of JWST. It doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t just poor NASA project management.
If you think it was costly to repair the astigmatism of Hubble or perform upgrades with Shuttle, imagine the cost of sending a crew to the Sun-Earth L2 to service JWST. Ain’t going to happen. Creating an L2 Gateway could well happen but by the time such occurs, SLS will be scrapped and sitting along Saturn V in rocket gardens because commercial heavy lift will have made it obsolete. How much taxpayer money, NASA funding and time will be lost? I agree that servicing telescopes at SEL2 is an excellent idea but future modular serviceable design and robotics will cut humans out of that equation.
There’s hardly a reason to send humans back to the Moon right now. The Chinese can choose to do it symbolically. Proximity to Earth permits remote control of machinery plus autonomy. Once you build a sizable habitat for humans, then the time will come to populate a moon base. Otherwise, humans can send an expedition to Mars or create a first colony but still only after robotics setup habitats and return vehicles.
Excellent point, if SLS/Orion has to go there they should do some useful work. However once the design of JWST is proven building a complete new instrument and launching it on an Atlas would be cheaper than building servicing hardware and launching it on SLS/Orion.
Exactly. Reduce the number of product lines, increase the flight rate of the smaller LVs, and shift the dollars to technology maturation and missions. Assembly on orbit of a 16m or larger telescope increases the probability of detection.
For all the mission sets, NASA only needs LVs in the ~20 mT capacity and the slightly larger fairing of an HLV (10m vs 7m) does not appear to significant benefits in terms of the cost of the capability.
Include the 3 legs, no 4 legs! of the stool in all future planning: (Mars, asteroids, assembly and servicing at L1/L2, and lunar). Make the agency more efficient by breaking the work down to smaller pieces. What is not to like?
So make launch vehicles more “assembly line”, but double down on the habit of one-off bespoke monstrous “flagship” (or whatever they get called when someone inevitably reinvents them) science mission?
You know that wanting to jump to a super-scope rather than going through an incremental development path was what got JWST into this mess in the first place?
In addition to what Rocky said – the planetary science supporters need to pick their battles ( and unfortunately enemies ) carefully. JWST is supported by fellow astrophysics scientist , a budget fight with them is not a good idea.
The regular “we need bigger overall NASA budget” cries are futile as well – you wont get it, as you are asking money to be taken from things with much longer strings and support base attached.
SLS however is a pork project by a few senators and select defense contractors with no clear benefit to anyone.
If NASA’s human spaceflight programs were cancelled, do you think NASA would be allowed to reprogram that money elsewhere? I don’t think so. We as a government spend too much money, and we keep committing to more. Healthcare or space exploration. The voters have chosen. We lost. NASA is trying to do the best it can with the pennies left over.
Come on. NASA has $16+ billion to use. Don’t tell me that’s not enough. If it isn’t how much do they need? NASA and Congress are simply interested in maintaining the jobs they have money for. Except for a few isolated cases, they’re not interested in anything remotely productive.
“We as a government spend too much”:
I’ve heard this argument before, a conclusion driven mainly by pandering politicians to the point that it has become a meme even among those most hurt by trickle-down, ever lower tax policy. It is instructive to look at the entire budget outlay, where, for a simple example, according to a piece in the NYTimes yesterday military acquisition of weapons platforms has increased 80% in the past two years. The Pentagon pisses away $18B without even noticing with a budget that responds to irrational military posturing and the complete lack of a coherent energy policy.
Some look at the current budget deficits (decreasing rapidly in recent years) as evidence that we spend too much. I would say that spending could be reduced by sound policy, but that tax income is also at historically low levels.
The USA is an incredibly rich and resourceful country, the like never having been created on the planet. We have the resources and responsibility to take care of ourselves (health care) as well as to defend ourselves while investing in the needed infrastructure to keep a great country strong.
On your point about reprogramming money you are dead right. And on my points about rational thinking I am pissing in the wind.
+1
Why is every comment in this thread focused on HEOMD? This is an SMD problem, and while I understand that monies from HEOMD could be used to help Planetary Science, I am not at all optimistic that this would ever happen.
Well, to a layperson its all One NASA .. ( Wait, that sounds familiar ? )
Why should it have gross waste two offices down the hall, when sacking a young generation scientists with the “there is not enough money” claim ?
I also wanted to note that the problem in planetary compared to other budgets at NASA is a relatively small one that will be affecting a large number of scientist doing good work. I believe the ideal number (from the Planetary Society would be in the $1.5-1.8 billion range, while the current funding is ~1.2. When compared to the other projects/divisions mentioned here this is literally a drop in the bucket.