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NASA's Finances in Disarray
mwolff writes "Yahoo News has an article about the 'financial disarray' NASA seems to be in after a recent audit showed horrible documentation of funding. 'As NASA sets course for the moon and Mars, the space agency's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565 billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.'"
These are just electronic accounting anomolies because of NASA's new Integrated Financial Management system (which has the huge task of combining 10 completely different systems at the field centers into one agency-wide system for accounting). Everyone I know pretty much concludes it's a complete fuckup of a system and whoever designed it should be shot, however, in NASA's defense, this of course does NOT mean they overspent $565 billion. NASA's budget was around $15 billion this year so you can easily imagine that overspending by $550 billion is impossible. It's all accounting oddities, not actual monetary loss. Think of it as a learning curve.. NASA operates as 10+ distinct field centers that honestly have nothing in common except the name of the agency. They all fight for program dollars, all have their own management structure with their own agendas, and all fight to try to steal programs from other centers. It's really pathetic when you think about it. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama is just about the worst when it comes to stealing programs from other centers IMHO. Oh yea, BTW, IFM is handled out of MSFC. It figures a bunch of backwoods hicks living in the asshole of America (Alabama) couldn't add and subtract numbers correctly. They get lost after they count to 20 and exhaust the number of fingers and toes they have so it's understandable that figures like $2 billion here or $3 billion there would utterly confound them.
Serious possibility?
Do you have the vaguest notion what building a space elevator would entail? It's a GREAT idea. And when we have autonomous factories that can turn asteroids into carbon nanotubes, it's going to be the only way to fly.
But, for now, with our current level of technology, it is a non-starter.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
don't laugh. the computer that nasa used for the moon landing had 74k of rom, only 4k of ram and no external storage whatsoever. despite that it ran a real, interrupt-driven, multi-user operating system and, most importantly, it go the job done.
my source is here.
2 1337 4 u!
if that be the case, then where does this $565 billion number come from? it seems that they have simply counted the same pile of money for several times, without noticing that it has already been taken into account: "a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Calm down, there, pal. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but from what I know, the US unemployment rate is holding short of 6% as of April. The unemployment rate of the Great Depression was about 25%. So in terms of real unemployment, we're doing about four times better than we were back in the 1930s.
Yes, the recession is bad, and on-going; I'm not going to make apologies for the current President because I, myself, don't like him. But, as a student training in history, I felt that I had to correct that one (run-on) sentence of your short but panicked post.
I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I do advise that you at least take a few deep breaths.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Basically, it's not that they lost 500 billion, it's that the total number of accounting errors totals 500 billion...I think this is a silly way of counting errors, as it grossly inflates the size of the problem by automatically tripling the size of a problem for every mis-classified entry.
Honestly, this looks like headline-grabbing by their auditors. (Who, it should be noted, lost the NASA contract to keep doing their auditing.)
Just a point to pick. There's nothing about going to Mars in the space initiative. That's something that Bush tacked onto the end of his speech (and doesn't even appear in the official transcript, showing that the transcript was written before he even gave the speech).
Quite frankly, Nasa can't even get into space at the moment. Mars is a prety far fetched dream.
Mostly legitimate double-entry bookkeeping, I would imagine. As others have pointed out, it's one of the right ways to do your books. Every transaction generates two corresponding entries, in such a way that the balance at the end of the day comes to zero. Railroad Tycoon is a good place to get a handle on the basics. :)
So--if you spend one billion dollars on a rocket, then you generate two billion dollars' worth of transactions--the billion dollars out to Lockheed Martin, and a billion dollars on paper for the assets received.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Take some hypothetical cases to illustrate the accounting. If NASA receives a bundle of cash from the federal government, that's two entries. If it transfers the funds internally from its general accounts to its satellite launching division, that's two more entries. If the satellite division subcontracts part of the project to an outside company, that's another two entries. You get six dollars in apparent traffic for one real dollar actually spent.
If someone makes a typo somewhere, then it gets even worse. Someone inadvertantly records a transfer to the satellite division as being transferred to the Shuttle. Oops--wrong expense code or something. A routine check catches the error a week later. Since you're not allowed to delete entries from the ledger--it makes it too easy to cheat--you now have to generate two more pairs of entries: one to reverse to original typo, and one to record the actual transfer.
If NASA amalgamates two programs into one, or splits a larger program into two or more parts, then reassigning the assets also generates transactions.
The $565 billion figure is an artifact of good accounting--it has precious little real meaning.
~Idarubicin
As several other posters have pointed out, the physics of orbiting the Earth pretty much makes this a idea no-go. There was some talk about this in the pre-Sputnik days, and the US was quite worried about how to handle the resulting jurisdictional mess. Luckily for them the USSR launched Sputnik, which then provided a precedent for orbital space being managed differently than airspace, and we ended up with the current system.
As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever.
This is fundamentally untrue. For starters, the geostationary belt (aka Clarke orbit, or 35,786 km), which is the only orbit that can be reasonably tied to geographical location, is very tightly managed. Different countries have assigned "slots" in GEO, and can use them or sell them as they see fit. Missions in other orbits require a certain amount of coordination in order to ensure that collisions don't take place, and the RF transmission don't interfere with each other.
Or better yet put them all under the total control of the UN, as things too big for one nation to claim for itself.
Which is in fact roughly what was done. You may want to look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and then remove your foot from your mouth.
but just because the US is powerful right now doesn't mean it should have total rights to everything it finds in space
It doesn't. See above.
Personally I wish there were more collaborative space exploration. Instead of 3 countries/consortiums sending a probe each to Mars, we could have a probe to Mars, one to Europa, and one to Venus.
The recent Mars Exploration Rover carried a German (IIRC) spectrometer. It was also going to be doing some communications via the European Mars Express mission (don't know if it actually did or not). Also, note that MER, Mars Express, and the Japanese Mars mission were all carrying different instruments and had different goals. In that sense, they were all performing part of a collaborative exploration of the planet Mars.
Both are true. The read-only memory and data tables were HAND-WIRED and HARD-WIRED to their exact values, and were substantially different for each mission. Painstaking human work went into running the sense wires properly for each bit, and then weaving the memory into a large core rope. Description of core rope memory.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but NASA didn't invent Velcro, an individual Swiss scientist did. See this for more info.