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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.'"
Does this mean I won't be getting my flying car this year?
NASA = Need A Second Accountant!
NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"
- Sherman
So their annual budget this year is $14 billion or so.
Where does the $565 billion come from?
Simply outsource the work to cheaper markets. I've heard China has really good aerospace engineers and programmers that will work at disproportional wages for the products market.
-How long till this is modded -1 Troll?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
If I understand it correctly, that paragraph would make it seem that the number $565 billion actually double- or triple-counts the amount of money that is poorly accounted for. Of course, $200+ billion is still not pocket change...
I'm wondering though - they don't actually say what part of that process was the problem. Making appropriate debits and credits to correct errors seems reasonable to me, but all I have to balance is my checkbook. Is there some other way to correct errors in the books? Or should NASA presumably have not been making errors to begin with?
Maybe they should have been using some of that $565 billion to hire better accountants?
All the more reason for private companies to get into the space business. I'm not saying that private companies can't cook the books, but at least there's laws in place to handle that.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
A space elevator could send up materials for a tiny fraction of what it costs now ($142/kilogram vs $40,000/kilogram) If a cooperation spent money looking into this as a serious possibility, it'd be called research and development and investors would flock to them. But because it's Nasa, it's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?
With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.
Gosh, you'd think it's the EASY part!
If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.
At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.
Something does not compute.
Check it here.
I was going to say something about the editing, but what's the point? Like it's going to change at this late date.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's for shitfaced lady and some other nasty offensive things.
So this won't be an entire waste of a post, the NASA stuff isn't surprising--my grandpa worked for NASA way back when, and the attitude was, "If we can get it in the, good. If we can get it in the air and make it stay within budget, they'll give us less money next time." This isn't an environment conducive to good bookkeeping.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
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.
"They can send a man to the moon, but they can't balance the damn checkbook?"
Where to begin, your first proposal would require any country that wished to launch any kind of space craft to get permission from almost every country and a few rouge nations as well. To orbit anything in a non-meridian or non-geosynchronous would require treaties on the scale of the UN charter. Currently there are only 3 countries able to provide manned space flight and about a dozen launching satellites. If your proposal went into effect, Brazil would be the only country that would be able to get the paperwork done to launch anything. There is a treaty stating that the Moon does not belong to any country. It sounds like you're a US basher; at least everything you have recommended would be detrimental to the US and its allies. Also the US is not a colony because we revolted and kicked the British out, the rest we bought from France because they were busy loosing some war or another. Personally I wish we would start colonizing space, but that takes money, technology and resources we currently do not have. At the moment each of the space faring countries and respective consortiums are working together fairly well. Most of the groups have their space projects for the next 20 year fairly well planned out with minimal over lap, and where there is over lap, it seems to be for the higher risk projects. On a political note, we don't care what you think. The President of the United States is the business of the United States, if you don't like it petitions your government to end diplomatic relations with the United States (if you are allowed to do that in your country).
The GAO should make NASA put their general ledger on the web. Their summary data is so obfusicated that it doesn't make any sense, but the transaction list of payments might be subject to analysis.
"Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country, space above the international oceans is open to all. Thus it would be necessary to have other countries' permissions before orbiting anything over them..."
This is completely impractical for everything except Geosynchronous satellites. Most satellites' orbits are designed to accomplish specific mission objectives, and if they happen to fly directly over (say) Burma, North Korea, or Zimbabwe that's just how it works. If you are interested in general orbit mechanics, you could consult Bate, Mueller and White's Fundamentals of Astrodynamics. More specifics about orbit mission design are in Wertz and Larsen's Space Mission Analysis and Design. Each is a classic.
Political problems: This would give every 2-penny tinpot dictator in the world license to put up a tollbooth in space. Should a scientific satellite that measures worldwide ocean wave heights have to get permission from said dictators to fly over their countries? How about search and rescue satellites? Telecommunications? GPS?
As to the issue of Moon resources... well I'm not too sure what sorts of treaties have been ratified, but I think it's a little early to worry about it. Even if there are tons of He-3 on the Moon we have no way to make use of it. Just about every other material resource on the moon (Al, O, Mg, etc) is in abundance on Earth. These resources will be useful for in-situ manufacturing, but economically not worth the candle here.
Please don't tell me they forgot to convert from Yen (or Euro) to USD.
Not that NASA would be so stupid as to forget to convert units....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
All that cash and they couldn't make a better movie?
An error of this magnitude is inconceivable. It really makes me think the figure must be $565 million, in which case this is pretty small potatoes for a big organization that's been around for a long time. (Lose track of $28 million a year - 0.2% of your budget - for 20 years and there's your number.) It certainly reflects inefficiency at NASA, but is there anyone, anywhere, who would be surprised by inefficiency at NASA?
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!
As someone who was born in the Huntsville area and currently works here, I have to take exception to some of this.
0 03 /05/05/daily50.html
n av =0hBBN5Ba
"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."
This is not an accurate characterization of the whole state, nor of all it's citizens. While there is alot about this state that I don't like (ex. I'm agnostic and none too happy over this crap Roy Moore is trying to pull) it's not all bad. As evidence that your assesment might not be fair I submit check the following:
http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/stories/2
http://www.waff.com/Global/story.asp?S=1863478&
As further evidence, I've got a pair of shoes! They're hanging from the power lines outside.
I'll grant you there is a lot of hicks here but Alabama hasn't exactly cornered the market. I've seen or seen pictures of (courtesy of friends in bands - and no not friggin country) poor crappy towns in almost every state in the continental US (and some in Canada).
Aside from that, not everyone that works at MSFC is a native of the state. If your going to assert hick management, you should at least be fair and blame it on the hicks and not necessarily the state.
I will admit however, that since NASA is a government agency, the IMF would be much better managed if it was handled in D.C. oh wait...
-- "Someone's gotta go back for a shit-load of dimes."
I'm glad BushCo applied sound Republican fiscal policy to our preeminent government research program. Wait, they're the guys who quadrupled the government under Reagan, creating more debt than the previous 200+ years combined, topped even that under Bush Sr., sending us (and the world) into a recession larger in real terms than even the Great Depression, and under Bush Jr. turned the biggest surplus in world history into the biggest debt ever imagined (maybe bigger even than that) - which we'll be paying off for the rest of our lives, if we can even muster that through the wreckage of our economy. My TiVo must have gotten stuck on FoxNews 2000.
--
make install -not war
Bush and his policies just continue to cut a swath through the core of US agencies. No, he didn't do it out of a vacuum. . .
NASA has been under funded since the NIXON administration. Every year since the last of the Moon missions NASA has been yoked to the Albatross of politicians who demand more and more from smaller and smaller budgets. Remember Senator Garn hitching a ride?
What? A short list:
Spacelab - allowed to drop from a decaying orbit in 1979 - but the budget cuts made it apparent in 1977 that the station was doomed.
Spacehab, gravity & solar probes failed littering Near Earth Orbits with debris - in fact, the problem of tracking debris has become a major project for NASA and the DOD. Of the space going powers we, alone, are responsible for more crap in orbit than any other nation by at least an order of magnitude.
The Shuttle project has killed two crews and the hopes of many veteran staff. Attrition of experienced staff has hit a new high while budget constraints gut the applicant pool.
Just do a search for the term, "mission" at http://kscsearch.ksc.nasa.gov/ to see the last 30 years for yourself.
What does Bush do in the wake of the latest shuttle disaster? He cuts funds for the Hubble and calls for a manned mission to Mars. The mere pennies to save Hubble he denies because his "core 'Christian' constituency" has issues with the idea of cosmology. Destroy one of the most effective deep space imaging systems ever and mandate manned missions to Mars! All of this must be accomplished with ever-decreasing budgets.
NASA in financial disarray? How could it be anything else...
$565 billion here. $565 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
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.
Let's be realistic, here; we're talking about the USA, where corporations are, by and large, getting off the hook one way or another left and right. Prominent examples of this can be found in Enron (barely a slap on the rist of those most responsible), Microsoft (a slap on the wrist, at most), Martha Stewart (convicted, but sentenced to a minimum security prison that seems to have been the inspiration for the no-security facility Sideshow Bob was sentenced to do time in), Halliburton (yet to face any sort of prosecution whatsoever, to my knowledge), and Wal*Mart (they find out in a self-audit that they were abusing labor laws... and the governments of those various states let them off after they promise to fix it).
I'm not sure which is more easily and quickly held responsible, but I'd still rather have NASA around, trying to do the job. I'd explain further, but my mind is all discombobulated from lack of sleep.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Ok, last comment in this thread while I have no sleep, I promise!
The US isn't a colony because the former colonists kicked the British out... twice. The rest was taken from Mexico in a war, bought from Russia and Spain, and taken, by treaty, purchase, and war, from the Native Americans. (We only bought the right to obtain the land from the French, not the land itself.)
As for the idea about putting the area above a country within the definition of that country's borders, I think there may have already been a treaty signed and passed. Or perhaps it was a U.N. resolution... either way, space is (and should be) apolitical. If the situation were to happen where borders extended for (in example) three hundred miles above the surface, then the terrestrial international situation would worsen, because it then really would be (technological) might makes right in space.
As for the "wild west" analogy, I suggest reading Ezra Meeker's Personal Experiences on the Oregon Trail Sixty Years Ago, which is the 1912, 5th edition of the book. There was surprisingly more (and more democratic) justice in the American West than one might otherwise assume.
Closing note: Be patient, for we may yet achieve our dreams of mastering space. All progress takes time.
~UP
Eat the Path.
565 billion in bad accounting? pathetic.
yet again gov't fails to lead the industry. look at the accounting issues in tyco, enron and worldcom. looks like nasa is just trying to play catchup to private industry!
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
> once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as
> a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in
> the correct column.
Although this makes more entries, the end result is correct. In fact, GNUCash (http://www.gnucash.org) does this for ALL your entries, and calls it double-booking or something. Maybe they just need to upgrade to the latest build?
It does compute.
... see Frequently Asked Questions and Who's in Charge? for details."
According to its own auditors, the US Government is posting not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars in "undocumented transactions." This means, the financial officers responsible simply have no idea what a particular financial flow was used for, or lack the paperwork to rule out fraud or theft.
The IT contractors that built the systems that can't keep track of the money (AMS, Dyncorp, CCC, CACI, and Lockheed Martin among others) have had their multimillion dollar "support" contracts extended year after year.
To quote:
From Department of Defense (DoD)...
"We reported that DoD processed $1.1 trillion in unsupported accounting entries to DoD Component financial data used to prepare departmental reports and DoD financial statements for FY 2000."
David K. Steensma
Acting Assistant Inspector General
for Auditing for the DoD
February 26, 2002
From Housing & Urban Development (HUD)...
"At the time we discontinued our audit work... An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity."
Susan Gaffney
HUD Inspector General
March 22, 2000
"Trillions of dollars in "unsupported adjustments" means trillions of dollars unaccounted for. What's going on? Where is the money? How could this happen? Where are the checks and balances? How much more has gone missing? Is this happening in the other government agencies too? What would happen if a corporation failed to pass an audit like this? Or a taxpayer? Who is responsible for this? Who can we trust to fix it?
whereisthemoney
Karani -- Gebrauchte Notebooks am Checkpoint Charlie.
That 6% figure of unemployment is just not true, not in any practical meaningful sense. They don't count people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits, those people are stricken from the official tally, and that's quite a large number now. There are perhaps millions of chronically un- or under- employed people out there now. And they DO count any part time job, no matter how meagre it is, into the "employed" figures, they make no distinctions there, which is quite misleading when you want to look at the economy as a whole. You work one day a week, it goes into the tally looking like a real full time job. that just don't compute. You hang out a shingle as a consultant, take a few jobs, but spend the bulk of your time still not working, it's still classed as if it was a full time job. And more and more even reported jobs, which can be classed as full-part time, are held by people who can't give them up, even though those jobs simply can't maintain any living level they might have held previously, and they can't find better, so they stick with it. That's why we have record mortgage defaults, and record bankruptcies, which are part of looking at the over all economic health. A lot of those folks are just constantly downsized, sometimes all the way into "no" job, and a lot of times into a less well-paying job or a less-hours worked job, but they started at a higher level. In the past, you workled your way up, now people are finding it harder to even maintain a level, and millions keep getting force-dropped down. Our economy has been going BACKWARDS for several years now,well, 20 years basically, and they try every way they can to make it look like it isn't. It's very common now for people to work long times in jobs with well under 40 hours a week, let alone any over-time pay, etc, like was true in years past, and any benefits have dropped as well, all things averaged out. Yet, wall street and government keep insisisting their methods are working, and the economy is getting better. But, you have balance of trade deficits, and levels of debt versus savings to look at, compared to years past,which again prove they are lying in general terms.
It's is NOT getting better, it's not even constant, the economy is retreating, it's getting worse.
Basically, you can double that unemployment figure, and maybe it's higher,and then break it down further by demographics,geography, race, etc. for example,in some urban areas it's already at 30% or so with younger black people, but those are just estimates, because they have no way to really know what they are, no adequate sampling methods exist.
They cook the books, and fail to keep any sort of accurate records, because it's impossible, AND because no way would they publically admit to double figures over-all, because it's a pychological and market driven level that they just can't deal with.
I hope your clipboard didn't contain anything you didn't want this guy to see.
Heh, what a stupid troll the original was, then. Making people copy and paste the link just before stealing their clipboard text. Duuuuh.
I copied about 16 megs of random letters and numbers and tried going to that link a few times, just for good measure.
The term you are looking for is
double entry bookkeeping
and simply means that for every credit, there must be a corrisponding debit.
As a result, if you sum all the books, the answer should be 0.00 - if it is NOT, then there was a misentry somewhere.
For example, using GnuCash, every time I get paid, an entry debiting an account called "Paycheck" is created, and an entry crediting "Checking" is created, and the two entries are tied together. So over time the "Paycheck" account grows more and more negative. However, this allows me to see exactly how much I've been paid over time.
It's a form of error dectection and correction.
I've a cousin who is a certified bookkeeper and how has been a comptroller for several small companies - I told her about GnuCash and she was VERY interested. Pity I cannot convert her system to Linux at this time, or run GnuCash under Windows (last time I checked).
"Double-booking" is a criminal activity in which a company maintains 2 sets of books (possibly using double-entry bookkeeping on each set), in which one book is the version that gets shown to the auditors and IRS, and one actually has the real facts in it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
NASA needs to be shut down and replaced. Since that will never happen as Government Employee Unions have too much control the best we can hope for is a reassignment of all the upper management and outsiders brought in to run the place.
NASA has had no real direction for 20+ years. The space shuttle hobbled it beyond compare. It was a stupid 70s pipe dream that should have died on the drawing board. If they are going to build a spaceplane then build one, don't build a rocket lifted glider.
Hopefully the X-Prize will show people that we are capable of putting stuff into space without a monolithic Government entity.
The goals of a moonbase and Mars landing are laudable. They are true attempts to move forward. The space station was a sick waste of money and worse, we were forced to keep the shuttle around just because of it. A base on the moon would finally move us forward. We aren't going to get there with the old NASA mentality which is still stuck in the 70s.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
this bullshit has been going on for years, my Science teacher worked for a contractor that dealed with NASA, he left because of the spending cuts even within the company he worked for, because of the NASA higher ups cutting money to the contractors, and within their own company, he pointed out the reason why columbia ended the way it did was because what he used to do was cut (checked the launch frame by frame for like 5 hours each day) to check for anything odd, and to monitor any mishaps in orbit.... there was even a time with columbia that it faced a threat like that, but the broken panel was ok enough to survive the landing.
So this is nothing new. NASA abuses its position in power to get a lot of cash for doing a whole lot of nothing.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but NASA didn't invent Velcro, an individual Swiss scientist did. See this for more info.
I just checked the latest real stats at the BLS website. Go down the chart and look at U-6. That's the sum total of unemployed, the figures the TV normally uses in "business reports" stop at U-3. this is fairly common knowledge, BTW, but the lower number is mostly used for propoganda purposes, once you wipe away the shilling grins of the TV/WS casino traders and various politicians trying to make things look rosy. That's an opinion,I admit it, but it's based on these two quite different numbers.
U-3, which is commonly used for the news shows,the most quoted and used in an argument to show how great the economy is, which counts any sort of employment, is as of April 2004 = 5.4 %
Sounds good, not too bad! Well, lets mosey on down the chart a scosh.
U-6, which is total unemployed including distressed workers, part time (no matter how part time), marginally attached, etc, what I am referring to is, as of april 2004 = 9.3 %
here is their little explanation that will cover U-6
Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want
and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally
attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic
reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. For further
information, see "BLS introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures," in the October 1995 issue of the Monthly Labor
Review. Beginning in January 2004, data reflect revised population controls used in the household survey.
url for reference
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
There's also a practical consideration with telephone surveys. It's pretty simple, although alien to most people nowadays,especially on slashdot I would guess, but very poor and broke people--uhh, these unemployed we are talking about- in a lot of cases do not have telephones in order to be surveyed. That's usually the first utility to get shut off. I can personally think of 4 families in my (poor underemployed, rural) neighborhood where no telephone exists. Myself, having a cell service, landline and internet connection, am an exception to the rule around here. I don'tknow anyone else around here who has internet. Even the couple of households I know about that have a landline do not have internet. Two families I know of, the father has a beeper, but no phone, they need to drive 2.5 miles to a payphone. I don't know everyone around here yet, but I know the closest people except for one house, who pretty much stay to themselves and don't seem too friendly so I don't push it. The house looks good(large and expensive), I am assuming they have a phone based on that.
That last is just anecdotal, but I hope my points on the *real* numbers are more clear now, and also why telephone surveys might not be as accurate as some claim. By their own admission, the real numbers on a "practical" look on unemployment are almost twice as high (roughly) as they usually use for TV reports. Now, after that, I am of the opinion-note, I said opinion only- it is still lowballed for a few more percentage points. I have reasons for that opinion, fairly involved, some arcane,some I could spend more time on and provide references but I really don't feel like it right now, but all in all I think it's lowballed. I would guess it'scloser to 12 %. I've shown it's offically lowballed already, close to 10, and last month it was slightly over 10% by their own numbers. It will lower next month as high school kids get summer jobs, that will happen too, usually a percent and a fraction then.
I will also freely admit that black market/illegal working is not included, even though no one brought that up to me yet. I have no rational figures to access for inclusion (I don't