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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.'"
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?
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?
$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?
With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.
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.
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).
"If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?"
Apparently by the explosive combustion of billions of small, unmarked bills crammed into the fuel tank.
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.
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!
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.
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.