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.'"

Comments

Obligitory NASA Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA = Need A Second Accountant!

I can hear my grandpa now...

[Murdock037]

"They can send a man to the moon, but they can't balance the damn checkbook?"

Re:umm

[Prof.Phreak]

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.

Unless someone accidentally used different monetary units...

Re:If their MONEY is in such condition...

[MooseByte]

"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.

4 of 5 orbital mechanics disagree...

[code_rage]

"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.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[hwoolery]

"Damnit Johnson! We demoted you to finances officer after the metric conversion incident, and now our records are off by billions of dollars!"

"Dollars?!? Fiddlesticks! I was doing these damned reports in pesos!"

Re:compared to?

[ctr2sprt]

Just to give you an idea, the total amount allocated to the entire US military in 2001 was $299 billion. That same year, $219 billion was spent on Medicare. NASA's budget was $14 billion. (Source: White House OMB.) That's roughly comparable to Microsoft's revenues in a single year. (Source: The Wall Street Journal.) If the figure quoted in this article is right, it would be the equivalent of Microsoft's books being off by more than the federal government spends on Defense and Medicare put together - and more than it's spent on NASA total since it was first created.

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?

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Frymaster]

NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"

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.

Re:A government agency with financial discrepancie

[Undefined Parameter]

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

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[gclef]

From the article:

Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column. By this reckoning, 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.

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.)