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NASA Inspector General Under Investigation
pinkUZI writes "Apparently, the FBI is investigating reports of NASA Inspector General Cobb doing a poor job with safety inspections and 'retaliating against whistleblowers.' Complaints have been filed by current and former employees." From the article: "The complaints are being reviewed by the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. The complaints describe efforts by Cobb to shut down or ignore investigations on issues such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center, and the theft of an estimated $1.9 billion worth of data on rocket engines from NASA computers."
Wow, the Maestro sure has come a long way!
"The complaints are being reviewed by the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency."
Experts at weeding out and disposing of integrity and efficiency wherever they're found......
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Many of us who pay attention already have a somewhat negative view of NASA. Monolithic, slow, expensive, etc. I think this investigation will change public perception. Now the general public may view NASA as bloated and poorly run. It'll be interesting to see the repurcussions.
BTW, "President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency"... that makes me giggle. They have it backwards. They should council the president.
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If NASA weren't shortchanged so much on budget, there wouldn't be any of these problems. The original Viking landed successfully on Mars, but the budget for that was ~1 billion dollars -- back then! Not coincidentally, the 250 million (in today's dollars) craft from a few years ago crashed. I think the bureaucracy should be fixed, but also you then need to pump some cash into there, so we get more cool consumer spinoff products.
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NASA is a monopoly, one that is in a unique situation that is very hard to debate in terms of allowing more free market competition. I understand that the market doesn't like spaceflight because there doesn't seem to be a profit -- yet. Of course, when computers were first built, there wasn't much room for profit but it is my opinion that the competitive atmosphere of the computer market did more to facilitate cheap and common PCs than any government body did.
When you have a monopoly, you'll have corruption and laziness. There is no one else offering your product for possibly less money, or at a higher quality, or with more choice. The customer is stuck with what you decide to give.
It's funny to me that it is the IG that is under investigation. My experience with my state's own IG shows that it is probably more common than not to see shortfalls in those who "police the police" but yet are paid by the "police" they're "policing."
If no one here is willing to deregulate spaceflight and offer NASA some real competition, how does anyone foresee proper market policing of NASA's spending and development? In the open competitive market, companies fail all the time when they try to take advantage of the consumer. The biggest failures in the open competitive market are usualy companies that are given some monopoly status or public funding (Enron, etc) or are given some form of government power to manipulate the way they report their business financing (Worldcom, etc). There are rarely failures of companies that make truly competitive products at competitive prices.
I wonder if spaceflight would be different if we spun it out of the federal budget and allowed it to be funded directly by states or even world organizations. Could NASA exist solely on donations of the wealthy and the poor, and could NASA exist on its own without any taxpayer allotment?
If not, I would argue that we don't need it right now. NASA to me was always a ploy to keep us aware of communism and the USSR. Sure, some good things came out of NASA, but how many of those things might have come to the market cheaper and quicker without it? We'll never know, but I do know I can see what we've spent over the decades, and I'm not sure that I can accept future spending when we know it is getting wasted by bad management of this monopoly organization.
So let me get this straight. They are saying a Bush appointee with no relavent experience is doing a poor job? Inconcievable!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
So he is steeped in the fine tradition of White House integrity and ethics. My question, why did it take this long for this investigation to happen?
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In space, chairs are a hell of a lot easier to throw.
I'm not sure about that the shuttles have enough lifting power to take mr Ballmer up there though.
Recently surfaced allegations also suggest that Cobb made personal use of the shuttle.
Unknown host pong.
malfunctioning self-destruct procedure
What exactly was suppose to be destroyed, but wasn't?
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The complaints describe efforts by Cobb to shut down or ignore investigations on issues such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center
Apparently, the self-destruct procedure is working quite well for Mr. Cobb.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
and the theft of an estimated $1.9 billion worth of data on rocket engines from NASA computers
While I usually keep out of the argument of whether or not copying data is theft or not in the piracy debate, how do you value the data at $1.9 billion if it's government data?
I'm all for funding NASA quite nicely, but were they going to sell their data? Shouldn't the information fruits of NASA's labor belong to the people of the nation that paid for it?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yea, then of course there is the "Efficiency Committee of the President's Council on Intergrity and Efficiency" - both of these committees report to, "The President's Committee to Abolish things that are Bad" - which is part of the "War on Badness" program.
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Now there's something that inspires confidence...
In space, chairs are a hell of a lot easier to throw.
:-P
More like, "In space, it's a lot easier for a chair to throw you!" (No, not a Soviet Russia reference. More like a reference to basic, Newtonian physics.)
I'm not sure about that the shuttles have enough lifting power to take mr Ballmer up there though.
NASA has enough lift power, but they keep having to abort the launch due to unforseen pogo oscillations.
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It's likely that in the near future we will continue to see the advances in space exploration/travel move increasingly to the private commercial organizations. A privately run company is always going to be far more efficient than one that must deal with political issues constantly such as NASA.
Unfortunately even the huge amount of private funding available cannot compete with the funding the federal government could offer. Maybe the government should start dumping that money into grants and funding for private space ventures, or even offer NASA for sale to companies that are actually accountable to shareholders to do things effectively.
That being said, NASA's funding is extremely small, most small tech startups have more money to work with.
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Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center
/that/ particular feature?
Now how does one test
The only bit not present in that post was the role played by the science officer on board. (He set the computer to calculating PI, effectively disabling the autodestruct.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The complaints are being reviewed by the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency.
Some news is just too hard to swallow.
Well if he had the proper funding this wouldn't be an issue. Let's Bring the Budget committee up on charges!
"$1.9 Billion worth of data" seems like a contradiction in terms to me.
I suggest putting it on the market and finding the strike price.
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Dorms...
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Specifically Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James E. Hansen's allegation that NASA's public affairs commisars upset with his stand on global warming have been denying journalists official access to him and censoring his lectures, papers and postings on the Goddard Web site. Other NASA employees have corroberated his story.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
None of this surprises me - when I was at NASA Langley, security amounted to having all the main computers with public IP addresses, giving them
That was seven or so years ago, so I hope they've improved since then. If not, well, I've even less sympathy for them than I'd thought.
How do they evaluate the worth of such material? Well, it depends on the material, whether they're playing the problem up or down, etc. A trivial way to price the material is to determine the total value of the project and the percent of the project represented by the data. Another simple method is to add up the man-hours spent on that piece of work, and multiply it by the typical charge per hour for that project number. Alternatively, find something similar that a commercial vendor is selling, and assume a credible-sounding factor for NASA's superiority/inferiority. The last method is to add up the bytes of data taken, then multiply by some standard cost per byte.
If an agency/company wants to sound as if the problem is insignificant, they'll pick the smallest of these values (or zero, if they can get away with it). If they want to turn it into a stage drama, for insurance or opinion control reasons, then they'll pick whatever gives the highest value. If they don't care, they'll pick a random number.
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