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."

Comments

Now there's a great commitee name

[NiteShaed]

"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......

Public perception

[truthsearch]

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.

NASA just needs more money

[192939495969798999]

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.

Re:NASA just needs more money

[Cujo]

Throwing money at problems doesn't work. It just turns it into a more expensive problem,like the space station, which by my reckoning has cost at least $60 billion dollars (arguably more like $80 billion) and does diddly-squat. In the case in question, the problem is internal NASA politics and culture, which is highly resistant to change, often self-righteously so. This is why most of what NASA really gets done is executed by non-NASA entitites: JPL (run by Cal Tech), APL (run by Johns Hopkins), and various university groups, non-profits and consortia.

The other problem with NASA is a problem everywhere: pork barrel politics. Once money starts going down a hole, it keeps going down there because the congress critters need it to. Here's a summary of my idea to get rid of it:

1. At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension to make the job attractive to a wider talent base. You can't keep two homes, one of them in D.C., for any less than $350,000/year, and current slary for most is $162,100/yr. This small investment would pay off in spades - Ithink we should value our legislators at least as miuch as our college basketball coaches.
2. Let each state determine that state's method of electing or appointing and unseating senators. I think the ideal would be a lifetime appointment by the governor with legislative approval and with recall by a 2/3 vote of the legislature.
3. Representatives still elected directly, but limited to a single 6 year term. Stagger the elections so discontent with a particular party's policies can be felt every two years.
4. Require each congressperson to sign their earmarks.

Re:NASA just needs more money

[Buran]

"At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension"? They already get ridiculously cushy pensions as it is -- FOR LIFE -- and get more than enough from their lobbyists etc. Who the hell needs two homes anyway? I do just fine with my single one at 1000 sq. ft. We really need to go back to true citizen-legislators.

Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders" is an interesting read because it's largely about one idea of what reconstructing the government (and improving and simplfying it) would be like assuming the "high command" were taken out all at once, so normal succession procedures couldn't be carried out. In the book, the President decides to replace most of Congress (read the book for what happened to them - I won't spoil it all!) by having ordinary people, like farmers and regular working people, serve in Congress. He does this because he felt that the Founding Fathers intended legislators to be selected this way (and I agree). The system has gotten as messy as it is because it wasn't ever meant to be handled by career fat-cat politicians.

As for the space program -- actually, yes, NASA does need more money -- the current bug-riddled Shuttle we have now would have been much safer and capable had the budget not been slashed in the first place, and so many great programs get killed because some idiot somewhere thinks they have a better plan for the money, and so much more gets spent to fix the stupidity. For example, the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle that would have allowed a full seven-person crew to return safely in the event of an emergency was killed -- after flight testing was going very, very well -- and now the seven-person ISS is stuck with two-person crews because the Soyuz -- a second-hand technology (though very well made; I'm not slighting it in that way) we have to ram special funding bills through to use, which is totally unacceptable! -- can't handle more right now! (though yes, Soyuz TMA is designed to carry three).

We need to fully, and properly, fund what we're doing. None of this compromise crap. It just comes back to bite us in the ass.

The latest casualty of this stupidity: the methanol-fueled engines the CEV was intended to use. Too expensive.

So why not rename it CV?

Re:NASA just needs more money

[Cujo]

"At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension"? They already get ridiculously cushy pensions as it is -- FOR LIFE -- and get more than enough from their lobbyists etc. Who the hell needs two homes anyway? I do just fine with my single one at 1000 sq. ft. We really need to go back to true citizen-legislators.

They're not supposed to be getting any cash for personal use from lobbyists. I can't quote you chapter and verse from the USC, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

And yes, you need two homes. You have to be a resident of your congressional district, in which you spend a fair bit of time when not in session. Decent housing in D.C. is very expensive and hard to find. So, if you want citizen legislators for limited terms(I do), and you want good ones, pay them like you're serious. 160 K$/year is lower middle class in D.C. and surrounds, and would make it difficult for the bulk of our talent pool to interrupt their careers to take the job.

The trouble with monopolies

[dada21]

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.

Re:The trouble with monopolies

[AKAImBatman]

Kuciwalker is right. NASA has no monopoly. Nearly all spaceflight is actually done by commercial interests. The problem with manned space flight is that it simply isn't profitable at the moment. Thus why no one does it.

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 computers were first built, the Military payed untold millions to have the machines constructed and operated. They didn't reach even the large business market until long after the Military was done funnelling money into the industry.

The same could have been true of the space industry, but it had its throat slit before all the R&D of the Gemini, Saturn, Apollo, and Orion programs could come to fruition.

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?

What deregulation needs to happen? Privately owned spacecraft already fly. Mini-aerospace companies buy space on other people's crafts to fly equipment. X-Prize competitors are working to put people in orbit. I'm actually amazed at how little the FAA has interfered.

NASA to me was always a ploy to keep us aware of communism and the USSR.

Now that's just nonsense. NASA was developed to provide an environment for rocket development that the military couldn't provide. America was already falling WAY behind Russia in rocket technology. Putting aside the PR issues with smaller countries (many of whom might chose to join the USSR if they were perceived as being more powerful), there was the matter of keeping parity in ICBM technology. If that parity was lost, the nukes just might have started raining down.

Back when it was formed, NASA succeeded wildly in its endevours. But it was also given a free hand. Once Nixon was in office, all that ended. NASA was told to shut down operations and begin building a token space infrastructure. We'd fly up and come back down. Just to show the USSR that we still had the technology. Beyond that, he didn't care if space travel just went away altogether.

Re:The trouble with monopolies

[flyingsquid]

The biggest failures in the open competitive market are usualy companies that are given some monopoly status or public funding (Enron, etc)

What in the hell are you talking about? Enron failed because they got caught up in the capitalistic frenzy of the Internet Bubble days, borrowed massive amounts of money, spent it poorly on overseas projects and other bad business ideas, ended up with billions of dollars of debt, and then couldn't pay it back to the banks. They were able to get this deep in the hole because they pulled a bunch of shady deals and creative accounting schemes to shift their losses off their balance sheet and make their earnings look better. Last I checked, it didn't have anything to do with a monopoly or government funding. It was primarily the greed and stupidity of Corporate America at work.

I know the libertarian "corporations do everything better than government" sentiment is popular on /., but the truth is that corporations- like Enron- can often suffer from dysfunctional cultures and incompetency, just like Enron.

I do agree that government-run enterprises suffer much more from a lack of accountability than private ones, in general but private industry doesn't cure all evils. There's still bullshit, incompetency, bureaucracy, egotism and politics in the private sector.

Re:The trouble with monopolies

[jdavidb]

Believe it or not, one of the most outspoken opponents of the "boldly sit where no man has sat before" space policy was Dan Quayle. I read about half of his memoirs years ago and I remember he related that over and over again he had to fight with people that wanted NASA to never do anything again and to slim down its existing projects. Remember "space station freedom"? He watched it slowly get dismantled and stripped down to a much less ambitious project, while arguing all the while that we needed to do more than just have a space station, but that if we were going to have one, we shouldn't build it so "on the cheap" that it couldn't even do what little it was designed to accomplish.

Interestingly enough, Quayle said that up until his time the Vice President was considered one of the main administration officials in charge of NASA. I don't know if that's true any more or not.

Re:The trouble with monopolies

[AKAImBatman]

You almost have to feel sorry for Quayle. He was actually a very intelligent and capable individual, but he couldn't speak in public to save his life. Under Reagan's administration, NASA was given broad powers (led in part by George Bush) to develop a plan to get the space program back on track. Reagan knew it would be expensive, but he wasn't willing to throw away the existing investment in the Space Shuttle. Unfortuntately, Quayle wasn't able to maintain a hold on Congress during Bush's presidency. While part of it was the fact that Bush trusted Congress a little too much (not enough killer instinct there), one has to wonder if Quayle's inability to speak had something to do with it?

Some of his more famous quotes about the space program:

• "Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
• "For NASA, space is still a high priority."
• "[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system."

I mean, those are soundbites that make me want to downright cringe. (His best one is his Hawaii bit. Watch the video to get the full experience.) If he spoke in front of Congress that way, it's no wonder they thought they could get away with murder. (Figuratively speaking.)

Interestingly enough, Quayle said that up until his time the Vice President was considered one of the main administration officials in charge of NASA. I don't know if that's true any more or not.

As far as I know, that's still the case. In fact, the Vice President regularly carries out a lot of the busy work that the President doesn't have time to handle personally. That makes the role an extremely important position and not the "find a dumb guy for the role so he won't take the presidency" role that much of the public believes it to be. :-)

No way!!!!

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

So let me get this straight. They are saying a Bush appointee with no relavent experience is doing a poor job? Inconcievable!

Re:No way!!!!

[skaffen42]

Inconcievable!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Pedigree

[Billosaur]

Cobb, a 1986 graduate of George Washington University's law school, became NASA's inspector general on April 22, 2002, after working for a year as an ethics lawyer in the office of the White House General Counsel.

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?

In related news...

[k4_pacific]

Recently surfaced allegations also suggest that Cobb made personal use of the shuttle.