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NASA Reconsiders DAWN Mission Cancellation
amstrad writes "Last month, NASA decided to cancel the DAWN mission to Ceres and Vesta citing 'technical difficulties' and 'budget overrun'. Monday, NASA released a statement reinstating the mission." From the article: "The decision to cancel Dawn was made March 2, 2006, after about $257 million already had been spent. An additional expenditure of about $14 million would have been required to terminate the project. The reinstatement resulted from a review process that is part of new management procedures established by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. The process is intended to help ensure open debate and thorough evaluation of major decisions regarding space exploration and agency operations."
So they'd already made their three easy payments of $39.99, and decided that it would be bad form to not pay the $6.95 in shipping and handling just because they didn't check their bank balance first.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
"We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them," said NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired the review panel. "Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed."
In other words, threat of having their project canceled scared the team into getting their shit together and their project under control.
I've got to say, so far I'm impressed with Griffin's leadership. He does seem to have a knack of getting the results he's after.
What they need is someone to realise that /(un)*manned/ space exploration is just too expensive to make useful research. NASA is a prestige object of the US government, which should have better things to do. For heaven's sake, employ some theoretical physicists to delve into the details of extraterrestrial physics, and yes, gaze into space all you can with telescopes, but don't fling bits of expensive kit to some distant lump of rock just so that a future US president can feel great during a state of the union address!
The article doesn't give details, but the statement "$257 million already had been spent. An additional expenditure of about $14 million would have been required to terminate the project. " probably does not mean they only needed to spend $14 million to complete the project. Most government contracts have a termination fee associated with it. If the government cancels the project early, the government pays the contractor to close up shop - dispose of unneeded material, severence pay for terminated workers, etc. etc.
This kind of thing is actually fairly common in large operations with (many) subcontractors. The fourteen million probably goes to early contract termination fees, materials already taken delivery of but not paid for, etc. The cynical would blame this "tradition" on NASA inheriting the military/government way of doing things, but one should realize that almost all large systems/transactions are handled in this way.
The problem is that some of us actually want a future physical human presence in space. If we never wanted to do that, there would of course be much less reason to ever send physical objects now. And, yes, I think it's quite reasonable to believe that it will pay off.
Two comments:
1) He cut NASA's budget by a third his first 3 years in office. Not until we invaded Iraq did it recieve any re-funding, and even then the new funds were earmarked for use in military technologies - not NASA's area in the first place. NASA had to use that money to support launching of military satelites and whatnot. To this day, NASA's budget is lessthan 80% of what it was when Bill Clinton left office. And that's 80% not adjusting for inflation or time, which means it's around 72% of what it was after adjustments.
2) You make a good point based on a bad theory. You're assuming that everything NASA does in the field of "research" has no gains. What happens in 2026 when over 60% of the polar ice caps have melted, the earth's land area has been cut in half due to the oceans flooding, and the average world temperature at 2AM is over 120 degrees? What happens is that we've either got ships ferrying people by the millions to another planet to live on, or we all slowly die, wishing that Bush had gotten us to Mars a little quicker.
The end goal for all this "research" is to find some place for us, human beings as a civilization, to inhabit once this planet is no longer habitable.
It should also be noted that, if not for this "research" then there would not be half of the education we have in colleges and universities today. Microchips whouldn't exist if not for research done in space, where it's far easier than it is on land, and neither slashdot nor the computer you or I am posting from would likely exist. There are over 2,500 products that humans use on average more than twice a day which, without space exploration, wouldn't even exist. Satelite TV and Internet, Computer Microprocessors, and even the entire idea behind LCD displays (needing to fit a digital data display in a nearly flat space for use in some of the first manned space missions, to be exact) from watches to laptops and LCD TV's. That's not to mention the foam matresses on TV!
Next time you make broad, sweeping remarks against Space Exploration (which is the correct term) please consider the fact that you can probably touch 10 things in the room you're in whose existance you owe to it.
I'm sure I read somewhere on Slashdot that Vesta has been pushed back to 2007.
Bill and Ball release stuff late, charge too much, and even when it's released, their stuff crashes all the time. NOT what NASA needs.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
To dispose of the nuclear fuel needed for any unmanned spacecraft requires untold millions.
Most unmanned probes do not use nuclear fuel, DAWN is one of them and will use solar panels.
The parent post is riddled with mistakes and is, frankly, wrong. Check out this chart and the associated data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
For specifics, look at the numbers at the bottom.
>1) He cut NASA's budget by a third his first 3 years in office.
False, see the chart above.
>Not until we invaded Iraq did it recieve any re-funding, and even
>then the new funds were earmarked for use in military technologies -
>not NASA's area in the first place. NASA had to use that money to
>support launching of military satelites and whatnot.
False. NASA doesn't launch the vast majority of military satellites and hasn't in quite some time. The military buys launch vehicles from aerospace constractors like Boeing and Lock-Mart and they're launched from Air Force stations.
>To this day, NASA's budget is lessthan 80% of what it was when Bill
>Clinton left office. And that's 80% not adjusting for inflation or
>time, which means it's around 72% of what it was after adjustments.
False; see the chart above. While NASA's budget in 1996 dollars is still not as high as it was under the highest level of Clinton's era, it's still higher than it was the last few years of Clinton's tenure, including when he left office. If you look closely, you can see Clinton was the one who was cutting NASA down from the recent highs it enjoyed under the 4 years of Bush I. This was mostly Space Station cuts... taking Freedom, which was becoming way more expensive than anyone wanted to pay, and saddling us with the ugly albatross of the ISS.
I believe the CPI for the past few years has also been lower than projected, so NASA's budget has actually done even better, but I'm not 100% sure on that particular point.
Bruce
Wow - reading that NASA was going to cancel Dawn was scary - all this Daylight Savings stuff was really getting out of hand. I'm glad to know that we do get to have the sun come up again after all....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks