NASA Knows How To Party

doug141 writes "NASA spends between $400,000 and $1.3 million on a party at every shuttle launch, according to CBS. Select personnel are treated to 5 days at a 4 star hotel. This year alone, they've spent $4 million on parties. NASA asked for, and was given, $1 billion more from the Senate this year. NASA proponents argue it makes more sense to give money to talented, productive people in exchange for scientific knowledge, than spend in on unproductive people in the form of straight welfare."

Comments

Nothing to see here...

[Kjella]

Nothing to see here, please move along Great. Another party to which I'm not invited...

Morale booster?

[thatskinnyguy]

While expensive, keeping the morale high at NASA means keeping the even more expensive astronauts alive.

Re:Morale booster?

[maxwell demon]

Yeah, the people at NASA could easily be outdone at their own job by a crowd of slashdot reading armchair-rocket-scientists, right? This armchair-rocket you speak of seems like an interesting concept. Could you tell me more about it?

Re:Morale booster?

[s4m7]

If I had NASAs track record, I wouldn't be talking about rewarding smart people, because they've proven pretty well that they're not.

Quite the contrary. Getting that bucket of bolts off the pad without a fireball is enough of a miracle to warrant a million-dollar party.

There's no funding for a new shuttle design. A billion goes missing in Iraq and that announcement barely lasts a single news cycle. Spend it on NASA and you'll hear people bitching about it for years and years.

And this is news why?

[Sosetta]

They spend less than one tenth of 1% of their budget celebrating their continued technological successes. That's probably less than ANY private company anywhere. It's not like they're not getting stuff done. Sosetta

Re:The truth hurts.

[apparently]

The real problem is, Congress can get more votes by paying Welfare than paying for celebrations for people taking our country forward

Yes, taking care of citizens surely is the antithesis of "forward" progress. Oh, that silly congress!

Otoh

[Arthur B.]

There are probably no girls at the party

Re:Otoh

[The Living Fractal]

Yea, we at the more mature stage in our lives call them "Women". I know the term scares you in a deep and profound way, but some day you will come to actually appreciate them, until you marry one, and then you will move from "Women" to "Bloodsucking Demons". It's all part of the natural order of thing.

Re:The truth hurts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see your contributions.

Automatic disqualification

[Harmonious Botch]

Great. Another party to which I'm not invited.. Well, they did say that they were spending it on "...talented, productive people...", and you're posting on slashdot.

Honestly

[fermion]

The cost to launch a shuttle is somewhere between 0.5 billion and 1 billion. That is one launch. The cost of a week at war is between 2-3 billion. The additional burden placed on local taxpayers for standardized testing, testing that was based on fabricated data during Bush's first education secretary's tenure at HISD, is immeasurable. And the head of heads of major private firms receive hundred of millions of dollars for borking the company to nearly bankruptcy.

I add this last bit because if the wisdom of the free market indicates that a little money thrown away is a good investment, how can those low life in government be so arrogant as not follow suite.

I certainly agree that it would be good if everyone would be deny themselves every available luxury. My food would be cheaper if the owner of my local restaurant would not own a hummer, not to mention my tax bill. My city could afford better education if they did not pay for downtown luxury offices and did not subsidize luxury sports arenas. School taxes would be much lower if we did not have luxury classrooms with lights and air conditioning. But everyone of us knows human nature is to do better work when on is appreciated, and when the environment is conformable. And if it takes .1% of the project budget to encourage the people to do a better a job, that might be a good investment. I would sooner see the parasites that leech off the education and military budget cut off than a single nasa party be canceled.

Don't you love sensational summaries

[Overzeetop]

Okay, I just RTFA, and here's the real scoop:

There is an awards banquet for flight safety held, apparently, at each launch, which occurs about three times a year. The awards cover 750 of what is likely tens of thousands of employees working for NASA and the contractors in the shuttle program. We're talking about a 1.5M awards banquet for an $8B/yr operation, or somewhere in the 0.01% range. Now I'm not saying that it's not a waste, though I'm curious where the seating costs of $20,000 for the shuttle launch come from, but the costs are not all that outlandish. Remember that one shuttle launch can really mean 4-16 different payloads, so there are a lot of people involved.

Go figure out what a similar party costs just about anywhere. Flying someone in coach is going to run about $300-500, minimum, if you book in advance and choose non-refundable. 4 nights hotel (we assume you are travelling on day 1 and day 5, day 2 is the banquet, day 3 is the launch, day four is a cape tour and the show), $120/night is bare minimum in a metro area unless you like sleeping with roaches. You get a night banquet at a banquet hall - nice dinner, dessert, a little entertainment. Hell, my high school reunion was $80 a head, and it was pretty basic. $150 is probably more reasonable for the service. One night you get a free show. Wow. Somebody call the fun police. Cirque tickets are $200; a broadway production in an off town is $80. Transportation to/from/between - you aren't going to walk to the cape from Orlando - would you have preferred we rented them a car for $300?

Where am I?...$300 plane + $480 hotel + $150 banquet and awards + nice show $120 + $300/2 for the car (we'll make them share) = $1200. Now, they came up with 400k-500k per banquet with 750 people...that's only $675 a person. I'd say they got a pretty good deal. $675 for 5 days and 4 nights plus a shuttle launch, dinner, and show? That's a freakin' bargain if you ask me.

Anyway...you go find out what the budget is for the awards banquet of any 10,000 person company. Go find out what just the CEO and his/her spouse spend. This really will look like chump change.

Re:Don't you love sensational summaries

[cyclone96]

Well stated.

Full disclosure. I'm a low level NASA manager. I also have been a recipient of the award in question (it's called the Space Flight Awareness, or SFA). I won it years ago when I was a line engineer for a contractor (managers usually cannot get these awards).

The article is unfairly one sided. NASA overall has very little "morale money", which is used to reward outstanding employees or significant contributions - things that are commonplace in the private sector. When we have an office party, or I bring in dinner for my guys that have to work on Christmas, it's out of my pocket. All my colleagues do the same. I can assure you that the sum total of this across the agency is a lot more than what the SFAs cost.

They also made it out like some extravagant party - it really isn't. They pay for the flight (you have to cover your spouse, though), get you a hotel at the Day's Inn Cocoa Beach (or similar) for a few days, they drive you around on a tour, and feed you a few nice meals and let you meet some astronauts and agency officials.

The reason why most of the recipients are contractors is that most of NASA employees are contractors. The way most contracts are billed with NASA is cost plus, and employee expenses (including the small awards that are given out) are billed back to the government. The contractors also do spend on some other awards out of their profits (which are relatively small on NASA contracts, in all fairness).

While you may have some negative opinions about how well NASA is doing as an agency, we've got a lot of really outstanding line employees who do great work, and in any enterprise you need to reward that. When I got my SFA, I was 28 years old and had spent a year of 60+ hour weeks getting an avionics package on the Space Station working. I didn't get paid overtime for that...the SFA was a nice token from my management. Another guy on the trip won his for finding a problem that saved the government $12 million dollars. As a percentage of the overall workforce, very few people ever win this award (where I work, maybe 1 out of 50 has gotten this in the last 10 years, you have to do something exceptional). It's definitely worth the tax dollars that are spent on it - and I hope other federal agencies are using my tax dollars in similar ways.

Re:Morale booster? No, contractor pleaser.

[teridon]

Why NASA is spending money on wining and dining contractors instead of the other way around, I don't really understand.

Contractors wining and dining federal employees is illegal.