Stern Measures Keep NASA's Kepler Mission on Track

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA's new Space Science Division Director, Dr. S. Alan Stern, appears to be making headway in keeping in space projects like the Kepler Mission at their original budgeted costs. The New York Times reports that Stern's plan is to hold projects responsible for overruns, forcing mission leaders to trim parts of their projects, streamline procedures or find other sources of financing. 'The mission that makes the mess is responsible for cleaning it up,' Stern says. Because of management problems, technical issues and other difficulties on the Kepler Mission, the price tag for Kepler went up 20% to $550 million and the launch slipped from the original 2006 target date to 2008. When the Kepler team asked for another $42 million, Stern's team threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take it over using the equipment that had already been built."

Comments

No news here.

[DerekLyons]

Nothing to see here, move along please...
 
Nobody should be surprised at this 'news', the unmanned/science side of NASA is just as bad at estimating costs and meeting schedules as the manned side. Every couple of years a new broom comes in and makes a big show of trying to change things... but things never really change.
 
Keep this in mind when they start whining about how the Shuttle is eating up all their budget.

Re:No news here.

[Zadaz]

To the contrary, they know exactly how to bid on a government contract: You bid low so you can get any funding at all. Then you keep your head down so no one will notice your cost overruns.

But I still feel that belt tightening is overdue at NASA. No way we're getting back to the moon, much less mars without more clever thinking applied to off-the-shelf components. The most successful of recent NASA projects have been the most thoughtful and focused, not the highest spenders.

Re:No news here.

[DerekLyons]

When the components NASA needs are available off-the-shelf, that will be an excellent approach.

Preflight testing was scaled back

[The Media Mechanic]

"Among other measures, the duration of the four-year mission was cut by six months and preflight testing was scaled back." Way to go guys ! You saved $42 million but increased the chance of the entire $500 million project failing due to not enough preflight tests! Good choice there ! Nice one !

Re:Preflight testing was scaled back

[kbob88]

You saved $42 million but increased the chance of the entire $500 million project failing due to not enough preflight tests!

This is not about saving money on that one project. It's about changing attitudes and processes over the long-term -- towards accountability in estimation, planning, and execution. If a $500mm project has to fail because they couldn't plan and implement, that's not good for science in that area in the short-term. But it sends a message to all other (future) projects: NASA is getting serious about money, so manage yourselves appropriately. And over the long-term, science in general wins, because more projects succeed, and money doesn't get reallocated from other projects to save the over-budget ones.

Because if they don't do this, eventually Congress will shut down (or radically reduce) the funding. And then they're all screwed, including the well-managed projects.

lowest bidder mentality

[timmarhy]

This is what happens when you try use the lowest bidder method of picking contractors.

They are forced to bid low and over charge later, if they don't some other company will do it and they will lose out.

Re:lowest bidder mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

As a veteran of several fixed price IT contracts with NASA, my experience has been that fixed price contracts solve nothing and create a whole new set of problems. Imagine this scenario: deadlines and feature sets are written by civil servants who know nothing about managing software projects and have essentially zero understanding of the technologies invovled. Contractors accept the terms anyway (becuase the contractor's suits don't want to "leave money on the table"). The contractor management then leads its (salaried) staff on a death march which inevitably produces a buggy, poorly-tested product (after losing many talented technicians to burn out) that the government ends up paying for anyway because the customer doesn't know the difference (see the part about failing to write decent requirements to begin with). When they finally DO notice the product's deficiencies, they award another contract (usually to the same cast of characters) to fix them. Wash, rinse, repeat... There are other nasty side effects of fixed pricing such as the staffing vs. hardware tradeoffs that occasionally turn projects into Catch-22s or the internecine warfare that frequently pervades relationships between civil servants, contractors and subcontractors, all stabbing each other in the back (and undermining the product) for a percentage of an award fee.

Sure, greedy contractors abuse cost-plus contracts. They also abuse fixed-price contracts (by delivering just enough to get paid while essentially forcing the government to buy the next version of a substandard product in hopes of getting something that works better). The fundamental problem has more to do with an agency whose civil service management corps has become infested with wanna-be "executives" who are given authority over projects that they are grossly unqualified to lead. NASA needs to re-learn how to attract and retain people who are actually experts in their fields (that does NOT mean "hire business-school grads to throw money at contractors who claim to know what they're doing"), and it needs to figure out how to let them do their jobs with a minimum of political and bureaucratic manipulation.

Re:lowest bidder mentality

[syousef]

In general, I think fixed-price contracts would be a good idea. If you're worried about paying for a large project along the way, write the contract with intermediate deliverables, like test results from subsystems or prototype versions.

Oh yeah that would be much better. Let's see how it would work. Company A bids on the manufacture of lets say a new space vehicle. Lets use as examples 3 components - say: Engines, frame, and navigation system. Company X bids and wins design of the space vehicle, fixed cost. The contract is in parts - part 1 is the engine. They are able to do this without large cost overruns. So they bid on the frame, and costs blow out big time. Now company X does not want to bid on the navigation system. It turns out that all other bids are much higher than the orginal cost. So what does NASA do? Ditch the project? Wear the overrun? How is this better? What if NO ONE wants to bid? A single contract would mean at least one company was obligated to provide the product.

Note also that with the above there's higher overall uncertainty about who's going to eventually build what. Integration costs would skyrocket. The overall future of the project would continually be uncertain. Whereas up front contracts mean people can start talking and planning earlier on. When you're talking about a project that already may take a decade to design and build, that's the difference between success and failure.

I know that in practice different companies make different parts of a vehicle, but the idea of breaking a product up into smaller chunks and letting companies bid or not on stages to manage their risk is stupid, whereas splitting the work based on a company's expertise may have merit (though you do wear integration costs).

Space exploration isn't cheap. Doing new things means there are cost overrun risks. The question is whether it's worthwhile. I believe it is.

Re:lowest bidder mentality

[evanbd]

Your argument sounds nice, but is equally applicable to any large engineering project, which are regularly done on fixed-price contracts. As such, there's something wrong with it. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what, exactly.

I've worked on a NASA contract doing rocket engine development as a sub-contractor. Our bid for the subcontract was fixed-price. Even that level of experience was enough to convince me that cost-plus contracts are a bad idea.

Most of what NASA does, while hardly trivial, is reasonably well understood. Yes, there is plenty of R&D to do, but there aren't any Apollo or Atlas-type leaps into the great unknown being taken. Even when it comes to design of significant rocket engines, satellite systems, and other space hardware, there are enough people that understand it well that NASA could get fixed-price bids if they really wanted them. These things don't need to be as outrageously expensive as they are, and cost-plus contracts are one (of many, many) reasons that they are.

Re:Corporate Sponsorship rant

[Toonol]

Well, it may have been idiots that bought the space, but whoever sold it is a genius...

Stern

[Shooter6947]

Alan Stern is the precise antithesis of a clueless project manager. He is, in fact, a planetary scientist who continues to actively contribute to the scientific community. He took this job because HIS mission to Pluto, New Horizons, on which he is the principal investigator, did end up on budget and on time, and he thinks that the total amount of science would be maximized if others did the same. He's right. On the astrophysics side there isn't money left for hardly any science at all these days, what with the Hubble-successor James Webb Space Telescope hoovering up any dollar not glued down. What Alan Stern is doing makes sense from the standpoint of maximizing the science return from a fixed yearly budget.

Re:Stern

[NatteringNabob]

The problem is that his boss, the President of the United States, has decided that the vast bulk of NASA's money should be spent on a welfare program for giant aerospace companies (i.e. "the base"), not on science missions. If the 'man on mars' fantasy, the shuttle, and the to date absolutely useless ISS project were shut down, there would be plenty of money to do science under NASA's current budget. Which isn't to say that NASA management shouldn't be tight with each dollar. They should. However as long as NASA is primarily a vehicle for rewarding campaign contributors and companies in key congressional districts, they are never going to do much science. Sending people into space just isn't cost effective. If the Mars rovers haven't proven anything else, they have conclusively shown that robots can do space research far better than humans can, at a tiny fraction of the cost.