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

They need some corporate sponsorship

[spun]

Put some big old advertising on it, call it Verizon Awesome Space Planet Finder. Offer to let sponsoring corporations name the first earth-like planet found. You'd have funding coming out your black hole, I tell ya'.

Please, for the love of science, don't anyone take this seriously, m'kay?

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.

Re:Preflight testing was scaled back

[earlymon]

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 ! Give that man a cigar! Here's a money quote from one of the first sites I'd googled for the initial Hubble failure:

The initial failure of the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of problems caused by relying on computer simulations. In 1990, when the orbiting telescope sent its first photographs back to Earth, the images were unexpectedly fuzzy and out of focus. NASA determined that the problem was the result of a human error made years before the launch: the telescope's mirror had been ground into the wrong shape. The mirror, tested prior to launch like the telescope's other separate components, functioned properly on its own. However, the manufacturers did not actually test the mirror in conjunction with the other components. The manufacturers relied on computer simulations to determine that the separate components would work together. The simulation didn't take into account the possibility of a misshapen mirror.

Because of the Hubble problems, NASA learned "a great lesson" about "the merits of actually testing a system rather than depending upon theory and simulation," explains Doran Baker, founder and vice-president of Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory. From - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3797/is_199810/ai_n8814801

That's just one slice, but not at all the whole story. I get too pissed off even thinking of the early Hubble days to grope further to substantiate, but NASA blew it on many, many levels of saving a buck and avoiding common-sense operational tests - and I say this as an ex-advisor for the Army and Air Force operational test communiities.

NASA learned their lesson, indeed! They say to never credit to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence - but the NASA corrolary to that is to never underestimate that a great crowd of incompetents can indeed conspire to hide their incompetency to the point of fostering even more of it.

And I've worked on joint Air Force / NASA projects, so no lectures please about how little I know or that I'm flamebaiting - I'm qualified to speak.

I'm always loyal enough to praise NASA after they get something right - but most of the time, I'm happy to grouse in the hopes of educating voting taxpayers. Today, people still don't essentially get that the shuttle was sold to Nixon by the NASA second-stringers - an outgroup - and he bought it because he was being looked down upon by the Kennedy-Johnson NASA crowd. Sorry - this stuff really chaffs my ass.

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

[evanbd]

Historically, some of the stuff NASA was trying to get bids on was so far outside the realm of expertise of any possible bidder that no one would have been willing to just eat the cost overruns. So cost-plus contracts were awarded. It's become ingrained, and contractors have realized that they can simply threaten to not deliver if cost overruns won't be payed for.

There are some small aerospace companies that place fixed-price bids on NASA contracts, but none of the major ones do. Many of these companies are of the opinion that taking cost-plus work is severely damaging to the company mindset and correspondingly to its ability to function.

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.

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:Staying within budget?

[ScrewMaster]

I can only assume the US suffers from the same problem

You have no idea. The military-industrial complex in the United States is second to none it its unrivaled ability to generate cost overruns and squander funds. Really, there's nothing like it anywhere on the planet.

Re:Corporate Sponsorship rant

[Toonol]

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

why isn't anyone saying this? :)

[k-zed]

for the love of god*: GIVE THEM MORE MONEY!

*: yes yes. irony.

Re:Staying within budget?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, keep in mind that a there is a difference between a commercial part and a part certified to mil spec, and military grade parts often cost a lot more. But yeah, there's a lot of profiteering going on amongst military suppliers, has been for decades. There are various C.O.T.S. (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) programs in our militaries. Their purpose is to seek out non-mil-spec commercially available hardware that can either be used in a military application as-is, or can be brought up to spec relatively cheaply.

Re:Staying within budget?

[Carnildo]

Didn't they spend some ridiculous sum (> $100) on a nut and bolt once?

For most applications, parts can be qualified for use in batches: take a few parts from the batch, test them to destruction, and if they meet spec, the whole batch is qualified. When I worked in a mechanical testing lab, strength-testing a bolt to destruction would cost (equipment + labor + overhead) $1.50. At the typical ratio of one part tested out of every ten thousand, that's a tiny fraction of a penny per bolt.

Military hardware requirements generally state that each individual part meet spec. This requires non-destructive testing. The company I worked for never did non-destructive testing, but the one time we were asked for a quote, it was $30 per part. If that's typical for the industry, it's obvious why the military was spending $100 per bolt.

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.

Re:Human Nature

[vajaradakini]

Well, when putting in a proposal for a NASA mission, you should generally have an idea of what components will be needed, how much the components will cost, how much time it should take to build this instrument et c. It's not like putting the instrument in space is the research aspect of the entire process, the research starts after launch and the experiments (or observing) commence.
Anyways, I don't know if you read the article, but Stern is a scientist, he's an astrophysicist. So he does (or at least should) have an idea of what research proposals should be like. It's not his fault if some people fail to take into account certain things when putting in their proposals and you can't just say to throw more money at groups who didn't ask for enough, what's to stop people from asking for much less money than they could possibly need in hopes of getting their foot in the door then asking for more?

Re:Staying within budget?

[ScrewMaster]

For most applications, parts can be qualified for use in batches

Statistical Process Control, yes. You'll still do both destructive and non-destructive testing especially for a military application, but yeah, hundred percent testing is expensive as hell. I did a number of SPC data acquisition systems for fastener manufacturers (self-tapping screws, mostly) and they would typically test 20 parts from a barrel of screws. That was sufficient for commercial use but would hardly be acceptable in a military program. And load-testing a bolt? There you'll have to use a high-powered tension machine (Tinius-Olsen or something on that order, if it's a large part) and those things aren't exactly fast.

There are many other failure modes that a threaded fastener can suffer as well, and depending upon the specifics you might have to test for those as well. That's not including performance testing and design verification either.

Re:Human Nature

[Detritus]

Building a new instrument package is often not "simple engineering", it's more like research and development that advances the state-of-the-art. When your doing something that nobody has ever done before, you often run into unforeseen problems. It isn't like building a common type of bridge for the 37th time.