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NASA May Outsource
The Wall Street Journal is running a piece about the growing momentum behind the idea of NASA outsourcing to private companies everything from transporting astronauts to ferrying cargo into orbit. Quoting: "Proposals gaining momentum in Washington call for contractors to build and run competing systems under commercial contracts, according to federal officials, aerospace-industry officials and others familiar with the discussions. While the Obama administration is still mulling options and hasn't made any final decisions, such a move would represent a major policy shift away from decades of government-run rocket and astronaut-transportation programs such as the current space-shuttle fleet. ... In the face of severe federal budget constraints and a burgeoning commercial-space industry eager to play a larger role in exploring the solar system and perhaps beyond, ...a consensus for the new approach seems to be building inside the White House as well as [NASA]. ... Under this scenario, a new breed of contractors would take over many of NASA's current responsibilities, freeing the agency to pursue longer-term, more ambitious goals such as new rocket-propulsion technology and manned missions to Mars. ...[T]hese contractors would take the lead in servicing the International Space Station from the shuttle's planned retirement around 2011 through at least the end of that decade."
They took our jobs!
On my country, outsourcing is the same as disaster. You pay the same for a poor service.
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NASA already hires contractors for doing a lot of the technical work right now. If I am not mistaken, large portions of the Space Shuttle and the ISS were manufactured by Boeing, just to give one example...
Anyone involved in actually running a business knows that you should focus on your core competencies and strategic intellectual properties. Using competent 3rd party vendors is always either cheaper or faster than developing in house, so I'm a little worried to hear that NASA wasn't doing this from the outset.
Engineers are smart people, but sometimes they haven't got a bit of sense. Business acumen doesn't come at the pointy end of a slide rule, it comes from understanding how to strategically use existing resources to maximize output. If that sounded like gobbledygook to you, congratulations, you don't have what it takes to climb the corporate ladder.
NASA needs to stop doing all the work themselves and start working with companies who can deliver cheaper and better solutions in shorter time frames. JPL, SLAC, Skunkworks, and all the rest are great to have as specialists, but gruntwork should definitely be handled externally.
SpaceX is moving forward, without asking the government for money. http://www.spacex.com/
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Would it still save money if the companies rose prices to make a profit?
With NASA, its science oriented. With business, its profit oriented.
I think the current status quo is best, only outsource if something better already exists.
If there's one thing worse than the government doing something, it's the government giving someone a de-facto monopoly to do it in the form of a government contract.
Contracting is the new graft. Witnessing this from the DoD side of the house, the same thing happens over and over. High level military officer retires, joins or starts a contracting company, and convinces everyone the contractor can do what the government is already doing for much cheaper. Politicians decide to use contractors, costs escalate, and there is no alternative because the formerly home-grown expertise is gone, since all the government experts are now working for the contractor making double for the same job.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Go NASA go. Once the infrastructure is in place for LEO/GEO/Lunar, then it should be possible to focus on NASA's true purpose; pushing the tech and science of space.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most contractors merely charge the govt $150 - 250 an hour for the same people the govt uses already, while at the same time, carrying little risk. Compare this to a GS-14 at less than a $100 an hour, inclusive of all costs.
You'll see a move to contract types* ** like cost plus, or cost plus fixed fee, where the government pays out the nose for cost overruns on the part of contractors. Fixed price contracts will only be made with massively inflated rates in order to protect contracting firms from risk.
This leads to massive poaching of govt personnel to the private sector, and vastly inflated rates to the govt.
The privatization of the US government is an abject failure. A-76*** is an abomination, because it does not consider the long term efficiency by private vs public sector.
* http://www.dtc.dla.mil/dsbusiness/Info/contracts1.htm
** http://www.dau.mil/pubs/misc/toolkit.asp
*** http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/Circulars_a076_a76_incl_tech_correction/
If I was an astronaut I would prefer not to have it outsourced, purely from a logical perspective. Being in space is all about perfection and control, and NASA can build from that vision. Private companies always come from the profit aspect above all else, which at some point may end up causing a part to be less perfect than it could be. In space that just isn't a question mark you really want to have.
NASA yearly spending, according to Wikipedia is in the 15-18 billion range currently. US Military budget is 515-651 billion, in comparison. So NASA is 2.7% of the military budget size, which kind of makes you wonder why we're worrying about cutting spending on NASA and not other far bigger numbers.
"Best of breed", no doubt.
Private industry has done so well in the US: telcos, airlines, utilities, "contractors" in Iraq, not to mention the entire financial sector. Deregulation and privatization in the US has shown that private industry has difficulty regulating itself or indeed acting in a responsible manner. Oversight with accountability is absolutely essential to success.
Hate to be so negative but I don't see anything good in this whatsoever. There are some things that are too important to be left to private industry. Building is one thing, running a program is quite another.
I'm about as free-market and capitalist as you can get, but there is a time and a place for government regulation.
Look, when you are doing the SAME REPETITIVE ITEM, then a free fair competitive marketplace makes sense to handle it. The problem comes when it is NOT fair, nor competitive. For example, the feds outsourcing a number of items to private workers in America was not the problem. The problems came when companies shifted the work to places like China and India who have only one-way trade, have no real requirements about pollution, and most of all, have their money fixed against ours. OTH, if trade barriers are dropped and money allowed to float freely, then economies adjust. If NASA does this right, they will focus on advanced tech rather than doing the mundane. They will also work with our local companies to get them thinking of different solutions to the same problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Outsourcing does give a larger chunk of the budget to external commercial interests. Who will then choose to operate in the states of malleable Senators and Congressmen, and fund a healthy lobbyist budget.
With the operations distributed in enough key states, we'll find a legislature ready to drown NASA in billions. Some of those billions might actually get spent building stuff.
Disgusting, but if it works it works.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Imagine if all the money wasted in Iraq was spent on space related projects!!
You should know better. Much of America's space hardware is built in various locations. For example, MGS was from l-mart in Denver. Likewise, there are plenty of companies that are fully capable of building the rover. With that said, NASA's new missions will be to continue building rovers for mars and other planets UNTIL it becomes methodical. Then it would be handed off to private to do. Though think about this. If USA can fire up multiple companies here that are space and lunar bound, we will get an infrastructure that can move to other worlds. That is what we need. NASA will take us there. They will be at the leading edge on all of it. BUT, to allow companies to take over what should be mundane only makes sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We call it a tunnel in my country - somebody is just going to cash on increased cost of work from abundant money supply of government. Have seen it repeated all the time during the transformation of our economy from a socialist one to capitalist. Funny the same principles are now employed in the West. I guess we were used to test and perfect it and the response of public was measured and found harmless. Good luck - you have no idea where are you going!
From the US taxpayer, to Lockheed, Northrop or Boeing.
Look at these inflated labor rates!
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Explain why there is a need to play dirty pool and lobby to get the work to those Third World countries.
If it was clean and honest, it'd be welcomed beyond the 'true believer' economists and folks like NASSCOM. It wouldn't need law firms to find loopholes in regulations.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
maybe we can finally get rid of the Johnson Space Center one of the ultimate examples of pork...
Just from a species survival standpoint, it will be a LONG time before we have a self-sustaining base off-earth.
And it will happen way before we see an extinction-level impact threat; even a city-buster only happens maybe once a century, and then they hit the sea 75% of the time and low-population areas most of the rest.
There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
Obama is a madman. He wants to nationalize heathcare and privatize NASA, to the utter ruinment of both. How's that change workin' for ya?
an ill wind that blows no good
Didn't "Ground Control" warn us against this?
A lot of people here seem to be missing the point with comments along the lines of "oh noes, outsourcing!" so I figure I should explain things in a way more grokkable to slashdotters. NASA's standard way of doing things is to have a single monopolistic supplier paid with a cost-plus contract, while the newer way involves having multiple companies competing for fixed-price contracts.
Under the cost-plus monopolistic way of doing things, a single company is chosen as sole supplier -- I'm sure slashdotters can appreciate why having a single monopolistic provider can be a problem. The "cost-plus" part means that the contractor is paid a multiple of whatever their development and production expenses are. That works well if you're in a "money is no object" scenario, but it means that the contractor has basically no incentive to be efficient or even finish work in a timely fashion, since they make just as much profit on development as on the final product (imagine if the software development projects you've worked on were like this). Of course, I'm sure the engineers work just as hard in any case, but it makes a big difference in how management is structured and how much bureaucracy gets in the way of engineers doing what needs to be done, as there's also substantially more paperwork in this scenario. NASA typically has an oversight role to make sure there isn't too much cost-plus waste going on, although this has gotten particularly bad with the Ares I since NASA decided to act as its own prime contractor, resulting in basically no oversight whatsoever (just look at all the Ares I problems which have been shoved under the rug and festered to see why this has been bad).
The new way of doing things, which NASA's been trying successfully with their COTS program, is to have multiple companies competing for fixed-priced contracts. The companies give initial estimates of cost during the initial contract phases, and if their estimates are poor they either eat the cost or stop getting paid. Payments are only made when specific milestones are accomplished and deliveries are made (e.g. pay a certain amount for delivering a particular amount of mass to orbit), so there's a big incentive to be as competitive as possible. Since you're not tied to a single company, NASA can just dump one company and switch to a competitor if somebody's underperforming, as they did when they switched from Rocketplane-Kistler to Orbital. Although some of these competitors are newcomers like SpaceX, there's also many well-established launch companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Orbital. Fixed-price competitive contracts is kind of an unusual way of business for many of the well-established companies, but they'll just have to either adapt or perish.
Finally, since there's multiple competing providers, companies (or teams within a company, so not all their eggs are in one basket) can try coming up with novel ways of delivering payloads to orbit. Since NASA isn't tying its entire fate to a single provider, individual providers have the flexibility to try to innovate and see if there's more cost-effective ways to launch payloads to orbit than the status quo. Once new launch methods have proven themselves in launching unmanned cargo, then they can transition to launching people.
This move by NASA is just another great example that government run health care would be a bad idea. NASA finally realized its history of supporting communism/socialism doomed man kinds' dream's of walking on other worlds and instead opts for the fix everything will of the free market! Obama, please look the complete failure of what NASA is, and realize too, that your Health Care package would probably do the same.
Explain why there is a need to play dirty pool and lobby to get the work to those Third World countries.
What the hell are you talking about? Nobody's talking about outsourcing spaceflight to third world countries.
How is a government organization paying a for-profit company to do what that organization was set up to do in the first place to do a good idea? There are somethings that should/could be better off contracted out to private companies. There are more that shouldn't be. Most government contractors are just milking the system for all it's worth. How much did the change.gov website get contracted for?
There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
Actually, according to NASA estimates it would take less than a billion dollars spread over 10-15 years to perform the necessary tracking, which I believe is well worth it.
Yup, and if our money goes to a private company who do you think those private companies turn around and give the taxpayer funded jobs to? That's right they will go for the cheapest exhange rates in the world.
Because this worked so well for the military, right?
Whenever the government starts making contracts with big companies to do its job, it becomes a useless middleman. Pretty soon our government is just going to be a collections agency, collecting money to pay for the crap it says we bought, most of which will never be delivered, just like how it is with our oh-so-honorable defense contractors now. If we contract out all of our spaceflight and R&D to private companies, why would we even keep NASA? To take credit for it? No, to allocate money. Don't think a lot of it won't be shaved off in transit either, also just like with those lying pigs in the defense industry. The cheapest and most effective way to get more bang for our dollar by far is to give the money directly to whoever is going to be doing the work. Installing competent leadership, applying adequate oversight, and giving real and useful missions to NASA will help transform them from a dusty and forgotten badge of honor we earned in the Space Race to an agency we can actually benefit from again. That means building modern launch infrastructure. (And if that means providing launch pads for commercial third parties, so be it. They get to pay NASA to use them.) That means taking a hint and designing new launch vehicles, something that was supposed to be done years ago. That means deploying useful satellites to space, like modern weather monitoring platforms and telescopes to monitor NEOs and solar weather phenomena. That means finding effective ways to halt the space-trash problem, which threatens future orbital activity for everyone. The Moon can wait and so can Mars. We have problems here on and around Earth that NASA can help us solve while increasing the breadth and depth of our knowledge of space travel, which we could then one day use for some of the loftier missions proposed. Using the money to pay for inflated, outsourced mission related services, and to fatten the patent war-chests of private contractors we have no oversight of is America asking once again to get ripped off, and if we whore out NASA to the same slavering dogs that already pilfer from the Department of Defense left and right, we must be the most gullible country on Earth.
I've never been fond of the argument that the government doesn't actually do or provide anything, but I'll be damned if ours isn't trying to play the part.
I'd really appreciate it if people would explain why they think my comment is apparently "redundant" instead of just modding it down as such...
You impressionable youngsters are always going into the space cargo ferrying business. I don't blame you. After all, the holovids are full of stories of out-of-luck war veterans turning billionaires overnight after delivering a cargo of vaccines to the Vega sector. What you don't know is how much you will shit your pants while trying to outrun a Dralthi fighter in your jerry-rigged garbage scows that you have sunk your life savings into. Take it from me. Find a nice farm planet somewhere in the Sol Sector and milk cows for a living.
Space operations haven't been a real money maker for private companies yet. Yes, a few make some launches on their own, but the vast majority of launches are done with Government support and equipment.
NASA (Government) should be developing the technology (this part is expensive) so private industry can offer services. It is probably non-realistic to expect a private company to expend a billion or so dollars for an unproven (and possibly non-viable) technology.
Private industry can improve on what NASA develops and offer services. The outsourcing of services is reasonable. The development of the basic capability is not, at least until there is some hope of profit for the private company. The stockholders will not stand for pie-in-the-sky projects that may or may not be profitable 10 years from now.
As bad as the Government bureaucracy is in long range planning I'm afraid no one else will even try because the threat of failure is too great. Unfortunately the Government can't even do this right...sigh.
perhaps the best aircraft would be some old USSR or Chinese aircraft.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nearly ALL of the small startups have an astronaut on-board that is pushing the company. More importantly, they are all saying that this is the way that it should go. Simpler systems; less costs; more launches leading to lower price and improved safety. IF NASA also pushes for bigelow in creating a private location, this will allow a LOT more launches to take place, which will only improve the costs for all.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No it isn't. It is because we make it all about perfection and control. The only reason for that is that it is too politically risky to screw up. The result?
We send over-engineered bricks into space that were built using over-priced, purpose-built hardware manufactured inside over-priced purpose-built factories. Nobody does manufacturing that way.
Give me a private company who wants to make space travel as cheap as possible. It might be a little more risky, but hell, so is driving a car. Could you imagine if NASA manufactured cars?
Why shouldn't the tolerances be the same? Given a profit motive, somebody would find a way to make commercial spacecraft with an acceptable level of tolerance. It might have a few zeros less than NASA, but who cares?
Russia doesn't send up the expensive bricks we do. They send up slightly dinged mini-vans instead. We could learn a lot from them.
China.
Lets outsource everything to china... that way the middle class can finally go completely broke... and the wealthy can take their joy rides into orbit.
Newscorp Shills Pushing For NASA To Outsource Pork, says Fox News Journal
When you can pay a private company 25% more than you can do it yourself and get 25% less service.
Nothing but a bunch of fucking incompetent retards.
Let me guess you cheer those idiots on because they're 'teh private sektor' and not 'teh government'...
Ok, they find the asteroid... and then what? I hate to break this to you, but Armageddeon was a work of fiction. (Shocking, I know.) We don't have anything that can land on an asteroid and do anything about it-- and we probably wouldn't have time to build one after we detected the sucker.
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The law only gives congress the authority "To establish post offices and post roads", it does not require that the post office deliver the mail or transport the packages. The post office frequently contracts mail transportation to third parties and could just easily contract out mail delivery or even legally eliminate home delivery if congress allowed it to.
This EXACT change has taken place across government. Here's how it goes.
1) Outsource the easy things (IT, HR, call centers, etc)\
2) Realize major cost savings
3) Outsource the harder things (mission stuff)
4) Realize EVEN BETTER cost savings
5) Transition all competant Gov't staff to be contractors
6) Retain incompetent gov't staff as "Program Managers" and "Managers of Program Managers"
7) Experience major disaster, blame contractors
8) Decide to hire back contractors
9) Realize that only the ones that weren't any good want to come back, at MUCH higher salary
10) Change to another contractor who costs more
11) They hire the same people that worked for the old incumbent
12) Everybody gets a raise
This isn't cynicism, it's Government Procurement in action.
After all that we just went through, what with the whole tanking of the international economy, what with the whole mess created by unregulated banks and traders creating a huge housing and credit bubble, you people still exist?
Pro-tip: anarcho-capitalism was on shaky ground before the whole melt-down thing. Now it is just silly to hold onto such ideas. Business needs to be overseen to some degree because often what is good for one individual or company turns out to be harmful to the system at large.
And this my friends is the entire ideology distilled into one little phrase. I mean, fuck them, you got yours, right? Can't pay for their cancer? Fuck 'em. You got yours.
Asshole. No seriously, you might be a nice person, but harboring that value system makes you an asshole. Thankfully (hopefully?) your values are becoming the minority. Hell, five years ago, I would have been 100% with you buddy. But I've seen the light. Your line of thinking (and formerly mine) is not only inhumane, but honestly it is just logically unsound.
Asshole. No seriously, you might be a nice person, but harboring that value system makes you an asshole. Thankfully (hopefully?) your values are becoming the minority. Hell, five years ago, I would have been 100% with you buddy. But I've seen the light. Your line of thinking (and formerly mine) is not only inhumane, but honestly it is just logically unsound.
I think it is easy enough to say all that, that, we should all just chip in and pay, but, that somehow this socialized nonsense is morally better, but is it? The lion's share of all cancers are caused by voluntary exposures to carcinogens. What's really fair, asking society to pay $1,000,000 for one guy who smoked for fourty years, didn't pay a dime forward for his own obviously pending cancer expense, or, taking that money and, jeez, perhaps investing it in fusion research, space research, maybe college tuition for 20 people, k-12 school level education for 100 kids, or so on. I mean, health care costs -a lot- and it costs so much that you can't just wave "the you don't care" around like you are some kind of a goddamned pope. Frankly, if it were in my hands, I think you could make the argument that, given that 90% of all lung cancers are actually fatal, and the enormity of the expense, if society should even pay for aggressive lung cancer -at all-. If you don't want lung cancer, don't smoke.
This is my sig.
I swear Democrats just can't stand NASA and I have no idea why. The party has been consumed by this cancer of a Walter Mondale wing that says that any federal dime not being spent on the poor is just being wasted, and we see all of these people crawling out of the woodworks to rip one of the few government agencies that actually accomplished something.
I'm just drawing a blank at private companies that managed to break the sound barrier, explorer hypersonic flight, put people in orbit and then on the moon. I mean, it just doesn't exist.
Outsourcing as a form of magic for cost containment was a great and wonderful idea in the early 1990s, but that's pushing 20 years ago, and we have a federal budget that is bigger than it ever was. Give it a rest already. If outsourcing was so great, the F-22 would have been on time and budget, and the Navy's multiple procurement programs would also be working as planned. If you ask me, I'd be more amenable to actually putting the Navy back into the shipbuilding business, and the air force into the plane building business, and keeping NASA in the space business simply because the needs of these agencies are so incredibly specialized.
This is my sig.
Just from a species survival standpoint, it will be a LONG time before we have a self-sustaining base off-earth.
Not necessarily. The whole reason space is so expensive right now is because weight it is so absolutely critical, and that's only because space flight is at the very upper limit of what can be achieved through the use of chemical reactions. If we make a few breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, space flight becomes a lot easier, because you won't have to spend literally millions of dollars trying to balance saving a kilogram here or there among so many different priorities.
This is my sig.
It's not always about the exploration, its about maintaining jobs for a very intelligent portion of society productive in a way that doesn't give us more ways to destroy each other and creating spin off technologies. Exploration is just a cool benefit. With out reaching farther we become stagnant, which weakens us scientifically.
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Ok, they find the asteroid... and then what? I hate to break this to you, but Armageddeon was a work of fiction. (Shocking, I know.) We don't have anything that can land on an asteroid and do anything about it-- and we probably wouldn't have time to build one after we detected the sucker.
Sure, if you detected an earth-impacting asteroid a few days beforehand you'd be screwed, but if you detect one several years beforehand you have quite a few options, ranging from splashing some paint on one side of the asteroid (so sunlight has an asymmetric effect on the trajectory) to using nuclear rockets.
If the idea isn't about exploration and expanding the frontier, as a soon to graduate spacecraft engineering student, I would rather do something else. There are so many things that need to be done that aren't involved in creating new ways to kill each other. Developing new energy technology, more efficient cars and aircraft, and better agricultural methods are a few of the other modern important engineering tasks that need doing.
Exploration, scientific study, and frontier development are what it is all about. Keeping people who would otherwise be best at making missiles employed is a side benefit... the money is good on the weapons side, so you'll always find more people for it if you need them.
SpaceX has been granted a Cargo Resupply Services contract by NASA in 2008, covering 12 cargo flights to the ISS worth $1.6 to $3.2 billion. They still need to prove they can do it (and they are well on the way to do this), but even the demo flights are being paid by the government under this contract. SpaceX is certainly a private company but right now one major customer is NASA.
sooon n@sa finance dept ledgers will start showing expenses for buidling a metro-tunnel from moon-to-earth project(costing 1.2 billon), which never took place, still everyone had their ride thru it. :P
or the tunnle parts might actully get built in china!!!
Even if NASA could build the equipment quickly enough, it could take several years of travel time to just arrive at the thing to splash paint on it, or attach the rockets. And then would it still be distant enough for those very slow methods to change its course enough?
I mean, I see your point, but I just don't think the odds of successfully intercepting a big one, even with years of warning, are very good. Maybe I'm just a pessimist.
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Yup! That's the spirit!
Wow, you were easily swayed.
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This isn't new news.
NASA has been contracting TONS of its work to other companies. I was a contractor,
and the number of people I knew while working for NASA who were truly civil servants were less than 10.
With the costs pressures, it's just having to expand that further, no big surprise.
Its for sure a lot of launching will come to India. ISRO has continually proved itself and will surely bag many chunk of outsourced work all by fair means (India does that always).
Americans should ask the NASA management team now for why they are planning to do this and should not fight later why the work is going India.
Given what happened in the UK to the train service and utility companies, this is a bad idea. Although it would create competition.
If NASA outsources, taxpayer money is being wasted on middlemen?
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