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."

Comments

Re:Is really a bad, bad idea...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's only because your country isn't as good at outsourcing as America, land of the free, is.

Here, we pay more for a poorer service!

How is this different than now?

[cowtamer]

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...

Re:How is this different than now?

[0123456]

How is this different? It eliminates 10,000+ government-funded jobs in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, etc.

Ares was always more about keeping people employed than building a useful spacecraft; commercial launch companies won't employ 10,000 people just to stack a rocket and roll it out to the launch pad.

Re:How is this different than now?

[Nyeerrmm]

The difference is the method of procurement. Under current methods of operations, the goverenment comes up with a design, says "Here's what we want, who wants to build it for us?". Then the big guys (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, USA, etc.) make arguments about who can do it the cheapest and fastest, and the one that makes the best argument gets the contract (and all the others get to be subcontractors and get a piece of the pie). These are termed 'cost-plus' contracts because NASA is actually funding the development directly, and taking on the responsibility to pay however much it ends up costing, even if its more than the original bid.

When they're talking about "outsourcing" and "using commercial options," what they mean is that they want to use whatever is commercially available, if it exists. The COTS and CCDev programs are designed to encourage this kind of market for the big HSF programs (JPL/Ames-style probes have been using straightforward EELV contracts for quite a while). The market is still not mature for human-capable launch vehicles (Atlas and Delta aren't man-rated), so its still in NASA's interest to actively foster the development of vehicles - but they're doing it with fixed amounts of money and relying on fixed milestones, resembling the way the eventual market would work.

I doubt we'll ever get away from cost-plus contracts completely. They make sense for single-use items and specialized development: things like probes and rovers and moon landers. However, just about everything needs to get to orbit, and there aren't that many different kinds of requirements for it: whether or not its pressurized, man-rated, and how much mass it can carry. For this reason many people believe that NASA should no longer be designing launch vehicles to do rather routine things like getting to LEO, and instead focus on truly expanding the frontier, doing new things.

The reason this faces resistance is that NASA has a habit of sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect (along with the concerns about risk in doing new things and losing jobs in congressmen's districts). The space-pen/pencil story may be apocryphal, but it is emblematic of the problem*. In this case, you could argue that an EELV-based solution wouldn't be as good as a working Ares I, but EELVs are going to be cheaper and faster to man-rate, and with the limited budget they shouldn't waste money re-inventing the wheel.

*Interestingly, its actually a great example of the COTS contract type, where a private company saw a problem, came up with a solution, and sold it to NASA (and the Russians) after developing it. They made money off of it and NASA got it much cheaper than it could have developing it on its own, probably.

Re:How is this different than now?

[Kenneth Stephen]

I think that would be a valid argument for any well developed business area. I don't think space falls into that category yet, even though the future looks promising. Yes, it would be a problem if, say for example, a TV manufacturer charges the government 10 times more for its product than business would pay for comparable products. But in the rarefield area of space technology, there isn't a good competitive landscape. In certain cases there isn't any candidate who can even bid, because what the government wants, may be pushing the bounds of current technology (military technology for example). In such situations, tightening the screws on your contractor may not be the right approach: if you want a super-kill-bill-gizmo #3, and nobody today can build it because the science or the technology hasn't been developed yet, cost plus is the right kind of contract.

The kind of outsourcing being proposed is in the more mundane (is there anything mundane about space?) areas of space technology, where there are more businesses participating. I don't think that the contractor cost overruns should be tolerated there, because there are more choices of vendors for the government.

Ugggh

[Bluesman]

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.

Re:What have they been doing until now?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.

Actually, the current state of the US economy indicates that buzzword bingo doesn't apply in any useful way to running a business, either, but that's a whole 'nother argument.

Contracting is basically wealth transfer

[brennz]

From the US taxpayer, to Lockheed, Northrop or Boeing.

Look at these inflated labor rates!

Re:and if these companies made profit?

[FleaPlus]

This almost sounds like science fiction in which the evil doctrine of capitalism is let lose to contaminate the universe.

If the "evil doctrine of capitalism" is what's needed for human civilization to "contaminate the universe," then please, bring it on. Faster.