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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...
SpaceX is moving forward, without asking the government for money. http://www.spacex.com/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
I understand your "gobbledygook", but I question your understanding of NASA.
Are you saying that NASA's core competency is not space operations, or space systems development?
Do tell what NASA's core competencies are then.
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.
From the US taxpayer, to Lockheed, Northrop or Boeing.
Look at these inflated labor rates!
Do tell what NASA's core competencies are then.
Public relations, of course. NASA has a huge PR operation, with visitor centers, educational outreach, and other image-enhancement activities.
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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.
Nice weasel word there, btw. "Competent." What happens when the contractor bungles it? They're not "competent."
COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business. For instance, outsource webhosting, and hire somenoe for training and tool creation.. but don't outsource the running of your website if you want any benefit from it at all.
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.
Didn't "Ground Control" warn us against this?
Huh? How do you get the privatization of NASA out of this? And why would that serve as a basis to find them stupid or insane?
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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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.
NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.
Ok, so then I'll restate it without using the buzzword lingo. With the Ares I, NASA has been trying (badly) to design their own rocket to get to low earth orbit (LEO), instead of using rockets which either already exist or are under development (e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9), with cost projections currently set to be about an order of magnitude more expensive than all of those other rockets combined. Instead of wasting all this money to try to compete against LEO providers and build an in-house rocket, NASA should just buy the lower-cost services from them, so NASA can focus their resources on beyond-LEO exploration and research. NASA actually cancelled most of their technology development programs when Ares I started going massively overbudget, and it'd be nice if NASA could bring some of those back.
COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business.
Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
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?
Are you saying that NASA's core competency is not space operations, or space systems development?
I'd say their core competencies are scientific research, technology development, beyond-LEO exploration (mostly unmanned, so far) and in-space construction. Well, and delivering jobs to key congressional districts.
It certainly isn't launch vehicle development, considering that NASA (well, mostly NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which has particularly incompetent management) has had many launch vehicle projects go massively overbudget/fail (e.g. X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP) without a single success in the past 30 years or so.
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.
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.
Er...
I think the problem isn't "doing all the work themselves", which they never did. They ran *programs* themselves. No, the problem is choosing programs that the country is willing to support realistically, not programs that recapture the glory days when the country was willing to support more.
Maybe this is the time to incubate private programs for things like launch capabilities, but if it does so it will be a remarkable case of altruism by the American people. Didn't we just have an article about high tech companies "detaching" from the US (e.g. moving know how out to cheaper countries). We'd be paying for somebody else to control access to space.
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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...
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.
(e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9)
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
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.
Yes its always cheaper to do YOUR JOB, elsewhere... typically in China.
Is that our goal in life? To eliminate our well being? OUR jobs... for the sake of cheaper labor?
Where will you work? and what for?
When you can pay a private company 25% more than you can do it yourself and get 25% less service.
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.
Comment of the year
(e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9)
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
What good is manned flight to orbit if you can't afford to do anything up there?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
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.
He wants to nationalize heathcare and privatize NASA
Doesn't it seem to be a contradictory statement to both accuse the president of nationalization and privatization in the same breath?
To say nothing of the fact that single-payer health care has been dead (in terms of the current legislative session) for over a month now.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
Why do I get a feeling you work for a NASA contractor?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
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.
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.
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
NASA has shown pretty well with the Ares I that the notion of "human-rated vehicles" is pretty much meaningless.
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.
Comment of the year
Huh? Ares I is based on the old RSRM motors, used for the shuttle, with minor tweaks to adjust for being a single stack. You, Mr. I-got-a-degree-in-business, need to realize that beyond your buzzwords and running management, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
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Yup! That's the spirit!
Wow, you were easily swayed.
Comment of the year
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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Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
Unless you've been under a rock since 1955, you might have noticed that they do, for everything except manned space flight. If you think the shuttle disasters were bad for NASA PR, wait until there is a loss of crew event on a manned launch vechicle that NASA bought from the low bidder.
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