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NASA's $349 Million Empty Tower
An anonymous reader writes: In a scathing indictment of NASA's bureaucracy, the Washington Post documents a $349 million project to construct a laboratory tower that was closed as soon as it was finished. From the article: "[The tower was] designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. ... As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially 'mothballed' — closed up and left empty — without ever being used. ... The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010. ... The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didn't need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse. ... Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space. In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift."
But what about the children? Pretty callous of you to ignore all the jobs created by the project. Thanks to the multiplier effect, this useless tower had a huge beneficial effect on the economy, this is just basic economics.
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Lo and behold, now that it's completed it is indeed useless.
Correct, but it was mere speculation before. Now they've PROVEN it.
Science!
Or they could've just given about $120 to every man woman and child in the state of Mississippi.
Maybe the tower could be converted to office space for the Senator. But only if it still is capable of holding a vacuum.