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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."
Yeah, it's hard to see why the article frames this as an indictment of NASA's bureaucracy, given the article explicitly says a senator from Mississippi explicitly forbid them from stopping construction. This is just another reflection of how money is more important than reason in Congress these days.
I hate it when people qualify infrastructure as useless. Especially infrastructure destine for research and development. Even if the foreseen use is deprecated, it doesn't mean it's useless. A test stand can always become of use, even if it's not for the originally planed engine. If they are wise about it, they could even rent the infrastructure to third parties such as Space-X.
Stopping the construction in the middle after 100% of the costs were already incurred, and then destroying the structure for even additional costs would have been a real idiot move.
Initially, I was going beat you down!
But in reading your fair points, I'm actually agreeing with you to an extent.
I do agree that hindsight is 20/20, but I also believe that experience is the best teacher.
The way we run things "with budgets" leads entirely to wasteful behaviour, as your budget is like a revenue stream, and worse, it has a feedback flow!! What I mean is, if you don't spend your budget, then you don't need it - and thus, next years' budget is allocated to someone else who does.... This leads to wasteful spending to "prove" you need your budget. I've seen store houses full of PC's and other goods purchased purely to absorb budgets (I was auditing a military site in the UK).
If this mentality were reversed, and you said what you don't spend becomes your Christmas bonus, - you'll find frugal spending, and big bonuses! Sound familiar? So it is possible to do more with less.... Now let THAT be the budget, and take away the bonuses, and build homes for the homeless, and feed them. (Other good causes apply here too...)
I wonder if "contractual capture" had something to do with it. What I mean is, much like the F-35, there was some sort of "poison pill" in the contract that made it impossible to cancel the contract without paying a hefty penalty. Much like firing a CEO these days, where they make more money by getting fired.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Stop bombing the Middle East for a few hours, or stop the global mass surveillance for a few minutes, and you're set for the year. But hey, at least you have your priorities straigth.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The U.S. Senator in question is Sen. Wicker, one of the biggest dolts in the Senate. You can hear him wax on and on and on about wasteful government spending unless.....errr...it happens to occur in his state whereupon it is magically transformed into a vital piece of American infrastructure.
How can NASA spend their budget effeciently when congressional representatives decide what they are allowed and required to work on? In this case a Republican Senator (Roger Wicker from Mississippi) amended the funding bill to require them to finish building it.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I guessed that before even opening the article. He has a habit of writing misleading Washington Post pieces about government waste. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of government waste, but blame does not fall squarely on NASA. I complained about a piece he wrote last year:
David Fahrenthold's April 24, 2013 article "Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts" incorrectly states that the Pentagon spent $435 on a hammer. That claim has been repeatedly debunked for a number of years. The hammer was $15, and the the $420 represented R&D costs for a project spread evenly across all items. See, e.g.: http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/
To which he responded:
Hello, Dave Fahrenthold here from the Washington Post. I wrote the story that dealt with the cost of “zero balance” accounts, and so I was forwarded the correction request you sent earlier. First, thank you for reading, and reading the story so closely. At this point, I don’t see the need for a correction to the story. Here’s why: the story says that the Pentagon “paid” $435 for a hammer. I had written it that way consciously, since I’d seen the findings you referenced in that govexec story: the hammer’s cost to the Pentagon included $420 worth of overhead (which had been distributed evenly among all the items for which the Pentagon was charged in that same order). The cost of the hammer, at least on the Pentagon’s books, was $435. To me, it’s still correct to say that’s what the Pentagon “paid,” no matter how that cost had been calculated. I’d welcome your thoughts, however. I’m grateful again for the feedback. DF
Nice enough, but to me this shows that he very well knew the full story but chose to present it in a purposefully misleading way. Given that there is so much real waste, I don't understand the need to latch on to myths like this.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I work in the Government, in a research environment, and if we can't use all our budget effectively we release the money back to our management to reallocate.
It gets reallocated where it'll do the most good.
Next year, if we can make the case that we are where the money will do the most good, WE get reallocated funds.
All that's required is management whose heads are not up their rear ends, a workforce who trusts management to find good use for the funds, and that you be able to justify your requirement for funding to meet the mission goals.
Management also has to realize that programs rarely execute as expected and be mentally and fiscally flexible. We are fortunate to have such management.
This isn't sunken cost as much as pork barrel. Someone promised a Senator from Mississippi that hey would get 300+ million dollars from NASA and by god he was going to get it regardless of how much of a waste of money it is.
Also not surprising that this was from the South where they are against big government, but pro pork barrel.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust