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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."
You pay for everything and get very little in return. Here's to you!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
It's simply not realistically possible to always perfectly plan multiple complex multi-year projects, when every your budget gets cut a little further, and you never know -- it's a roll of the dice -- if or how much it's going to get cut by -- then there is the secondary knock-on effect that of the small budget that remains*, the managers need to very carefully decide where to constantly try shift things around to try keep remaining projects going. The rocket program canceled in 2010 was probably canceled due to budget cuts. NASA's budget has consistently been cut, what, every year for the past 15 years? You can't entirely blame NASA - nobody can plan properly under those circumstances. Nobody, not you, or me, could end up not wasting any of it as a result of the constant shunting around.
Also, *all* large organizations have at least some expenditure that in hindsight was wasted. Hindsight is always 20/20. Look at the R&D allocations for any large organization, public or private, and you'll always find plenty of projects that went nowhere - whether it's an IT company or a mining operation or a shipyard or energy utility etc.
* NASA budget is less than 0.5% of the total federal budget. We're really going to nitpick over this while literally trillions get regularly poured into completely wasteful military destruction? We're being played and manipulated by articles like this - look carefully who *benefits* from articles like this that attempt to portray the real bad guys (spending-wise) as those who take less than 0.5% of the budget.
My other UID is three digits.
This is months old news at least.
At this point, we have a thriving private industry that can get us to space more cheaply and efficiently that Big Government with its waste and corruption. There was a time when we needed NASA to get the space program 'off the ground', so to speak. That time ended before the space shuttle ever flew.
Let's see ...
... India's space rocket mission to the moon cost around $13 million
Anyone got a calculator? Wanna know how many moon mission can NASA do with $349 million and Indian rockets ??
This was forced on NASA as a pork barrel money grant by the Republican senators, and this isn't news.
Senator Makes NASA Complete $350 Million Testing Tower ... ..... The other senators will likely decide that it's easier to fund his pork ...
yro.slashdot.org/.../senator-makes-nasa-complete-350-million-testing-to...
Feb 1, 2014 - Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the
senator bob: I want to fund a NASA mission to mars. heres a budget rider for whatever they need, in my state.
NASA: ok, thanks. we'll start on this 25 year plan. we need to test some rockets first.
senator ted: NASA wastes tax dollars and the mars mission is a terrorist anchor baby that I dont understand. STOP working on this now and start working on a public/private partnership in my state. heres a congressional mandate. you're studying asteroid mining now because i saw a movie about it and it had my favourite actor in it.
NASA: uh....okay. mission aborted. **shuffles papers** looks like we're going to mine...uh...something.
Private company: thanks for giving us all the free rocket designs and code. uh, mission accomplished and because asteroid mining isnt profitable we're just going to do a defense project with it. defense sells real good.
NASA: wait...what?
Senator ted: good job but i cut your budget because I had a bad dream about Terrorists and now i think all government research is secretly communism.
Senator Bob: What the hell are you guys doing with that old communist rocket monument you made in my state? i havent seen the lights on in a month. can you do a mission to the moon again? I miss stuff from the 60's that im familiar with
NASA: uh...wat?
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Another red state represented by fiscal conservatives!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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+
Pork barrel money has found its way to the intended recipients. That's all that matters.
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.
This only doesn't make sense if you don't understand that NASA's *REAL* job is to funnel money to politically-connected contractors and produce a lot of PR bullshit. Anything science-related or any actual accomplishments in space are just a byproduct.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
After Challenger, the House Ways and Means Committee basically forced the ASRM onto NASA even though they didn't need it. Billions were spent on the Yellow Creek facility because of one congressman, Jamie Whitten, and it's now abandoned. Pork-barrel politics has been around since well, politics but that doesn't mean we have to like it or put up with the system that enables it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
When NASA boosters complain about static/slowly declining funding, this is why it happens. This is well over 1% of the agency's annual budget squandered on something that everyone knew was useless. It's not even unusual. The entire manned space program has been useless for quite some time. That's over a quarter of the budget right there.
While the unmanned part of NASA is not quite as inefficient, it still prioritizes the spending of public funds (usually via development of new one-off projects) over the purposes for which those funds are allegedly spent (such as exploration of the Solar System or the study of Earth-side physical systems).
Between the two, that's a great majority of NASA's funding spent in terrible ways for at least four decades.
In that light, I think it reasonable to ask that before we increase NASA's budget, we insure that it spends its present, quite ample funding in a much more efficient way now. No more non sequiturs about how it's unfair that the big boys like the military or Medicare get to do that. Or terrible spin off arguments that totally ignore that most of NASA's spin offs would have happened anyway, the only meaningful difference being that NASA socialized the costs. Or terrible intangible benefit arguments that argue NASA does this really great but vague thing like international cooperation or inspiration, but nothing that we would spend our own money on.
it's only other people's money.
Actually, with James Inhofe in charge of the Senate committe on commerce sceince and transportation, it might be the case that anything science-related or any actual accomplishments in space is a defect of the intended process of funnelling vital money to the people who fund senatorial re-election campaigns.
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
So that's where they put it!
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Since when has atmospheric pressure been 40 psi!??! Have we moved to a different planet? I don't trust an article that can't do this basic level of fact checking.
I'd not be complaining about the pork of merely finishing the tower: if it was designed in a non-wasteful manner it ought to not matter that the program it was designed for was shut down--it ought to be usable for testing any rocket needing to operate in roughly the same environment. Thus, if it isn't, it was pork regardless, while if is properly designed then we have something to use later which will also hopefully cut down on time (and opportunities for budget cuts to strike) for future programs.
Therefore, either its entire existence is pork, or we simply have a stage (and some expense) removed from future engine design projects...and it's only wasteful if we don't plan to ever need to test such ever again.
So, really, it is either end-to-end pork or infrastructure we hopefully want regardless.
When NASA is as accountable as a mind control cult, you know shit's really hit the fan.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Why didn't the Republicans think to put a hold on Obamacare then?
Call it a sports stadium and call it a success. NASA isn't the only one that wastes tax payers money. Minneapolis is building a $1 billion stadium for 10 football games a year. $349 million is amateur hour.
Whether you want to blame NASA bureaucrats for covering their asses or Congresscritters for their warped priorities, this failure can be explained the same way. Government and its agencies are total strangers to the economic incentives of profit and loss. The only profits and losses they directly experience are the rise and fall of their bureaucratic clout. As a result, success and failure are defined on completely different terms versus a private endeavor. For an operation like SpaceX, success is getting the customer into space with the greatest practical efficiency. For NASA, success is whatever curries favor with the people in Congress deciding next year's budget. Congressmen don't care about what goes into space or how. They care that federal money gets back to their clients at home. The bickering in this thread over whether to blame NASA leadership or Congress misses the larger point: Both are culpable because of the incentives they operate under. This is just the economics of nationalized space exploration taking its inevitable course.
NASA doesn't want to waste its budget any more than other organizations; it's just that its costly projects tend to be lucrative contracts that get awarded to politicians' favorite companies.
If some asshole senator wants to funnel billions of dollars that could have gone to actual space research and exploration into his home state for some useless construction, NASA basically can't do shit about it.
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.
NASA didn't decide to build that; a Republican senator from Mississippi forced through the budget amendment even though it was pointless. Apparently stimulating the economy down there with some completely useless waste of resources is more important than actual space research.
Blaming NASA for it is just adding insult to injury - what an asshole reporter.
i agree. Tell welfare states ie taker states ie red states ie republican states ie ignorant states to go fuck themselves.
The liberal makers are tired of the conservative takers
Have gnu, will travel.
Space can be a poor investment. What do we gain from human space exploration? I see a little bit in testing science projects in weightlessness. But beyond that, what good is it wasting billions to try and send humans to a planet which we already know is not able to sustain human life without a lot of help. Such as space suits, a way to produce water, and a lack of fossil fuels or materials to even build with any reasonable costs a living environment for humans. Yes, by all means explore all you want with unmanned craft, and study space all you want. But the effort to waste billions on space when the Earth here needs so much attention is simply trying to fulfill some childhood dreams of being Capt. Kirk when in fact its more noble to try and save the planet we actually live on. Space is very useful, for communications, Earth studies from space and other experiments that benefit man. Going to distant planets with no hint of supporting life is simply playing spaceman which was fun as a kid. But too expensive for man kind.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/02/01/215218/senator-makes-nasa-complete-350-million-testing-tower-that-it-will-never-use
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Gee, No wonder the facility where the tower was build is called the "STENNIS TEST FACILTIY" Stennis, senator, it is all politics from the get go. Drop in the pork barrel and was a gift to the contractors in MIssissippi.
...to bloated and ineffective government bureaucracies, the private sector. Everyone knows that the private sector is more efficient than any government operation, right? And corruption surrounding fat government contracts granted to political cronies is hardly ever a problem, right?
A vacuum test chamber for the BFR upper stage, mayhaps?
NASA does not do anything except spend money and blow shit up because they smother their technical talent with mountains of bureaucracy that can never be successfully navigated.
Just kill it. It's useless. It's time to turn space over to the people and let them deal with it privately.
Kiddie stuff, we have some cancelled gas plants up here in Ontario, Canada that have that beat that all to hell... never did a thing except create an eye sore and cost a billion to cancel the contracts.
Why build one tower when you can have two at twice the price?
... and the makers of the rules under which NASA operates? Congress. ... and the ones that set which projects NASA may or may not pursue? Congress.
Seems pretty obvious to me, it's not an engineering problem.
Looks like the Congress and the Senate were able figure out a good use for a giant vacuum tower - http://imgur.com/9Sbd5By
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
...The Sandusky site might have worked during the 1960's but it would get shut down due to noise complaints. The Stennis site is smack dab in the middle of nowhere and they can make all the noise they want.
What kind of noise do you expect from testing a rocket engine in vacuum?
I have family members who worked in NASA at high levels.
NASA has no power compared to a powerful Congresdroid scorned.
The consequences to NASA for publicly embarrassing Congressdroids over embarrassing pork insisted upon by such droids would be so much worse. The retaliation droids would in return destroy the primary science goals and missions of NASA.
Stennis was mentioned, back many years ago, as a prime geographical centroid of pork though hardly the only one.
The only problem I see here is the cost overruns by these contractors, and the inadequacy of NASA's budget. Other than that, all the decisions seem rational and that tower may yet find a use after a few more presidents and Washington Post reporters have come and gone.
Since you wanted to go all-political, let's remember some facts:
The A3 test stand was designed and built to test the J-2X engine which was for the upper stages of the Ares I and Ares V rockets of the Constellation program. Because the J-2X would need to air-start at very high altitudes without being hooked to ground support equipment, the A3 stand was designed to simulate that high altitude environment. There is nothing wrong with the stand. This is entirely a political debacle brought about by Mr Obama who campaigned in 2008 on the promise he would accellerate the program that was replacing the Shuttle (he made this promise in Florida in August of 2008). This gave NASA and the contractors every expectation that this stand remained a vital bit of construction with many people's plans and contracts depending on its completion. Mr Obama allowed the program to plod along, albeit with insufficient support, until 2010 when he suddenly killed the project without even negotiating with congress. Even Democrats in congress were shocked when the program was suddenly zeroed-out in the budget (and with NOTHING in its place). THAT is why memebers of congress with constituents whose jobs hung on the project reacted so severely and THAT is why the Senate in RARE bi-partisan action overrode Obama and ordered IN LAW that Obama build the Orion capsule and the SLS rocket.
The A3 stand will NOT consume hundreds of millions per year in maintenance as has been deceptively claimed - in government agencies like NASA, all the fixed ongoing costs of each facility are divided-up and financial "blame" is attached to each pile of money spent. During the Shuttle era, mos of NASA's costs were blamed on the shuttles, which made them seem very expensive to operate. After the shuttles were grounded, however, the taxpayers save NO money... the blame of all the agency's overhead was simply re-assigned. Same thing here. Stennis Space Center is simply assigning some of its overhead to one of its test stands.
Had the A3 stand NOT been completed, it would have stood there, partially built and open to the elements, and would have rapidly rusted to the point of needing to be torn down. As it it, the stand is there ready to be rapidly brought online should we ever again choose to elect a President who is not a short-sighted moron. Oh, and the J-2X engines which WERE the "long pole in the tent" that was a major part of the justification for killing the Constellation program now exist and have been test fired many times at sea level and are ready for altitude testing on that A3 stand - but thanks to Obama these new engines (America's best-ever and most capable air-startable LOX/LH2 engines, better than we had for Apollo, are also now mothballed.)
No NASA == No "commercial" space flight
Elon Musk has publicly stated that he was out of money and SpaceX was about to die when his last early Falcon rocket finally reached orbit... and then NASA swept in and offered him piles of taxpayer cash and a contract. With no NASA, there is no ISS and therefore no NASA contract to haul cargo to/from ISS and no NASA contracts to haul people to/from ISS and then SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and Boeing all lose those contracts. Boeing announced this past summer that without the NASA contract they would cancel their manned capsule. Orbital and SpaceX would be forced to focus on commercial satellite launches (NOT manned stuff and NOT anything related to exploration/colonization of space). Commercial sats do not need to leave Earth orbit, so there's no purely commercial reason to spend money on rockets for beyond Earth orbit.
You have aimed your wrath at the wrong target; the reasons for all the waste at NASA over the past few decades (the NLS, the VSE, the SEI, the X-33 program, the X-38 program, the Constellation program, etc) are ENTIRELY political and caused by the waffling, indecision and fighting on capitol hill and in the White House. NASA is simply doing what it's boss in the White House orders it to do, and its paymasters in congress pay for it to do.
There is a huge disconnect on the public's view on how NASA works. The main problem is congress determines NASA's funding AND agenda. So a congressman or president says, "lets go to mars and beyond and build new fancy rockets to get us there". So NASA goes to work and comes up with a plan, and redirects their funding accordingly for years (keep in mind the time and money that are being used for one project cannot be redirected once spent in another). The next president comes along and says "we are going to spend our money on something worth while like planetary sciences!" Now NASA has to switch gears, but guess what happens to all of the equipment that was used for rockets. This story was just an example, but it does happen an awful lot. At least in the future this tower can be used because it was finished, would you rather our money be spent on a project that only finished half way and then scraped? Keep in mind that NASA also has to operate on a budget that hasn't kept up with inflation or increased.
Obviously, you don't work for the same lab I do.
Maybe if politicians that know nothing of science, and only care about contracts for friends kept their fingers out. It would get somewhere.
I'm mean really I just loved the
"Let's scrap everything we are doing. Pull old Apollo drawings out of storage and go back to the moon."
I'm serious look the stuff up. Everything they are doing now is based on the final Apollo designs that were scrapped because they stopped and out was all to heavy. The "new" rover, capsule, suits. You can find in all in drawings from the 60s. Now that's not totally a bad thing. But we had reusable sort of space planes. And the military had small ones now. But we scrap that for single shot stuff. Though I'm sure an Apollo capsule run by an iPhone will be much better. The shuttle had those tiles, the new capsule uses the same ablative shield Apollo did.
Ok going back to the moon sure. But why are we going back 45 years in tech?
Really look what they can do with a small budget when you leave them alone. Curiosity was supposed to run a few months. It's been how many years?
They can do a hell of a lot with not much. And develop so much that we use. Or is developed for them.
Oh and the Hubble screw up want NASAs fault. They didn't make it. It wasn't even a new design. The only two new things about it was the sensors and that it points up. All the rest like it point down. It's just a standard spy satellite.
As for the whats the point crowd, do a search on things in everyday use developed by NASA.
Serious question: how much of that alleged $700k/year-to-mothball is real, hard cash NASA has to spend, vs accounting formalities like "how much would the site be worth if put to its highest and best use" (and taken as a paper loss because the site isn't being used)? Or one-time costs that were incurred for mothballing, but aren't likely to be repeated annually (like shuttering the building, building a fence around it, etc)?
Don't discount the accounting formalities. I once worked for a company where upper management directed us to immediately dispose of about 100 non-obsolete laptops... at a disposal cost of more than $900 apiece. Why? Because they were sitting in a stack in the middle of a mostly-empty datacenter literally covering most of a square block, and some idiot in the accounting department decided that they were costing us $25,000/year to maintain for no reason besides "they're taking up 100 square feet, and we're paying $250/foot per year in rent"... in a building that was about 95% empty & leased for 20 years at the height of the dotcom boom just because "it was there". The fact that even if you take the fictional annual rent for the floorspace seriously, it took more than FIVE YEARS just to break even on the insane disposal fees. And in the meantime, we had to buy new laptops to replace the ones we were ordered to dispose of, because new people were still getting hired. Wait, it gets better. As a matter of policy, we were required to ship the laptops to the disposal center via FedEx. Priority Overnight. Individually. Almost a decade later, I *still* can't grasp how anybody could have possibly thought it was sane, let alone a *good* idea.
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You might not get to work at NASA, but you can work toward your passion.
You may need some additional education, and you are taking good steps in that direction. Not gathering a lot of additional debt is also a good financial decision for now and your future.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
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Possibly finding out WHY it was funded initially, and WHY it was 'mothballed' (I am guessing reduced funding) should combine to give you an answer.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."