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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 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 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+
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"
it's only other people's money.
Little in return?? Why just look at all the generous aerospace contractor donations this project generated for Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker. You call THAT a FAILURE??
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
NASA isn't the only agency to be forced to spend their money on horrible projects. The military has many instances of getting things they don't want because Senator X wants pork for his district or trying to close down an unneeded facility only to be informed that Representative Y is forcing it to stay open because that facility means jobs which means votes for Representative Y.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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'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.
Why didn't the Republicans think to put a hold on Obamacare then?
Or they could've just given about $120 to every man woman and child in the state of Mississippi.
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.
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.
"Work harder! Millionaires are dependent on YOU!"
FTFY.
Cause then it'd be like $1 and nobody would care.
...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?
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.
... 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.
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 reality is that both posts are correct. The 1% cheats the system and should be dealt with as well as welfare dead beats that drain the system. The sooner we get past arguing which is worse and instead try and be rid of both parasites the better off we'll be. The middle class is getting a raw deal from both the 1% and the non-working poor.