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Costs Soar on NASA Communications Upgrade Program
schwit1 writes A new GAO report has found that NASA's effort to upgrade the ground-based portion of its satellite communications system, used by both military satellites and manned spacecraft, is more than 30 percent over budget, with its completion now delayed two years to 2019. Worse, the GAO found that this problem program was actually one of three that have had budget problems. And that doesn't include the disastrously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope. "In its latest assessment of NASA's biggest programs, the U.S. Government Accountability Office identified the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) as one of three — not counting the notoriously overbudget James Webb Space Telescope — that account for most of the projected cumulative cost growth this year. The others are the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which launched March 12, and the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, mission, the congressional watchdog agency said."
Now that would be a headline!
This isn't really news when you are reaching for the sky instead of just filling in a hole in the road.
The US state itself is a disastrously over-budget, over-deadline undertaking with the alleged goal to reach so-called "equal rights" for all. You hear nobody about that one.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
NASA has a tiny enough budget as it is. Trying to destroy decades-long scientific projects by cutthroat budgetary reviews is really quite despicable when the excesses in military spending are so many times larger and give no social benefit, just profiteering in the military industrial complex.
GAO would save taxpayers more money and have a more workwhile role if it examined military spending instead of NASA.
Oh c'mon, folks, April fools' day is over !
NASA projects suffer cost overrun? Who is kidding whom?
USA being the most efficient country in the world and NASA being the most efficient government agency inside USA
What is wrong with /. these days??
Don't you guys know it yet?
Everything coming out of NASA is cost effective and under budget and they always get things done way before the deadline and everything they do never fail
NASA is so effective that even Obama got so impressed by it that he ordered NASA to become an agency to make the people who believe in the same deity that he believes in happy like some fucking clams on ice!
OMG NASA is over budget by 100%, or 200% or even 1000%... oh wait which is a pittance of nothing, when the nations' budget is TOTALLY DWARFED BY the F*CKING GDP of the USA and the BLACK BUDGET of the 3(? 4? 5? 6? who knows???) other agencies that have no accountability whatsoever.
CAPTCHA: corpse
All those contracts go to the lowest bidder, so they just underbid them and come back and say "We need more money" a third of the way into the project.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Another flamebait non-story from schwit1.
SpaceX reaches for the sky and they manage to stretch their budget to work on a reusable booster.
If NASA is anything like the gov projects I used to work, there are too many people billing time on too few projects. But I noticed a tendency for people to reflexively defend NASA instead of asking hard questions about the budget, contract costs and staffing.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Just stop doing anything to do with space then the budget will be saved!!
OR increase NASA's budget!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is still plenty of money when it comes to bombing brown people on the other side of the planet, but not enough for scientific research, infrastructure, or anything else that benefits the entire country.
I very much doubt they are anything at all like the projects in which you used to work unless you were building radio telescopes or experimental equipment.
Building something different to what anyone has built before is a bit hard to quote for, and that's the main, should be incredibly obvious point and not related to distracting comments about overstaffing.
Have you every considered that if costs go up it's possible that they were understaffed to start with and had to put more people on?
Sorry guys for questioning the thought bubble where you think a manager says "get it done" and the only impediments are lazy people and not the actual difficulty of a task.
There is still plenty of money when it comes to bombing brown people on the other side of the planet, but not enough for scientific research, infrastructure, or anything else that benefits the entire country.
Funding on a large scale generally only comes if either A) people are scared of something or B) people think they can make a buck. Option A is why we went to the moon. However right now the big scary thing is "terrorism" and a space program isn't vital to dealing with that. Option B applies to NASA but only indirectly to most firms outside of NASA. NASA is a research organization so they cannot predict what economic benefits will flow from their work because economic benefits from basic research are fundamentally unknowable in advance. Worse, the benefits from basic research generally take longer than the election cycle so politicians are unlikely to be interested. Most US research funding comes from fear of things that might kill us or hurt us. Defense, disease, energy, etc.
So if you want to increase NASA's budget you need to either A) scare congress about some threat or B) find some way to make economic benefits from research flow more quickly. In either case the benefits will need to flow in a time shorter than an election cycle most likely.
It is better to get budget approval first (at any cost) and then fix it later with apologies.
Hurr durr keep loading up on government debt our children will forever service because... science!
Having worked on federally funded science research projects, we had to make sure our budget included contingencies for risky things not working. Multifaceted projects would have to just drop a facet that didn't work, or switch to a backup plan that cost less. A lot of other federal departments don't work about the issue of "sunk costs" and will drop projects big and small, even mid-grand and those with established facilities. The only project I've been on that went over budget was due to a scope change midstream, as new discoveries were being made, but the budget increase had to be requested just like any other grant (and was canned a year later even though it had excellent reviews, as it didn't fit the big picture the funding agency wanted to go after).
But a lot of these projects don't have the PR like NASA does, especially the smaller ones, and people end up believing any research project can and will go overbudget. And I don't have a problem with NASA's work in general, but they some times end up as a lightning rod to pork and a specific project from time to time is given a lot more leeway than other research projects.
Meanwhile the triple-over-budget military project for a new jet fighter stays the course, and nobody says shit about it. Because... you know... priorities
Sorry guys for questioning the thought bubble where you think a manager says "get it done" and the only impediments are lazy people and not the actual difficulty of a task.
I don't see evidence that the actual difficulty of the project is relevant here or all that hard. They aren't trying to do the impossible, just scale up well-known systems a bit. Meanwhile the cost overruns are small enough that they'll probably keep being funded. I think it's just another cost plus contract being gamed a bit aggressively.
The actual GAO report is here [url]http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/669205.pdf[/url]
What it *really* says is that there are four big projects that NASA is doing that have significant cost overruns. SGSS is somewhat of a problem: while the report says they're having trouble retaining staff, I suspect the real problem is that NASA, and in particular, Space Network (who operate TDRSS and the ground stations) have a set way of doing things with existing 1970s designs and architecture and 1980s equipment. Anytime you're coming in to do an upgrade, there's a lot of undocumented lore and process that needs to be accommodated, and jumping 30 years in equipment technology leads to all sorts of unusual things. It's all well and good to say "we're going to replace that rack of discrete electronics with this whizbang 4U PC with a FPGA card in it", but that rack of discrete boxes with boards and boards of TTL and analog circuits has a lot of idiosyncratic behavior that must be duplicated.
I have a real gripe with the report too, because it talks about reducing risk. They are pleased in the report that in general NASA is making all their missions have high TRL (tech readiness levels) >=6 at PDR. Sure, this makes the mission cost/programmatic risk smaller and you come in on budget, but it also means you don't infuse new technology. It's cheap to get to TRL 4 or 5 (benchtop demos in the lab), it's really expensive to get to TRL 6 (demonstrated in relevant environment), and NASA's big bucks go to missions, not to technology development. Big technology development happens when you get a mission to take a bet on the new tech and pray that you can get it to TRL 6 by PDR/CDR.
I also have a gripe that GAO evaluates maturity of design by "percentage of released drawings at CDR". Given the increased role of software in modern spaceflight, I don't think that's a relevant metric, at least by itself.
Building something different to what anyone has built before is a bit hard to quote for, and that's the main, should be incredibly obvious point
So about half the projects come under budget and the other half over budget? no? they all go over budget? yeah... proof that the problem isnt how hard it is to quote for, but instead how easy it is to get more than you quoted.
"His name was James Damore."
I can't tell what you are trying to say because NASA funded SpaceX for several billion dollars.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Not actually said at NASA, but one would think sometimes that it's what they live by.
As a spacecraft and instrument builder, we joke that mission assurance would be happiest if we didn't launch: the spacecraft that does not launch cannot fail, after all.
I would like to see NASA have more a DARPA-ish take: high risk, high reward. But, rather, it's "low risk, incremental progress along a path that is easily distinguishable".
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Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I can set a budget of $1 to buy a new car, and if I go get one at 14k, I've gotten a steal. Sure, I've overshot my budget but that just means I didn't have a good estimate of what it cost in the first place. Unlike cars, however, NASA can't just google "cost of new communications" or "cost of telescope" and get a reasonable approximation. Also, the summary doesn't mention 30% of what amount which is misleading. The article does, but that is beside the point. So is this really complaining about NASA overspending or their budgetary skills? Furthermore, if NASA exceeds their total allotted budget for every project, do they get more money? If the answer is "No, they don't get more money." then there's literally nothing here to complain about.
outside of the telescope optics, there is little cutting edge going on with those 2 projects.
time to trim the fat.
The real problem is outsourcing. Big surprise, you grant a project to one of the usual suspects (government contractors) you get the typical overruns.
SpaceX saves a ton of money by keeping the project management in the same house as the actual work.
If NASA is allowed to bring a layer or two in house they can probably start being on time and reasonably within budget too. Especially if they don't have to make concessions to pork.
What, did they buy their communications equipment from the same company that sold the DHS those non-working radios?
The problem is there are 10X projects at NASA looking for funding, but only funding for 1X projects. These projects are all completely custom projects and the budgeting is therefore really difficult. Additionally, if you build in too much contingency then one of the other 9 projects won't, and they'll win the funding. You'll be stuck waiting 3+ years for the next opportunity. There's just too much incentive to estimate optimistically. I think the only solution is to have the budgeting done by an independent panel from the project itself.
There is no incentive for such projects to come under budget, at least not the internal ones or ones being done at federal institutes and universities. It doesn't mean the money is just pocketed by people like when a business does something under budget. Instead, projects that come in under budget than use the money to do additional research, which is much harder to sum up in a simple number. But qualitatively, it is pretty obvious some groups get a lot more done with a given budget than others.
This is not about trying to make something exiotic that has to last forever in hostile space environments without ability for hands-on repair.
This is ground based telecommunications equipment!
I don't understand what can make this go so far over budget and over-time. Ground based telecommunications equipment, including satellite base stations are commodity items that are off-the-shelf.
Ham radio operators have been building satellite ground stations as well as terrestrial communications equipment for years on-the-cheep.
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Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
You can't grasp the implications, so let's try something obvious. Consider scaling up an ant to horse size. It's not going to work without some redesign is it?
It's not code, and even code sometimes needs redesign to scale up.