Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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?
I don't like fiction either at least the non science type. Well, I take that back, 1984 was pretty good. That was made up, right?
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.
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.
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."
$160/household/year isnt small no matter how many times the Statists claim it.
It is only small relative to the total federal budget, but that being way out of control isnt the justification needed to call NASA's budget small.
"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.
[voiceover] For just 44 cents a day, your family can participate in the exploration of the known universe, helping solve the cosmic puzzle we live in. [/voiceover]
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
Luv & Peace
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.