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."

Comments

Business As Usual

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:Cutting edge has unknowns! Who would have thoug

[HangingChad]

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.

The solution to NASA's budget problem

[MrKaos]

Just stop doing anything to do with space then the budget will be saved!!

OR increase NASA's budget!!

Re:The solution to NASA's budget problem

[trout007]

I work at NASA and you would be surprised how accurate your statement is. The Center projects like repaving roads, tearing down old facilities, or doing something similar are always lauded for how well they were run since they are on time and on budget. Meanwhile when you are trying to do something nobody ever did before you are constantly getting threatened to have your budget cut. The real kick in the pants is when September comes and these same budget people are running around asking if anyone knows of a way to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2 days before purchase orders are cut off at the end of the year or we will lose the money.

If the work wasn't so interesting I would have left a long time ago.

Re:Cutting edge has unknowns! Who would have thoug

[khallow]

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.

kind of a misleading article and a gripe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cutting edge has unknowns! Who would have thoug

[dbIII]

just scale up well-known systems a bit.

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.