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NASA Inspector Says Agency Wasted $80 Million On An Inferior Spacesuit (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When NASA began developing a rocket and spacecraft to return humans to the Moon a decade ago as part of the Constellation Program, the space agency started to think about the kinds of spacesuits astronauts would need in deep space and on the lunar surface. After this consideration, NASA awarded a $148 million contract to Oceaneering International, Inc. in 2009 to develop and produce such a spacesuit. However, President Obama canceled the Constellation program just a year later, in early 2010. Later that year, senior officials at the Johnson Space Center recommended canceling the Constellation spacesuit contract because the agency had its own engineers working on a new spacesuit and, well, NASA no longer had a clear need for deep-space spacesuits. However, the Houston officials were overruled by agency leaders at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC. A new report released Wednesday by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin sharply criticizes this decision. "The continuation of this contract did not serve the best interests of the agency's spacesuit technology development efforts," the report states. In fact, the report found that NASA essentially squandered $80.6 million on the Oceaneering contract before it was finally ended last year.
> This is a fucking horseshit article.
I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.
NASA has done this before, with the space shuttle. There is an excellent article on how the space shuttle was basically crippled by the Air Force's requirements (e.g. launch a satellite into polar orbit) and never even did that. [0]
I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had excellent success with those so far, than some stupid goal of putting more very fragile and relatively useless meatbags in space.
You're drawing a false equivalency. Yes, Trump is wasting a massive amount of tax payer dollars on his useless golf trips. But this money wouldn't go to NASA anyway.
[0] http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
...could have been much worse, like for example wasting money on building a wall or something silly like that.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
... continuing the project, and paying $200 million for a space suit that nobody needs.
Here the NASA looks for a bunch of idiots for obviously wasting $80 million. Lots of people in management positions would have found a way so that nobody can claim it was _obviously_ wasteful, even if it costs more money. So have mercy on them, they could have wasted a lot lot more.
Rational, scientific rebuttals are welcomed...
Nobody here is going to waste their time giving a rational scientific rebuttal to a bunch of wildly irrational and unscientific conspiracy theories. Saying that you don't believe something happened or that you don't believe the numbers because they just don't look right to you isn't the same as providing rational evidence or performing any kind of scientific action.
Someone in congress got to campaign on a fat contract that they brought back to their constituency! Same reason parts of the space shuttle were manufactured all over the country, even though it's not even close to the most cost-effective strategy.
I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.
The question is whether it was obviously wasteful at the time the decision was made to fund the suit development. I don't know the answer to that either way but it's unfair to judge in hindsight if it wasn't clear at the time. R&D isn't some magic results dispenser that money in equals results out. Sometimes we pay a lot of money to learn what doesn't work. That's useful too though admittedly frustrating at times.
I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had excellent success with those so far, than some stupid goal of putting more very fragile and relatively useless meatbags in space.
And I feel that NASA should be spending more money putting humans into space and that we get huge value from doing so. Want to know the fun bit? We're both right. The difference is that I think we should be fighting to get more NASA funding and you apparently are meekly accepting the status quo. I want more humans in space AND more robots.
You're drawing a false equivalency. Yes, Trump is wasting a massive amount of tax payer dollars on his useless golf trips. But this money wouldn't go to NASA anyway.
It's not a false equivalency and you seem to have missed the point. And nobody argued that Trumps wasted money was going to go to NASA so that is a strawman. Waste is waste and tax dollars spent are fungible. Trump flying to his resort to play golf and line his own pocket is very obviously wasteful and unnecessary and arguably violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. A decision to invest in a space suit that in hind sight we didn't need is waste of a different sort but still waste. Though I would argue a FAR more acceptable sort of waste. At least the space suit development was an attempt to do something potentially valuable to the taxpayers even if it didn't work out and we probably learned something useful in the process.
So $80M over the course of about 6 years is $13.3M/year. Out of an annual budget of $18.4B. That's 0.07% of the annual NASA budget. Okay, so somebody made a bad decision. Reprimand them, do what you have to internally to avoid such decisions in the future, and let's move on. It's not enough that anyone outside of NASA needs to get their undies in a bunch over. If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
This looks like another conservative trope about how the Federal Government wastes money, and somehow the private sector never does.
Arguably the private sector wastes FAR more money than the government does. 90+% of new businesses fail. Even the most successful companies make investments constantly that don't all pan out. The difference is usually that we have a lot less visibility into their failures nor do we have a lot of say over them unless we are investors. We are all "investors" in a sense in the government so we are a lot more sensitive to government waste as a result. But to pretend that the private sector is universally more efficient at everything is just demonstrably absurd. There are some tasks the government is far more efficient at than the private sector and vice-versa. The key is to know which is which and to not conflate the two.