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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.
... 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.
I feel like there is some information missing from this claim, particularly, the rationale for which NASA HQ decided to continue the contract. NASA isn't known for making illogical decisions, so it stands to reason that there is a logical explanation that is missing from this article.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So about as much as it costs to keep Melania Trump in Trump Tower for about thirty days, or one-third of the Trump Regime so far.
Rapunzel, let down your hair. Thank you.
AC
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.
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.