*THIS*, more than anything, is why NASA no longer stands at the forefront of leading the charge into the heavens:
New NASA moon rocket could cost $38 billion
According to preliminary NASA estimates, it would cost between $17 billion and $22 billion to ready the new rocket and Orion capsule for a test flight in December 2017 that would put an unmanned capsule into a lunar orbit. An additional $12 billion to $16 billion would be needed to launch the first crew on a lunar flyby in August 2021.
I usually make at least a token attempt to keep the dialogue vaguely “family friendly” on this blog, at least in the main posts. But here, I’ll make an exception.
Rockets and capsules are *not* that friggen’ hard. They are not that friggen’ expensive. Just as with health care, when you get a massively bloated government bureaucracy involved, prices skyrocket… because those paying the bills aren’t paying out of their own pockets, so they come to not *care* what the bills are. And those getting paid quickly realize that they can charge whatever the hell they like, and they’ll get paid. Much of aerospace has not only fallen into this cesspit, it has the added bonus of realizing that government accepts that major programs take two Presidential administrations or more to accomplish… but that there is every chance that changing politics will kill off the project before it gets built and has to prove itself. So go ahead and spend, spend, spend… you’ll probably never have to prove that your design was any good.
Of course, aerospace and healthcare are not the only areas that have been corrupted by “crony capitalism.” The Defense Department is hardly squeaky clean; the DoD has its own long, sad history of overpaying for projects that are doomed to cancellation. With that in mind, who can blame a company for raking in the cash and slapping together a crappy product using inappropriate second-hand commercial parts?
It’s utter bilge like “building a rocket that’s not even capable of *landing* on the moon will take $38 billion” that has ruined NASA. How to fix it? Well… much as I hate to appear to agree with Obama, slash NASA’s budget. Get NASA *out* of the business of building rockets… or even of overseeing the design of rockets. In the late 50’s/early 60’s, NASA involvement in rocketry was appropriate. Why then and not now? Because then… rockets to the moon were complete unknowns. We didn’t know how to build them. Now… we do. We’ve done it before. Back then, we needed Rocket Scientists to build a moon rocket. Now, we need Rocket Engineers.
NASA should pave the way in *science.* Leave the relatively mundane engineering to private companies which will be forced to compete in an honest system. Offer a contract to whoever provides the required launch capability to fulfill NASA”s launch needs… payment on delivery. I’ll bet you a nickel that if NASA offered $5B for the lunar launch requirement (with a $2.5B contract to the second-place competitor for backup), SpaceX will step up. Hell, Boeing and Lockheed will step up, if only to make sure that SpaceX doesn’t get the prize.
7 Responses to “Old-school NASA procurement”
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The Augustine panel report talks a lot about the huge overhead and fixed costs that get included in any major in-house NASA project. Only half the Shuttle budget, for example, would be freed up for other things by the end of the Shuttle program. The rest would continue to pay for misc. salaries and upkeep on facilities.
It’s like the big projects start atop a one or two billion dollar baseline. Congress will act surprised but the numbers for SLS/Orion are actually quite consistent with what the GAO had predicted for Ares I/Orion.
As you indicated, buying things like launches in a service arrangement is always going to be a lot cheaper for NASA. Even if commercial markets such as Bigelow fail to show up, as long as the services are bought in a competitive, fixed-price manner, the agency is bound to save huge amounts of money over doing it with standard in-house procurement.
You’re mixing common sense and government. Those two go together like oil and water.
Let NASA do the science and the manufacturers apply it to their products? That’s what the NACA did, and it worked quite well. I see no reason why it cannot be applied to the environment today. I can’t see it happening, either.
So by 2021, we can fly a Moon mission that doesn’t even orbit it, like Apollo 8 did in 1968?
I’m impressed.
Apollo 8 didn’t orbit the Moon. Apollo 10 did, though.
Yes, Apollo 8 did orbit the moon. Apollo 10 did, too, but also flew the lunar module to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface.
NACA worked the way that it did, and the current NASA aeronautics program works the way that it does because there was/is an aircraft industry to support. NACA was started to counter the investment that European governments were making in aeronautics development that the US wasn’t. The existence of that industry helps keep the economics realistic. The US never built the SST because there was no way to make money with it. The Concorde was built even though it was a huge money sink because France and England were willing to subsidize it. Boeing looked at the SST and realized that they couldn’t make a profit with it.
When NASA started there wasn’t a commercial space industry so anything that was built had to be built by the government. Things have changed over the years and, although no private company can do the Space Station resupply and crew exchange today, there is a thriving satellite launching industry. Between them and the startups it looks like commercial capability will come on-line in the next few years.
NASA should run the Space side of the agency more like the Aero side once there is a space industry to support. NASA should still do the non-commercial or pre-commercial exploration and R&D work.
Remember that Congress has a lot to do with why NASA development projects cost so much. They insert themselves into a lot of decisions that make the agency less efficient, from deciding in detail what will be done (remember the continuous congressionally mandated space station redesigns?) to steering work to their favorite center, whether it makes sense or not. In addition they have helped create an environment where failure is punished more severely than success is rewarded, which breeds a generation of timid managers afraid to take a risk or make a mistake.