NASA cancels $450M mission to drill for ice on the Moon
nature.com
nature.com
From the lost talent alone, this seems catastrophic - why would any of the country's best engineers want to work on ambitious NASA projects when they can be rug-pulled so close to completion?
Also, where's the accountability or at least lessons learned in this cancelation? Is there a single finding on how to reduce cost overruns for future missions?
The past is in the past. The half a billion matters insofar as it's given us our current playing hand. The right mentality is some combination of looking forward (we have many options, some of which were bought for half a billion, but even those might be worthless), backward looking (half a billion is probably worth having a retro over; was the outcome regrettable? If so, how can we do less of that?), and keeping non-obvious systemic effects in mind while doing both of those things (e.g., if you never finish a project, it doesn't matter if you were always working toward the "right" thing, and with that sort of thing in mind your bias toward cancelling projects should perhaps be weaker than the immediate facts might indicate).
Imagine you'd invested half a billion in Theranos. You really would have pennies on the dollar in return, and completely scrapping it (or otherwise selling it for parts) could be a logical move. The sunk cost fallacy comes in when you decide that because you've already invested you need to continue in that direction.
Your point about it being hard to wrap your head around scrapping it entirely is a little subtle. We very well might have bought something worthwhile for that half a billion. In that case though, you still want to look at the resources you _currently_ have available or expect to have in the future, not the fact that you lost a half billion (except insofar as you can use that as a learning experience to not fuck up so much in the future).
Year Budget Change
2000 13,428
2001 14,095 4.97%
2002 14,405 2.20%
2003 14,610 1.42%
2004 15,152 3.71%
2005 15,602 2.97%
2006 15,125 -3.06%
2007 15,861 4.87%
2008 17,833 12.43%
2009 17,782 -0.29%
2010 18,724 5.30%
2011 18,448 -1.47%
2012 17,770 -3.68%
2013 16,865 -5.09%
2014 17,647 4.64%
2015 18,010 2.06%
2016 19,300 7.16%
2017 19,508 1.08%
2018 20,736 6.29%
2019 21,500 3.68%
2020 22,629 5.25%
2021 23,271 2.84%
2022 24,041 3.31%
2023 25,384 5.59%
2024 24,875 -2.01%
Congress might increase the budget by 3% but when they force something like SLS on NASA that eats 6% of the budget in real terms it was a 3% cut.
And this assumes the employees don't deserve any raises or bonuses.
2010: 26,162
2015: 23,150
2020: 26,559
That's the point! By making government dysfunctional we can point out all the wasted funds and slash the budget /Reagan
Huge sunk cost though, it might lower confidence in future budget talks.
0: https://www.space.com/moon-cave-lunar-exploration-radar-imag...
I'll note that it sounds like they were relying on a 3rd party to make their descent module, but it won't be ready in time. So if they were to go ahead with the launch they wouldn't have a way to land the thing.
Edit: I guess NASA says manned missions will cost billions. Still seems like half a billion is a lot for a glorified DJI drone thats only gotta make it to the moon lol. Regardless, money spent towards any space project tends to be money well spent, so compared to all the other spending I'd like to complain about, this isn't even on the radar.
When you're paying billions per rocket launch, you simply can't afford to have your robot break down on day 1 because of a software bug or because a component was accidently installed upside down.
(Also, "only gotta make it to the moon" makes it sound like that's a trivial task. There's a lot to unpack in that small sentence.)
If NASA was in the habit of building hundreds of robots at a time, the cost per unit would drop dramatically.
Where "glorified" means "can withstand temperature, radiation, and dust conditions that would brick a DJI drone in short order.
DOT puts it at 13.2m: https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
We've never had an astronaut crew get stranded on the moon. though we got close with Apollo 13. If/when that happens for the first time, you'd better believe the entire planet will be paying attention.
Just the congressional inquiries alone will set the space program back by decades.
Plenty of volunteers, and no need for 100M USD.
People go to war for less than 50K USD.
Dying to protect a political system vs dying to advance science, better pick science.
I am willing to bet that other parts of society (e.g. traffic planners and automobile manufacturers) have a much lower cost of human life.
It’s widely accepted that you may die going to space in experimental vehicles, nobody ever said it would be safe, and nobody can reasonably think it is risk-free.
Apollo 1 folks died, not a problem for reputation of NASA.
We’ve been sending rovers to other planets for decades, so I assume there’s a good base of knowledge to build on. This isn’t basic research level, it seems like it should be a lot closer to production work. Satellites go up nearly every day, so I’d guess the space-spec supply chain is healthy.
Do post-mortem documents get published on programs like this? I really can’t understand it.
Maybe faster if someone has an old spare Gameboy to lend to them.