NASA’s $349M monument to its drift | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s $349M monument to its drift

washingtonpost.com

176 pointswallflower87 comments

$349 million is a lot of money, if it is yours. For a public works project, it's construction of three medium size US high schools when the land has been donated.

In terms of NASA's budget [never mind the US Federal budget] the Washington Post is ranting about rounding error only because the project is in a state for which their audience has little sympathy. Producing four fewer F35's would save more money, just on initial cost...never mind that the costs of operating just one well exceed $700k a year.

For anyone with a passing interest in the integrity of journalism, the J-2x rocket engine for which the A-3 Test Stand was built to test was let on a $1.2 billion dollar contract to Pratt & Whittney RocketDyne. The program was only killed this year [1]...and a new $2.8 billion dollar contract to develop the alternative was let just this July to Boeing. Purportedly this contract was a continuation of an undefined contract with Boeing let back in 2007 -- the same year as the A-3 Test Platform broke ground.[2]

What NASA got for the money is an additional capability that is reasonably likely to be useful over the next several decades so long as manned missions beyond LEO remain within the agency's potential mandate. Given the speed with which the hot air of politicians changes directions, moving forward on infrastructure makes sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-2X

[2] http://spacenews.com/41139nasa-boeing-finalize-28b-sls-core-...

It seems to me like NASA's internal strategy right now is "build systems that will be useful no matter what the politicians decide to do, and make sure we finish them before they change their minds".

It's not the most efficient way to get to Mars. It's probably the only way we will given the politics involved.

Wow, this is a great comment! Thanks for writing.

Thanks for putting the price tag in perspective.

It's still wrong no matter what the price tag is. It isn't just wrong, it is a symptom of a broken system. It's a very simple and easy to understand example of the brokenness, where as your examples aren't quite as convincing, because they aren't as simple.

The way for NASA to be effective, is to make a plan and follow it. I am very skeptical of your claim that it made sense to complete this project. Would it have made sense at a billion dollar price tag? What about 2 billion? All of your arguments in favor of completion, would still apply. It would still be relatively inexpensive (compared to defense expenditures).

“It’s heartbreaking to know that, you know, you thought you’d done something good,” Forshee said. “And all you’ve done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail.”

^^^ Another strong sign of dysfunction.

I don't expect NASA to be perfect, but it seems as if you are setting a very low bar for NASA.

Nasa's annual budget is around $17 billion, so $349 million is about 2 percent of it. A better comparison might be to the cost of significant individual programs: commercial crew has a current annual budget of $696 million, down from an administration request of over $800 million. That's not an entirely fair comparison because the expenditure was spread out over several years, but it's still past what I'd consider rounding error.

Ground breaking was in 2007. Design preceded it. That means less than $50 million a year -- tenths of a percent of their budget on the project.

Throw in the "shovel ready project" aspect and there was no political will to halt the project from the Executive or Legislative branches of the Federal Government.

Hooray, I finally have a new best example of congress interference in NASA's budget and planning. And it's simple enough for anyone to understand.

A TLDR for the entire thing, "Local congressman urges congress to force NASA's to spend four years building something in his state for a rocket scrapped four years ago, demanding the agency waste taxpayer money."

Don't forget 700,000 dollars per year for maintenance. Pure insanity.

Well I wouldn't get upset about that. Now that it's built, $700k/yr is an insanely cheap price to maintain such a strcture. Now e.g. SpaceX can use their Space Act agreement with NASA to use the facility at cost for testing their own engines. $700k/yr of taxpayer money to enable SpaceX et al to build better rockets is a good ongoing investment imho.

The article is a bit hyperbolic in that regard. The facility isn't closed down, it's just locked up because a locked door is cheaper than a security guard. No one is using it at the moment, but that doesn't mean it is not open for use.

Doesn't detract from the insanity of building the thing in the first place though.

The article actually says it's not ready for use, has no instruments and has not been tested under vacuum. It's a big steel shell.

True, but it could be made ready for use in a couple of years, or less with outside investment. While it certainly appears that spending four years finishing it was a waste of money, I tend to agree with the parent comment that $700k/year isn't much compared to NASA's $17B annual budget, and that it will likely be used for something eventually that will make that upkeep (if not the original building costs) worthwhile.

Well it's federal taxes, the local congressman brought jobs, and tax revenue to his state (rough guess would put the state tax revenue probably close to $10 million in taxes).

Purely disgusting.

The local congressman is doing something for his voters. It's his job.

It's also why Americans think dimly of congress as a whole.

Is his job as a federal congressman to only think of his own state at a cost to the rest of the country?

If that's the case, then maybe it's time that the US got a national parliament (with proportional representation) unencumbered by the district system.

Unfortunately, this is literally the one thing that even a constitutional amendment can't do. The part of the US constitution that describes the process of amending specifically forbids any amendment from depriving any state of its equal senate representation.

Honest question: is it legally impossible to first amend the constitution to remove that restriction?

You might be able to do that, but the clause in Article Five itself doesn't say the Senate can't be killed; it says "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate."

You could abolish the Senate if all states agree to remove equal Senate suffrage.

> that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

Above is the relevant section of Article Five. If every state agrees to removing the Senate, the Senate could be killed off entirely.

Failing that, it may be possible to remove any power the Senate has in an amendment and grant states the ability to not have members of the Senate if they so choose, with the Senate to be abolished if no state puts forth a senator.

Of course, such an amendment is virtually impossible to get passed considering that it would greatly reduce the power of states like North Dakota that have tiny populations.

Just the Senate? I'd gladly accept just proportional representation in the House, as long as the Senate is restricted from meddling in party politics, and just oversees the division of power between the federal level and the states, and the constitutionality of laws.

I don't think "restricted from meddling in party politics" means anything unless you want to establish another political body with the power to overrule the Senate if they think they are "meddling".

Also, it is the Supreme Court that has the job of determining the constitutionality of laws.

I wonder, does the European Space Agency have the same problem? They have the same potential for conflict of interest, but perhaps individual politicians have less say in how money is spent.

No, he is trying to get re-elected, which is his job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interests

all of this, every time: mayday.us

It's a wealth transfer, from the rest of us to the people of a region whose most valuable export is congressional creativity.

This is painful, because you can support and institution while hate what happens to it. The same happens in the military. You can support our soldiers, but be sickened by base closure being turned into a political tool.

If I was in NASA management I would have stick it to the congressman by importing all labor - even the janitors from out of state. Let him then explain how the huge project is creating zero jobs.

How would that help NASA?

It might help you as a taxpayer, but it doesn't help NASA, so they would never do that.

I don't think pissing off congress is going to ever be in NASA's interest.

How is this NASA's failing? A congressional mandate to fund and build this regardless of the agencies needs is the failure. There's no need to display the agency in a bad light, especially if you have the information about what happened and show it was caused by other government involvement.

Who says it was their failing? Drift just means being pushed from one's target. It is acceptable (and usual) for drift to be caused by external forces.

I think drift in this case has a connotation of being aimless and directionless (eg being adrift). However, I don't think the article is blaming NASA. Any organization would be adrift after having the kind of success NASA did, then getting presidential grandstanding followed by congressional micromanagement for decades.

The real villains in this story are Congress and the President.

Unfortunately, this is a huge failing of large federally funded projects.

Contractors (and federal agencies too, to a large extent) have long since learned that the best way to get a big contract from the US government is to spread yourself out as much as you can, over as many districts as possible, in order to maximize your political pull.

Look at the supply chains of companies like Boeing, or defense contractors, and you'll see they have this down to an art.

This then leads to more and more entrenchment - there's less funding for truly innovative research because so much gets locked into those awful projects that are sacred cows and absolutely impossible to touch.

I don't really have a good solution. I strongly believe in federally funded research. Maybe something like the base closing commission should oversee all federal contracts?

I'm not sure if its fair to blame contractors completely in this case. The government, their customer, defined requirements for a project. Halfway through the project with ~80% of funds committed they decided that they don't need it anymore.

The US does this all the time.

For example, the Navy LCS program called for a fast ship that could patrol the coastline while traveling as quickly as a speed boat. Lockheed Martin designed the Freedom Class. They made a 378ft, 3,000 ton boat that can travel at speeds of 47 knots, or about 54 MPH. However the Navy was not very happy because they concluded that it wasn't survivable enough and that its armament was lacking. These are all things that should have been well defined at the start of the project. Especially considering that the speed requirement practically begged designers to make certain compromises in order to limit weight.

Not completely in this case.

But, take Lockheed, for instance. They are notorious for running supply chains that stretch across as many states/districts as possible so that whenever there are any possible budget cuts, their lobbyists call up several congressmen and talk about how many jobs in their district will be lost if a particular program gets cut.

There are no evil people in this system. Lockheed is doing everything it can to insure that it gets the maximum possible amount of federal funding. Each congressman is doing whatever they can to keep well paying jobs in their district. People vote for congressmen who can bring high status projects into their district.

The problem is that the interplay between the narrow interests of each individual player results in a system that's constantly stuck in shitty local minima.

> There are no evil people in this system.

Plenty of corruption though, I'd count corruption as an evil.

Oh, absolutely. I'm just saying, even if everyone was doing everything within the law, you'd still get suboptimal outcomes because of how the incentives line up for all the players involved.

The evil in the system in Congress whose members use their power to reward and punish, through tax law, funding, and directing other agencies in the government to take actions not in their own best interest; namely the military though they still seem to want to run the Post Office.

You could say this evil is a behavior politicians at all levels exhibit, the focus on bettering their position than good law or exercise thereof. It isn't just Lockheed playing the system, unions get involved too, as do the political parties. Look at all big government boondoggles, Big Dig, the bid for high speed rail in California, and such.

Being impersonally evil to people who can never hold you to account is merely the lowest-effort kind of evil to be.

I agree that if our politicians had to actually walk up to people and physically steal their wallets in order to pursue their own interests, some of them would not be willing to do it unless they had bodyguards present, so their evil does have limits.

I see a lot of defense of NASA here and rightly so it is a "hacker news" forum after all, what person here hasn't dream of being an astronaut at some point. And then the article does say they were forced to build it against their wishes...

But, NASA is guilty too. They increased estimated costs from $160M to $350. And took 3 years too long. Said nothing when they were forced to finish this project.

When the law that said "NASA shall complete A-3 project blah blah" passed this article should have been written. NASA should have raised a stink and so on. I don't remember ever hearing about it. Obama signed it. Nobody oposed. Work continued. NASA as an agency is not innocent here vs mean ol beuarocracy from Congress.

Think about it, if NASA wants people's support for space exploration, not saying anything publically and continuing to follow ridiculous demands from Congressmen, they are not helping their case. By association they are seen as accomplices in the "waste of taxpayers' money"

Are you going to raise a stink about the people who are funding you?

A previous poster pointed out the N Dakota oil boom likely raised wages and steel costs.

"Jacobs Engineering Group, blamed changes in the design, plus unforeseen increases in the cost of labor and steel."

I believe that. Given the project was supposed to be done in 2010 and all those people who are good at this type of labor can earn some serious money in the oil fields springing up in North Dakota and Texas, I can see some serious increases in labor cost. We really need to start thinking about infrastructure talents in this country.

Phrased another way: Congress elected to raise the costs on all Americans who drive cars or use electricity in favor of reallocating industrial inputs required to satisfy their desires to a project which doesn't support a space exploration program we don't have.

I lose geek cred every time I say it, but NASA is not a science agency which occasionally funnels objectionably high amounts of money to politically favored firms. NASA is a funding mechanism for politically favored firms which occasionally produces industrial biproducts which bear some loose relation to research. If space exploration wasn't an applause light among geeks because of science fiction, we'd have a strong consensus to defund the entire agency.

Hey, it also serves to employ aerospace engineers! Keeping them off the streets and out of trouble is worth a bit.

It's like they've never heard of the futures market.

This is just generally what happens when the government funds long term science experiments. My favorite example is the $1 Billion (inflation adjusted) MFTF-B fusion experiment at LLNL, which was completed the same day the gov't canceled the project: 2/21/1986. It was never turned on.

Any good counter-examples of private enterprise funding long term science experiments?

D. E. Shaw made a ton of money on Wall Street and then started a private biochemistry research company that's done a bunch of basic scientific research (including supercomputing) with many publications (including top journals like Science).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_Research

(I'm just mentioning this because it's interesting, not for any private-vs-government debating points.)

I do not mean to imply that pure capitalism is more efficient for scientific progress, just that massive waste is common when the government funds programs, and too often heart-wrenchingly so. Hopefully we can decrease it with better policy processes for medium to long term investments, and a more science literate population. In the meantime, there's a lot to learn from.

I think it's pretty unfair to say that this facility does not fit within NASAs new side-job of assisting commercial enterprise with vehicle development.

I'm sure that this facility would be useful to lease to aerospace companies such as SpaceX and Armadillo that will want to QA and optimize their second/third stage engines.

This facility could be a pretty huge competitive advantage to US space industry.

By the time that original program that justified the need of the facility was canceled NASA had already made a substantial investment of time and money building it. Only time can tell if this facility will help with future engine development or not.

I don't have any expertise in Space & Aeronautics, but I'd love to hear from anyone in the industry what they think about the completion of this facility.

It seems more like a monument of a raised finger, the Congressional middle finger to NASA monument.

I'm not sure why something congress forced them to do is an example of NASA's problems.

I am.

Anything that prevents NASA from putting its budget to good use is NASA's problem.

In a numbers focused article, this line kinda creeped me out.

"It had to swing open to let the rocket engine in, then swing shut and hold up under 40 pounds per square inch of pressure from the atmosphere outside."

In English it is all too easy to mishear "14" as "40". Given how much of the article seemed to come from verbal sources, I imagine this is why that happened. Still, careless.

I thought NASA has been on a decent rise as of late? Maybe I am biased given my love for their success with curiosity, but I feel like I have heard more good then bad out of NASA during the last few years.

A lot of the good stuff (Curiosity, etc.) gets a ton of PR, but that doesn't mean there aren't day-to-day problems that are massive impediments for NASA. The mere fact that successive administrations get to come along and yank on NASA's long-term planning like a dog on a choke chain is really damaging to NASA's ability to actually break beyond LEO.

Until someone is able to marshal enough political power to force a change to this constant interference (and protect them long enough to accomplish their mission), NASA is going to continue to have trouble. Great engineers can still do incredible things even with bureaucratic and political interference, it's just so much more difficult than it needs to be.

I worked as an intern on Curiosity project.

I estimate less than 1/10th of money spent on NASA goes towards space research. Even worse, they hire all the best engineers from the market. I hope that we will close NASA someday, so that we can start doing space research again.

There are two perspectives when looking at any job: project objectives and social utility.

The first sees a job as an effort focused on some project goals, e.g. designing a car, building a house, curing a disease, finding Higgs, running a restaurant, landing on Mars. The second sees a job as something simply done for money: those who do it need the proceeds.

Politicians have a tendency to put the social utility above project objectives. This explains situations where some jobs are equivalent to digging a whole in the ground only to bury it back again.

It's sad to see NASA come to this, too.

There is no social utility in digging a hole to bury it back. Targeting social utility would mean to run a business at break-even or even at a loss to provide value as a side-effect to the community.

The cost of restarting tower building from a hibernate state would be enormous. I think they did the right thing in continuing building even if the immediate utility was lost. It's not like they will never need such a tower. They can't use it _now_ and that's a different thing.

In perspective, the $300M do not compare to the $8B mentioned in the article. Hey, they don't compare even to the budget of a box-office Hollywood movie today. That should mean something.

There is social utility in digging a hole to bury it back. The utility lies in providing value as a side-effect to the community. The value is provided by strengthening earnings of the diggers and reducing the unemployment in the community.

What's missing is the project utility: nobody else needs the product.

It's a fair point that the test stand may be needed in future.

I've learnt a new word yesterday: sophism.

You can argue as well that breaking windows employs the glass makers and destroying cars employs the car makers. Yes, starting wars as well because it employs everyone.

You forget that, as a whole, the community is left without a window and the money to replace it could have been used for something else.

No, there is no utility in breaking windows and in digging holes just to bury them back.

Your examples include destruction of property which negates their social benefits of improved earnings and reduced unemployment.

Digging a whole is a metaphor for unproductive, but also not destructive work where the social benefits are not negated by other factors.

Imagine then the following (stretchy) scenario: an isolated village on an island.

Now the villagers start digging the hole in the ground. Mind you, digging holes is tough business: they have to eat and someone must pay for the food. If all of them work on the hole, who makes the food? But they are smart and the project manager arranges for some of them to cook the food while the rest of the village digs.

After a week the hole is done and after another few days the hole is filled back.

Now they sit at the campfire and think by themselves what great two weeks those were: they were employed.

Now compute the Gini coefficient for that island and compare it against the one for a neighbor where all the villagers skilled at cooking have jobs while all those skilled at digging remain idle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

While diggers dig they do not generate income (because a filled hole is not 'income' by itself). And the cooks don't generate income either because their work is not for their utility but for the diggers.

What does that say about the net result?

Think thermodynamics: What is the utility of burning fuel? If you end up where you started, you're just wasting energy and increase universe entropy.

>After a week the hole is done and after another few days the hole is filled back. >Now they sit at the campfire and think by themselves what great two weeks those were: they were employed.

And how is this - or how is the original NASA makework - different to a startup that burns through tens or hundreds of millions and then dies?

I suppose you could argue that the startup might have succeeded, and at least some people believed it would.

Some people believed the tower would be useful. Others knew it wouldn't be, but still thought the cash infusion would be useful - either for them personally, or for their community.

What is the difference? Because if we're going to be asking questions about the utility of makework and the social value of Keynesian welfare, we should perhaps be asking about the actual social and economic utility of most start-ups, and whether the fact that they're private sector boondoggles really does make them any more economically efficient.

The difference is that the tower was built and it exists and can be used for another project if not for the original one.

If you ignore corruption for a second (not that you should), the problem remaining is the original project died without a replacement in the near term. This looks surprisingly like a waste of money, since the tower has no immediate utility. However, it has long term value and that is important.

Doing busywork would have amounted to building the tower and destroying it to recoup the land value.

If corruption was involved, it should be investigated separately. But the tower should not have been scrapped for this reason alone.

The startup issue is much simpler.

Start-ups are started to generate value. They are ventures in a sense that you don't know exactly where they will end and if they end up nowhere there is no real problem.

However, identity function is not a venture. Investing in one makes no sense.

This is such a stupid framing to the article. The sixth paragraph states clearly why it was built and it has nothing to do with NASA drifting - it was being pulled:

"But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didn’t want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress — at the urging of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what."

Why condemn NASA for cronyism and Congressional stupidity?

I hate to say it, but this is why I don't see us going to Mars within our lifetime. At least not through NASA.

If they could fund a Mars mission over a 15 stretch, we could do it. Funding needs to match the goal and it has to be long term.

If the linked article is any indication, funding needs to vastly outmatch the goal.

A persistent failing in the U.S. system is the ability of congress to micromanage the minutiae of larger programs, all for pork barrel spending. Things like the gasket problems on the Shuttle SRBs, and NASA in general being spread all over the country are all related to every single Congressperson trying to get a little something to take home. In a perfect world, they would have to authorize money at an agency level and with no finer granularity. Of course, if that were the case no money would ever be allocated at all...

And this would be bad why? Snark aside, the federal government is out of control with no accountability. I don't even know how they could be held accountable.

The short version is, I think one of the main things that separates, say, the U.S. from the E.U. is the ability to shift vast quantities of money around the country in the guise of federal programs. It's spectacularly inefficient, but it also helps to set a floor on how bad any one area can get. If that's good or bad largely depends on your personal politics.

"And then Congress — at the urging of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what."

So it's not NASA's fault.

NASA accepted government money. This is the consequence they have to deal with. It is NASA's fault.

Why can't they use it to test other engines? Or rent it out to space-x?

Stop buying bullshit narratives against state funded science.

Rocket test stands are not limited to a single rocket model. The choice in 2010 was to spend $57m finishing a project that will undoubtedly see future use, or to abandon a $292m investment with 0 return.

Look for SpaceX to jump on this opportunity since they already lease testing facilities from Stennis.

SpaceX uses slight variants of their 1st stage rocket engines in vacuum, so they don't really need this kind of testing. And this test rig is 10x larger than SpaceX's current vacuum Merlin 1D needs.

This testing gets you valuable information about performance and stress characteristics which can allow you to make improvements to the rocket, either by changing its shape for better efficiency or by making it lighter where it turns out to be over engineered. SpaceX hasn't been doing this testing yet because it hasn't been necessary and building a test stand too expensive. Now they could.

SpaceX do need to test their methane rocket engine design, which is bigger than the Merlin.

It's not an argument against state-funded science. It's an argument against politicians using that funding to screw over the fundees.

Where was it built?

Oh yes, the south. Bastion of bemoaning government size while masters of government pork.

I'm just shocked it wasn't Texas.

>"What the hell are they doing? I mean, that’s a lot of people’s hard-earned money"

Yes that tower did indeed waste $1 of every US citizen.

As apposed to $3400 rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in a hundred year old building which is spiffy because it's due to market forces.

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