This still stuns me. How do you spend $8 Billion and not build a single piece of hardware???
Well, first you spend lots of money developing basic designs and doing feasibility studies. Then you decide it will be too expensive, and you scrap the designs and start over again. Then you come up with a ‘finalized’ design, and start subcontracting the design of sub-components to various companies. Then you scrap your design again, and pay off all the companies who design components you will never use.
In the meantime, you’ve set up a gigantic bureaucracy to manage the program, which has a fixed overhead. So now you’re tied into a minimum annual budget no matter what you produce. Then you start over, and start building a new design. Along the way, the Russians start scaling back what they are willing to commit to because of financial difficulties, so you have to scrap all kinds of components that you’ve already spent millions to design. In the meantime, a few years pass, and the salaries of everyone in the bureaucracy have to be paid…
The government is no stranger to massive cost overruns and failed designs. They’ve taken stabs at re-designing the air traffic control system and failed after spending hundreds of millions or billions. And I believe it was the post office that embarked on a massive computer upgrading program, spent something like 4 billion, and then gave up because the software design they came up with was horribly flawed and became totally unmanageable.
Or as Heinlein said, the definition of an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.
The whole fiasco with the ISS is one reason why I’ve come to decide that the biggest impediment to a robust space program is NASA itself. It’s great at basic research, but not so good at running large industrial projects.
But it still stuns me how someone could be soooooo bad at managing something that they blow $8 Billion and not have anything to show for it. Seems to me that the sensible thing to do (and I do realize that mentioning “sensible” and “government” in the same sentence is dangerous) would be for NASA to hire a bunch of science fiction writers (a lot of them are engineers, so this isn’t as crazy as it might seem), tell them they’ve got ‘X’ amount of dollars to spend to design and build the thing. Probably wouldn’t have to pay those guys a salary because they’re such space happy fanatics they’d be willing to do it for nothing (instant cost savings, I might add), and we’d wind up with something a hell of a lot better than we’ve got now and for far less money to boot.
Damn, a cheap and easy solution to the problem. There’s got to be something wrong with it.
Thanks for keeping this discussion going!
Another thought. NASA is government-funded which means that politics (public support) is key to their budget. Dan Goldin gave frequent “wow” speeches (“let’s explore this and that, let’s build this and that”…etc.) which in effect, lobbied the public for more support/funding. Hiring a bean counter suggests that the administration’s goal is for NASA to do less over the coming years. Consider this statement (emphasis mine) from the link I provided…
Good science should be one of NASA’s primary goals.
If I were part of the aerospace industry, which presumbably bought as much of a chunk of this Administration as the rest of Corporate America has, I would be greedily eyeballing NASA as a valuable research and development tool.
You need to get a head start on a military contract? You call your boy on the inside of the New Executive Building, he calls NASA, NASA contracts you to do the work you would have to do anyway, and funds it with taxpayer dollars. NASA gets a research paper, after you’ve applied for the patents of course, and everyone’s happy, no?
The only thing is, you need a bean counter to keep the grifting on the up and up. Hmmm…
(Consider the above to be an uninformed inquiry. I have no citations, just firsthand knowledge of how another besieged section of the Executive Branch has realigned itself to suit its benefactors.)
Well, in one of Larry Niven’s first-edition books, the Earth rotated in the wrong direction.
It’s those little details that’ll get ya every time.