Graduate student Ouliang Chang and Professor Madhu Thangavelu of the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering are suggesting that NASA should build a nuclear-powered mainframe supercomputer center on the Moon. For some reason, Wired Magazine is taking the idea seriously.
Back in August, we wrote about the perverse incentives of government space programs, in which projects that underperform or overrun their budgets are rewarded with more money.
A new report by the NASA Inspector General, reported by the IEEE Spectrum, indicates the problem is worse than we thought. Perverse incentives are now so common in NASA programs that managers have internalized them:
Many project managers we spoke with mentioned the “Hubble Psychology” – an expectation among NASA personnel that projects that fail to meet cost and schedule goals will receive additional funding and that subsequent scientific and technological success will overshadow any budgetary and schedule problems. They pointed out that although Hubble greatly exceeded its original budget, launched years after promised, and suffered a significant technological problem that required costly repair missions, the telescope is now generally viewed as a national treasure and its initial cost and performance issues have largely been forgotten.
IEEE Spectrum points out that the same psychology permeates the Defense Department as well.
“Help us, private sector. You’re our only remaining hope.”
Popular Mechanics has published a short summary of talks given at the Air Force Association Air & Space Conference, including interesting views from two former NASA astronauts.
Today is the 50th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University, in which he called our the reasons for landing a man on he Moon. Kennedy’s speech remains one of the most famous and rousing bits of oratory in US history. Unfortunately, it was also one of the most misguided, and his words have helped to malform space policy for half a century.
What does the future hold for NASA and America in space? NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s statements on that question have shifted noticeably in the last few years.
In February 2010, General Bolden outlined a bold plan that would “enable our path beyond low Earth orbit through development of new launch and space transportation technologies, nimble construction capabilities on orbit, and new operations capabilities.”
Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts…. NASA will accelerate and enhance its support for the commercial spaceflight industry to make travel to low Earth orbit and beyond more accessible and more affordable. Imagine enabling hundreds, even thousands of people to visit or live in low Earth orbit, while NASA firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizon beyond Earth.
But in August 2012, USA Today reported that, “NASA chief Charles Bolden focused on Mars as the ‘ultimate destination for now’ for human space exploration in a meeting with the USA Today Editorial Board.”
This represents a significant shift in NASA rhetoric. In 2010, trips to Mars were included in General Bolden’s vision, but they were part of a much larger whole. Today, Mars is the raison d’être. NASA’s vision seems to have come full circle, returning to the same obsession which has informed NASA’s long-range planning (publicly or privately) since the 1960’s.
Until very recently, space policy has been a non-partisan issue. Even when politicians were divided on space-policy issues, that disagreement rarely aligned with party lines. Unfortunately, that has changed in the last few years.
One organization seems determined to throw fuel on the political fire.
A basic principle of economics says that if you reward a behavior, you will get more of it.
Unfortunately, government programs frequently have perverse incentives, which reward behaviors and outcomes which no one desires. Education is an example. If a private school does a poor job of educating its students, parents will remove their children and the school suffers financially, but if a public school performs poorly, it is likely to receive a budget increase in order to “fix the problem.”
In government space programs, managers who overrun their budgets can expect to receive additional funding. Managers who come in under budget may be targeted for future cuts. Their success proves they “don’t need” as much money. The system rewards managerial failure and punishes success.
A Mars sample-return mission has long been the holy grail of NASA’s unmanned science program. Given the publicity surrounding the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory, it isn’t surprising that calls are once again emerging for such a mission, whose cost is estimated at $5 to $10 billion – two to four times the cost of Curiosity.
There is little chane of such a megamission being approved in the current economic environment. That may be just as well. From a space policy viewpoint, the proposed sample-return mission offers a poor return on investment.
The proposed mission would return about one pound of Martian surface material to Earth – a meager bonanza considering the cost.
For that same $5-10 billion, we could send a human expedition to Mars. To get the cost down to that level, it would have to be a one-way mission. Burt Rutan and others have advocated such missions in the past. NASA does not discuss such unconventional concepts publicly, but sources close to the astronaut office tell us there is a great deal of private interest.
The tradeoff, in this case, seems to clearly favor the human expedition. Instead of ounces of Martian rocks in Earthbound laboratories, geologists would have the opportunity to study tons of Martian rocks in situ, while simultaneously establishing a new colony for humanity on another world. All it requires is courage and vision. There’s scant sign of such qualities among the invertebrate political classes of Washington DC, but the real America outside the Beltway hasn’t lost the pioneer spirit. Elon Musk may attempt such a mission sooner than anyone expects. The question is whether NASA can realign itself to assume a supporting role or lapse into irrelevance.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) are working on a new budget bill that would give greater stability to the NASA budget. Their bill would create a 10-year appointed term for the NASA Administrator and a multiyear budget cycle for NASA.
This plan has been endorsed by Johnson Space Center director Michael Coats, who complains about NASA programs that have been canceled by budget shifts in the last seven years. Coats “notes that if they were able to plan out four or five years ‘it would be amazing what we could do with our team.’”
The Congressmen are addressing an old complaint from some pundits in the space-policy community. According to these commentators, NASA’s success is impeded by the electoral cycle, which brings changes to the makeup of Congress every two years and a new President every four to eight years. Each time, there are major changes or minor tweaks to space policy, which make it impossible for NASA to effectively pursue long-term projects.
This bill is troubling for two reasons. First, because it attempts to insulate NASA from political control and the electoral process. Making unelected government bureaucrats less accountable to the American people is never a good thing. Wolf and Culberson justify their action by pointing out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enjoys similar protections. The problem with that analogy is that it’s not analogous. NASA is not a law-enforcement agency. It does not conduct legal investigations that may affect politicians and political interests, so the justification for long-term political autonomy does not apply.
Second, the bill fixes the wrong problem. What NASA needs is shorter planning cycles, not longer.