NASA Mentioned in Republican Presidential Debate

GOP politicians are largely agreeing with the presidents actions?

What's the catch?

So, just two more years, right? Then a Republican will save us from evil privitization imposed by that evil socialist? Right? Right?

Hear, hear, Mr. Gingrich!

Bravo!

tinker

Gingrich implies that he wants to stop funding NASA in order to give tax payer money to the private spaceflight companies after the Republicans there had previously said that they were against subsidizing private companies with tax payer dollars:-)

Government investment in space technology has created a tremendous amount of wealth in the US and throughout the world. There would be no $100 billion a year satellite based telecommunications industry without tax payer investment in space. In fact, there would not have been a CNN to conduct the Republican debate or any other cable network without the American tax payer's investment in space technology.

And private space companies like the ULA, Space X, SpaceDev and Bigelow would not even exist if it weren't for the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax payer investment in space technology.

Marcel F. Williams

I just glad that Sarah Palin stands a better chance than these guys.

Apparently, to those people, the "space program" only means hauling freight to orbit. I wonder how many corporations would consider exploring Mars or a probe to the surface of a Jovian moon to have a valid business case? If missions like that could be justified from a purely business perspective, they would have been done by now- just like commercial communications satellites.

How would Pawlenty "refocus and reprioritize" the space program? He's already said: "if you can Google it, cut it". Fine- let Elon Musk or LM explore space on their own nickle.

Typical comments from Gingrich and the rest of the Luddites....

Regardless of the specific words from any of these candidates, what is noteworthy is that NASA's leadership and bureaucracy problems are now being recognized at a national level. Whether its the current Administration or the next one, I hope NASA will get some help and correction.

"Gingrich implies that he wants to stop funding NASA in order to give tax payer money to the private spaceflight companies after the Republicans there had previously said that they were against subsidizing private companies with tax payer dollars"

This is very poor reading comprehension. He was bluntly clear; "you mischaracterized me. I didn't say end the space program ... I said you could get into space faster, better, more effectively, more creatively if you decentralized it, got it out of Washington, and cut out the bureaucracy. It's not about getting rid of the space program ..."

You said: "private space companies like the ULA, Space X, SpaceDev and Bigelow would not even exist if it weren't for ..."

This sums up why you're having trouble with all this. You're treating it as a pride issue; who gets credit for what? I realize that a lot of fanboys piss on NASA in a certain way, but you don't have to play that game or think in those terms. Elon Musk doesn't. He is also blatantly clear, in interviews and such, that his goal is to get a handle on LEO access in a way that offloads some portion of cost to the private sector to enable grander public sector activities. In short, take care of launch so that NASA doesn't have to waste its time on things we did in the 1960s.

I do not see a moral difference between directing taxpayer money to private companies under scheme A that fails repeatedly and directing taxpayer money to private companies under scheme B. The funding and project development schemes are the thing that needs to be developed at this moment. I strongly suspect your only trouble with it is a pride issue. You might be letting the wrong people get to you.

Two very disturbing quotes here. First Gingrich's assertion...

"If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles. And instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure."

I have no idea where he gets this idea of what we'd probably have if NASA had done what he wants them to do. If you read between the lines it seems to be pandering to business interests at the expense of NASA, i.e. making business friendly noises without a lick of fact and nothing else.

And this exchange pretty much says it all: KING: Is there any candidate who would step in and say, no, this is vital to America's identity, this is vital to America's innovation, I want the government to stay in the lead here when it comes to manned space flight? Nobody?

[King looks for a show of hands, none of the candidates raises a hand]

And we thought the GOP was space friendly, we should all know better at this point, not like the Dems are any better. There isn't any politician on either side of the fence who cares about the long term space exploration future of this country. It's all about taking the pulse of the political winds and letting them blow you where they are going. It's campaign time after all.

Where was the Republican uproar when President Bush said we should go back to the moon? Wasn't that a "NASA, big bureaucracy" initiative? Republicans have had chances to act on their comments before and didn't. It is disingenuous now to blame the Democrats.

Private space companies have accepted large sums of taxpayer dollars and for all the hype have relatively little to show for it. And cutesy trips into space or near space for the spoiled rich does not constitute space travel.

We should return to the moon and establish a base there as a logical next step on a planned move out into space. The current idea of sending a crew in a tiny capsule to an asteroid is another one-shot stunt. Robots can and have done that. There is much science to be done on the moon and much to be learned about living on another body that will help us on the future steps to Mars and beyond.

When I hear Newt Gingrich in what sounds like ready-to-backpedal mode, I don’t think it means a thing.  Although he has long been a proponent of spending money on space exploration, he has also “suggested” for years that NASA has basically outlived it’s usefulness.

Like others with a similar stand, however, he has proposed no solid plan, that I’m aware of, for how to transition from NASA Space to a private-industry-based space exploration set-up.  You obviously can’t just shut NASA down on Friday and start from scratch somewhere else on Monday morning.  It will take time and a lot of money to transition from one to the other — and there are not short-cuts.

Steve

To be clear, although I'm all for increased commercial space activity, and a sensible amount of government financial support for it, you can’t completely eliminate NASA. There are still many functions which a more frugally operated NASA is the logical entity to handle, such as:

• Science research
• Science primary investigators
• technology transfer and dissemination
• regulatory interface between industry and government
• regulatory interface between the US and international partners

And lots of similar functions that release each involved organization from repeating for themselves (but limited to activities that sits in nobody’s critical paths) which has got to save money.

Biggest of all, some (relatively neutral) agency has to evaluate and develop mission plans, and act as a top-level management for “The Space Program” because any major transition to commercial requires that there be a continually cooperative effort. Simply throwing the door open to traditional competing aerospace companies to see where the market takes you, will take exactly nowhere in terms of sustainable space exploration (and later settlement).

Steve

Steve,

I helped Newt write the space chapter in his book Window of Opportunity back in the 1980s. Obviously it could be updated, but it mostly still hangs together. Some of his newer books have more up-to-date ideas, stressing prizes and other non-bureaucratic approaches.

You're right, of course, that it will take time and effort to transition. But we're already spending the money. We're just spending it on propping up the past, instead of transitioning to the future.

- Jim Muncy

By far the biggest problem isn't beuracracy. The problem is contractors and focus.

First contractors, you have companies like Northrop routinely low balling cost projections to win government contracts (this is a broader problem), and then have the final cost be far greater than what they promised. A classic recent example was for the UCAS-N UAV contract. Boeing submitted a $1.2 billion over five year bid. Northrop submitted a $650 million over five year bid. Northrop won, but later negotated a "funding profile" that raised the cost to $1.2 billion.

Read about it here (page 7): http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/killer-drone-secret-history/

Something needs to be done about these absurd cost-plus contracts and one of these contractors, Lockheed included, needs to pay a stuff price for overruns of their program. With the F-35, for example, how does the fighter's per-unit cost grow from $55 million to $110 million, largely on the back of a software package that is one third the size of Windows 7? The answer is, it doesn't. More space related, I'd love to see Northrop get awarded a five year ban for it's JWST failure, and Lockheed to have its MPCV contract renegotiated... sorry, I don't see $5 billion. I see about $700 million. No way does a capsule cost over five times the amount (including inflation) of what was spent on the X-33, which required more advanced technologies (including development of the Linear Aerospike engine.

It's a shake down, pure and simple.

The second problem is focus. We would have had a space shuttle successor ready to go by the end of the year (its 2011) if NASA figured out one course, and stuck to it in 2004. Instead it got, like every other manned space flight program since the 70s, a lot of ground test articles, a few prototypes and a lot of concept art. Without digging and looking at specifics, it's easy to mistake the SLS HLV for Ares V. Heck, as far as I know, there is exactly one article on the internet explaining how they are supposed to be different. But to someone who isn't a follower of manned spaceflight developments, the computer generated art of 2011 looks, you know, the same to 2003.

The point is, this was needless. Right from the get go, before one piece of aluminum had been cut, before one line of code written or one RFP distributed, it seemed people weren't interested in improving or modifying the Constellation architecture, and prefered to completely undermine it on one ground or another. Every hurdle, from a fear that the "stick" might tip over to vibrations in the capsule, was reported as near project-ending. The existence of NASA workers moonlighting as DIRECT acolytes was tolerate for years (try doing that in private industry).

This again, is a larger problem with government, not just NASA.

But in any event, that is largely superfluous. While I appreciate Newt's comments on the matter, and it shows he has at least thought about the economics of space travel, none of them have firmly thought it through. One day an American President will wake up to a world where China has put a man on the moon, and he will have to face his country. By making smart investments now, we can shrug it off by saying "Americans are already on Mars / Americans will be on Mars in 2 years time because of investments we made a decade ago". Or he can make some lame excuse that the country was there in the 1960s, and it really doesn't matter anyway. One is of a country actually working on doing a great thing. The other is of a country that is a lot of blabber, but little action.

I won't be supporting any of them, because frankly, they think to small. They love to blabber, but are walking into a disaster they can't be bothered to avoid.

You make a good point about the cost-plus-contract issue. Even NASA's cost-estimation software reflects the difference (more about NAFCOM -- which is referred to as "cutting-edge cost estimation software" -- available here: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20020048607_2002079472.pdf).
This "cutting-edge" software came up with the following (quoting from a NASA report to Congress this Spring):
“NASA used NAFCOM to predict the development cost for the Falcon-9 launch vehicle using two methodologies:
1) Cost to develop Falcon-9 using traditional NASA approach and, 2) Cost using a more commercial development approach.
“Under methodology #1, the cost model predicted that the Falcon 9 would cost $4.0 billion based on a traditional approach. Under methodology #2, NAFCOM predicted $1.7 billion when the inputs were adjusted to a more commercial development approach. Thus, the predicted the cost to develop the Falcon 9 if done by NASA would have been between $1.7 billion and $4.0 billion.
[In fact] ”SpaceX has publicly indicated that the development cost for Falcon 9 launch vehicle was approximately $300 million. Additionally, approximately $90 million was spent developing the Falcon 1 launch vehicle which did contribute to some extent to the Falcon 9, for a total of $390 million. NASA has verified these costs.”
So we have $390 million versus a range between $1.7 and $4.0 Billion. The former reflects private development in a lean commercial environment. The other the environment of NASA and/or the USAF.
Clearly, either NASA is content to pay far more than it should, is incapable of even modeling an efficient development, or its model is way, way out of sync with reality.
Cost-plus contracts play a big role, and NAFCOM models them, but you have to wonder whether one of the Old-Space companies could develop a launcher for a price approaching SpaceX's. I suspect they could if they tried, but that destructive reporting and oversight, and the carrot of cost-plus are inflating space development costs beyond all reason. But then, this is one reason Old Space hires lobbyists and conducts FUD campaigns by the likes of the Lexington Institute. SpaceX could be very bad for their bottom line.
My urgent questions are why Bolden's head didn't explode when he found out about this? Why didn't he order NAFCOM shelved or rewritten? Why aren't contracts based on NAFCOM cost estimates under review this minute? Why isn't almost every Old-Space company awaiting a visit from the inspector general? And why isn't NASA making plans to claw back some of the money wasted on these overpriced developments?
Don't take this to mean that these developments have always failed to deliver on their technical promises, or that commercial space will never make a mistake. The point is that the procurement process is terribly flawed, and because of that we have spent more and done less than we should have during the last 40 years.
For the same reason, we can hardly envision a logical HSF program until we have a handle on what the real costs are. No doubt we can do more on less money, but we have to blow the overhead and profiteering out of the system before we can even plan rationally.

"... More space related, I'd love to see Northrop get awarded a five year ban for it's JWST failure ..."

That sounds like a really good idea to me. Some way to smack a project without literally smacking the project; I mean we still _want_ JWST, so it'd be nice if we could discourage these kinds of overruns without axing projects that are more done than not?

...Is that a good idea? Has this sort of thing been done before?

Folks,

NASA succeeded brilliantly with the Apollo program 40 years ago, and today the Science Mission Directorate and the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate continue to provide value well in-line with their government budgets.

The "elephant in the room" is the Human Spaceflight (HSF) program. Despite valiant efforts by countless individuals over several decades, this program remains a square peg as the world has evolved into a round hole -- HSF in its current form just no longer fits with the external realities.

Those realities being a very constrained federal budget, development of significant commercial and entrepreneurial space capabilities, orders of magnitude improvements in information-technology compared to modest improvements for other technologies, and inherent economic inefficiencies of large, prime contractors working under cost-plus government contracts.

HSF is so out of alignment with current realities that even politicians can now plainly see it. And so discussions about NASA's Human Spaceflight program, once confined to a narrow aerospace audience, are quickly evolving into a national level debate -- something in evidence last night during the GOP presidential debate.

Simply put, this is what a paradigm shift looks like from the inside...

Thanks Jim.  It seemed to me that Mr. Gingrich, like many of the other well-known DC names, has been a supporter of space for may years, but his proposed ideas have always been short on details for bringing about changes, but to be fair, I guess that probably describes 99% of us who support space.  I may just be being cynical, but I've seen Gingrich back down from questions on space issues too quickly when challenged, so I don’t see him as a significant influence.  I wonder how President Gingrich would handle the current non-situation in space policy.

Steve

No doubt we can do more on less money, but we have to blow the overhead and profiteering out of the system before we can even plan rationally.

Nottt in any ones interest to blow the overhead and profiteering out of the system until now, thanks to Mr Musk and Spacex and a crippled country and budget
afghanistan war 100 billion a year

only in the interest of the American tax payer of non pork receiving states

If Boldoned made like this is criminal which it is!!
he would just make nasa MORE of a target.
Not in his interest

All ready nasa is a political target from both sides .

Classic good old boy rip offf.

much of NASA may pay the price inspite of all the wonderful things they have done.

only hope for manned space flight in usa is a chinese landing on the moon and them trying to claim it as their own.

sounds far out?? don't think so china about owns us now and soon will if things done change. day may come when we say we are going to war and china just says nooo has to do with debt not high tech war toys.

People who were hoping that a new administration would bring back the big NASA bureaucracy engineering of the Apollo glory days got a rude awakening.

ObamaSpace and RepublicanSpace aren't much different. Get over it.

The future at NASA will be driven by engineers writing crisp requirements specifications (something NASA can't do now) and professional purchasing agents.

Why is it that China seems to do a lot with little money ??? Could it be their space program is less corrupt?? They have a smaller space budget and have to work inside that budget maybe????
less (rocket science is expense)overhead and profiteering in their system so far??

Anyway I voted for W hoping to get a mars program. I got it and 2 wars hummm and wonder if constilation would still be running right down that dead end track if not for 911 hummm

Well, unfortunately doing this is extraordinarily problematic. The most recent, notable case was the A-12 Avenger II, which was canceled in 1991 by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Every carrier was envisioned to have 20 of these at the cost of $55 million a pop. That ballooned to $84 million, and after much back and forth during the end of 1990, the government canceled the contract, and McDonell Douglas and General Dynamics took them to court.

The result? Boeing (which bought MD) and General Dynamics are still in court with the government, as recently as last month. The government asked for all is money back, plus interest, and its been circling around appeals courts for years, with no end in sight.

It might be too late for JWST, but contracts need to have built in mechanisms whereby taxpayers can hit back at these contractors for failures. I mean they have no choice right? Lockheed Martin's exports are controlled by Congress. If they aren't making stuff, from radios to jet fighters, for the Feds, they don't have much of a business. They're essentially captive to what the government needs. The government should exploit that to get products at a reasonable cost and contracts that heavily favor it.

How much of a shakedown is it? Consider these Aircraft carrier statistics:

USS Ronald Reagan (launched 3/1/2001) - $4.5 billion

USS George H.W. Bush (9/6/2006) - $6.5 billion

USS Gerald R Ford (to be launched in 2012) - $9 billion, (class development is an additional $5 billion).

Now the Ford class is a significant advance in many ways over the Nimitz (of which the Reagan was the last "classic" Nimitz in a sense, since the Bush was designed to be transitional between the two). But is it twice-as-expensive advanced? What can possibly be in a single Ford Class that makes it cost twice as much as its predecessor, especially when it is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary carrier design.

It strikes me as odd that the Navy's response to this has been to go to a 5 year building plan rather than 4. Why isn't there a big investigation into WHY it is twice as much? Could I see it costing an additional billion-per-ship? Sure... those EM catapults are brand new and will cost more. But an additional $4.5 billion? Might as well build a 20 carrier fleet out of Nimitz's and get twice the capability.

And thats what bugs me most about all of this. Aside from the JSF, which is on probation, there seems to simply resigned acceptance to this. Getting back to more space-related matters, let's consider ATK's SRB. To turn the 4 segment SRB into a 5 segment one, ATK was allocated $3 billion to the job.

What?!

You'd think the SRB, of all booster systems would be the most modular. People have been talking about six, seven, even 8 segment SRBs on various evolved STS stacks since the 80s for all sorts of purposes. But the cost of adding one segment to the existing four is ten times what it cost to develop the Falcon 9.

I mean here's a diagram...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Space_Shuttle_SRB_diagram.png

Am I mistaken for thinking it should be as simple as sticking another copy of the "Forward Center" Segment right after it, and adjusting the computers that control it to expect the longer burn? It seems if there was a booster designed for cheap modularity, this is it.

So where's the money going? How do you spend $3 billion on that? Well you have to build a test article...oh wait no you don't, because you can recycle an older, booster for the Space Shuttle program, like they did. So you don't need to build something new really, just assemble the segments that you already have.

How much does an SRB cost? According to Astraunatix: http://www.astronautix.com/stages/shulesrb.htm

$23 million!

I realize SRBs burn differently in 5 segments than 4... but enough to justify $3 billion?

I mean this line of questioning can be expanded to so much. The MSL needed $700 million to control a "contamination" issue... so its going to cost as much to fix that as to buy ten F-18Es. Orion has $5 billion put into it already... oh really? Where? The heat shield that is being lifted from the MER program? The software that flies it? Oh yes. Lockheed Martin and it's creative accounting of software costs. How fun it must be to charge for something that basically can't be audited.

I mean yes, there has certainly been a bureaucracy problem at NASA. But even the most efficient bureaucracy in the world wasn't going to do space travel much cheaper unless it really starts asking tough questions about what things costs.

I have worked on cost plus construction contracts before.
Guess what!

cost plus are a rip off and should be outlawed !

but for the fact that the customer agrees to be ripped off. Did Mr and Mrs tax payer agree to be ripped off?

We have a whole industry based built on the cost plus contract and the customer can't afford it any more.

The parties over !

Ye your mission should you decide to take it Mr. Bolden is to try to make that change without getting to many people excited. Would NOT look good to point out the last 40 years have been a ripofff? sssssshhhhhh

Jonathan N and doesn't take a rocket scientistt have figured it out.

The first job of any contractor is to make as much money as they can for their stockholders. Additionally, they need to provide large quantities of money in the form of salaries and benefits for their management, and they also have to cover the salaries of the rank and file.

When you put those motives together with a bunch of NASA managers who (a) don't know what it takes technically to do a job, (b) have as a primary goal to control as large a budget and as many people as possible for as long as possible.

Then everyone is happy! The contractors are getting what they want. The stockholders are getting what they want. The NASA managers are getting what they want. Oh, you say the US taxpayer is getting ripped off? Are you trying to defame the company? Maybe the company will bring a legal suit against you.

It is ten years since I worked on NASAs "Space Launch Initiative" and could not believe the chaos I saw. For each of 10 tech components (Engines,avionics,etc.) for the next generation launch vehicle, NASA gave contracts to multiple companies without an organization to pull things together. Then it told them "Now cooperate to build a launch vehicle". Of course each company team working a tech area wanted to cooperate only with tech areas from the same company. So cooperation was scarce. Frustration was high. NASA did not know that somebody had to run the show. SLI was shut down without producing a product after 2 years and a billion ? dollars.

Also many of the NASA staff running SLI had never actually built anything. They were intelligent, dedicated, hard working, well-educated people but lacked the real world education that can only come from succesfully building something that works. One young manager repeatedly demanded that contractors deliver their Interface Control Documents (ICD) at the start of his task contract . An ICD defines, for one example, what data will be passed between a GPS and the onboard computer performing navigation functions. He had enormous difficulty accepting the fact that you first had to design the GPS and NAV system & their interaction before you could document in an ICD what data was exchanged between them. The ICD comes later, not at the start. Crazy. But you certainly don't tell your customer that what he wants is stupid even if you think it.

The next space station will be a commercial one.

NASA could do well to follow the path its on and support commercial crew and cargo development.
Additionally I would more urgently lend NASA’s expertise to Bigelow as the most plausibly cost effective module for that station. The SLS as a heavy lift would be well timed to loft the larger Bigelow modules with SpaceX, ULA, and Orbital serving the station and lofting the smaller Bigelows for a package price.

Can the cost of that packaged deal (module + launch price) be reduced to the point that it would appeal to a broader market; major universities, corporations, mining companies, hotel chains?

"And cutesy trips into space or near space for the spoiled rich does not constitute space travel."
It was equally true a hundred years ago that cutesy flights around the meadow did not constitute air travel. My point is, there are only two accepted techniques for doing something really big: (A) bureaucracies or (B) rich people. If you want to change the world, start by building toys for rich people.

It seems to me that no matter which side it is, the final goal is to turn NASA into a corporate welfare. All that NASA will do is request money from the 'capitol' to do something that will be really cool and get congressman 'XYZ' substantial re-election donation.

You and several others have happily found your JWST scapegoat-whipping boy -- Northrop Grumman -- but you need to support that with evidence. "Contractors plundering the poor US government via cost-plus contracts" is a traditional rant, but inapplicable here. There is no evidence that contractor abuse of a cost-plus contract played any significant role in the JWST program overruns. Rather, the JWST Independent Comprehensive Review Panel (ICRP) laid the blame squarely on GSFC and HQ, not the contractors. The executive summary exclusively blames HQ and GSFC, and does not contain the names Northrop Grumman or NGAS. The word "contractor" appears once there -- just before blaming GSFC and HQ for mistaking a major programmatic flaw for a minor contractor problem.

So there's an unmistakable message from that report - the blame is the government's, not the contractor's. The message you're promoting -- contractors are all filthy bloodsuckers -- comes entirely from your own prejudices and not from the facts of the JWST situation or the assessment of a panel of experienced aerospace professionals.

I do not work for Northrop Grumman, and never have.

For nearly 4 years a rather vocal group has repeatedly told us that: (1) anything other than the current Administration's [minimalistic] plan is unaffordable (even under a ~$20B/yr budget); and (2) there are commercial operators that can do a better job (most people think this means private funding).

As a result it's not surprising that many now think there's no longer a pressing need to continue pouring billions in taxpayer $$$ into a 'human spaceflight program' they didn't really care about to begin with. And, of course, they're quite happy with passing the buck to someone else and if that doesn't work in the long term, well, they really could care less.

We really need to be careful what we wish for. Some could also argue that with NASA having already sent space probes to all the planets in the Solar System (Pluto's been demoted and no longer a planet) there's no longer a pressing need to continue funding space science at the same level. They'll claim that we've already been pretty much everywhere in the solar system, and there are other agencies tasked with monitoring Earth from space (NOAA, DOI, etc.).

Yes, the public may appear to be inspired by science but for the most part they love the pretty photos but could really care less about conference papers. For instance, I'm worried that the average person is already getting bored with endless red dunes on Mars and hints of an environment that could have perhaps sustained life 3-4 billion years ago (in fact, if MSL doesn't find tangible evidence of current, or former, life it just may the last large-scale mission to that planet).

As far as public usefulness goes the funding for JWST would probably far more usefull in other research areas such as Fusion Energy. I can picture some people easily making this argument to divert some of NASA's space science funding over to DOE, or DOC.

It's obvious you're familiar with the cinematic theory of rapacious capitalism, but you have never actually worked in the industry.

When I propose the job in the first place, I have assembled a contingent of suppliers, and they have given me prices. The story I tell in the proposal must hang together with those specifics, based on technical, cost, management, and risk. Those become the initial baseline for the contract when it's awarded. Changes from that baseline must be approved by the customer (NASA). So you're right in your first post -- fundamentally it's the responsibility of the one writing the contract - NASA.

If you screw NASA or a Center through benign indifference to cost, or through rampant greed, they will remember, and in the worst case you may never win another AO from them in the future. It's called the "Past Performance Volume" of a proposal. That plus the terms of the contract plus the threat of project cancellation will limit your ability to run wild on cost. "Cost-plus" does not mean "do whatever you want and send me the bill."

However, if the NASA project manager is not paying attention, or is not running his/her own cost estimates next to yours, then big disconnects in the plan can go unnoticed or unchecked. That's what the JWST-ICRP blamed for the JWST cost growth. Both HQ and GSFC signed off at the project confirmation review despite what the ICRP committee called a flawed cost and schedule baseline. There's no indication that prior expenditures had been unwarranted, just that all the costs and risks had not been collected into a coherent and complete picture.

So take your Machiavellian fantasies of life in an aerospace corporation and indulge in them privately. When we're talking about these major programs, we must talk about the real problems and the real people involved. If you still want to blame the contractors, then prove your case.

The issue with cost plus isn't the obvious one of rapacious greed.

The issue is an endemic malignancy in the aerospace industry thats hard to get away from. Because we've built it in over decades into components / subsystems / processes / procedures / management structures ... and when we add more in, it must look a lot like what we had before. This is why the govt has cost modeling software that simultaneously a) gets right industry costing and b) can't get near SpaceX costs.

Why? Because industry costing has many, many built-in costs that can be projected - none of which are in SpaceX from the start. No magic here - any of them can simply do a absolutely completely clean sheet design and do same. A simple example of the issue.

I could lecture chapter and verse on many, many other examples in the aerospace industry that are like this. I believe that many vendors are financially sick (have been for a long time) because of this disease, which got institutionalized by Cap Weinberger and his idiotically simplistic "forced mergers".

But Papa's right here - listen closely. The origins of this problem was in DC with many thinking nothing of the practice. Til now.

The rules stink ... absolutely.

Many of us pointed this out decades ago. It was too convenient to be pushed back under the rug. Well, it's finally come home.

Papa's point was that you shouldn't go blaming when you don't know the whole story. The whole story starts in DC with an affinity for big projects and the ability to look the other way on oversight, structure, and costing - because of an aversion to reality means no one gets stuck being blamed - it just becomes another in a long line of loser projects. The right accepts them as a necessary evil of the failure of government, the left invites them as a form of social welfare.

What's happening now to the Republican's is that the bottom is about to drop out of the SLS due to unsupportable costing. In the cost adjustment we're about to be forced into, major vendors like PWR are being forced into a tiny survival footprint, where the future will depend on separating the sheep from the goats - some stuff continues because the cost structures are supported by active need, some stuff is created from scratch new with sensible cost structures to meet new need, and the rest goes away. Lots goes away.

Many are overreacting, because they are exposed and vulnerable. No one can even begin the discussion of how to rationally go forward. Because there are still many skewed games bargaining for life irrationally, and attempting to reestablish denial.

Thank you Chris Chyba. The biggest component of launch costs is the avoidance of rational pricing over 50 years in the industry.