Comments on: Politicians who don’t want to do their job

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:24:43 +0000

Perhaps you should not look at every issue through the narrow viewpoint of your own political beliefs. Sometimes, when analyzing decisions, some actual thinking and understanding of facts are required. This bill would eliminate a lot of the sort of issues that plague the agency and make space exploration so expensive. Right now, NASA must stretch out development on projects like the SLS, JWST, and interplanetary robotic probe missions over several years to stay within its tiny budget (relative to the size of the entire federal budget). This results in substantially higher costs because of the costs of keeping required personnel while waiting on things like procuring parts. They could save a ton of money by say, doubling their budget for a couple years and speeding development of whatever projects are in the pipeline and then reducing it slightly over the next 8. This is why things like the JWST mushroomed in cost from less than $1 billion to over $8 billion.

By: wade

wade — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:58:16 +0000

in my entire 55yrs on this planet, i have seen time and time again, once the government gets involved with nearly Anything, it goes to hell in a hand basket.

By: wodun

wodun — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 21:54:48 +0000

Hmm, I think I need more information. It would be nice if NASA didn’t have to worry about congress cutting them every year. But NASA’s budget problems are mostly due to their cost overruns both in time and money.

NASA does need a long term strategy that isn’t changed every four to eight years. One of the things that I didn’t like about Obama’s canceling of Constellation was that getting rid of the Ares I meant the the entire strategy had to be scrapped. Tactics should be something that can change but the over arching goals and strategy shouldn’t.

By: Craig Beasley

Craig Beasley — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 19:49:13 +0000

I understand what you are saying about term limits and hire/fire issues for NASA administration, but these politicians do have a point that is not being addressed very well at all. NASA programs are often constrained by limits of production, and physical limits that demand that its programs have major milestones with timespans longer than an annual budget cycle. There is something to be said for trying to find a way to ensure that a program has the proper amount of time and money guaranteed to make the progress it says it can make, without having to have management cloister away for 1-3 months every year just to pull a story together to justify a program’s existence. Really, companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing, etc., they’re put through this gauntlet yearly as well, so this is a concern not only for NASA-centric work, but for the commercially defined stuff, too.

This is not to say that underperforming programs should get fat budgets and long timelines as some sort of entitlement, but I do think that it is a thornier problem than just advocating the end of NASA and leaving it to purely commercial interests.