Tag: budget

Independent review: NASA’s Mars sample return mission is in big trouble

9:27 am

Perseverance's first set of core samples, placed on the floor of Jezero Crater
Perseverance’s first set of core samples,
placed on the floor of Jezero Crater

An independent review of NASA’s Mars sample return mission (MSR) to pick up the core samples being collected by the rover Perseverance has concluded that the project has serious fundamental problems that will likely cause it to be years late and billions over-budget, assuming it ever flies at all.

You can read the report here [pdf]. After thirteen pages touting the wonders and importance of the mission to get those samples back to Earth, the report finally gets to its main point:

However, MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning. MSR was also organized under an unwieldy structure. As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.

Technical issues, risks, and performance-to-date indicate a near zero probability of [the European Mars orbiter intended to bring the sample back to Earth] or [the Earth sample facility] or [the Mars ascent vehicle] meeting the 2027/2028 Launch Readiness Dates (LRDs). Potential LRDs exist in 2030, given adequate funding and timely resolution of issues.

• The projected overall budget for MSR in the FY24 President’s Budget Request is not adequate to accomplish the current program of record.

• A 2030 LRD for both [the sample return lander] and [the Mars orbiter] is estimated to require ~$8.0-9.6B, with funding in excess of $1B per year to be required for three or more years starting in 2025.

Based on this report, a mission launch in 2030 is only “potentially” possible, but only wild-eyed dreamers would believe that. It also indicates that the budget for each component listed above requires several billion dollars, suggesting the total amount needed to achieve this mission could easily exceed in the $30 to $40 billion, far more than the initial proposed total budget for the U.S. of $3 billion.

None of this is really a surprise. Since 2022 I have been reporting the confused, haphazard, and ever changing design of the mission as well as its ballooning budgets. This report underlines the problems, and also suggests, if one reads between the lines, that the mission won’t happen, at least as presently designed.

The report does suggest NASA consider “alternate architectures in combination with later [launch readiness dates].” Can you guess what might be an alternate architecture? I can, and its called Starship. Unlike the proposed helicopters and ascent rocket and Mars Orbiter, all of which are only in their initial design phases, Starship is already doing flight tests (or would be if the government would get out of the way). It is designed with Mars in mind, and can be adapted relatively quickly for getting those Perservance core samples back.

Otherwise, expect nothing to happen for years, even decades. In February 2022 I predicted this mission would be delayed from five to ten years from its then proposed ’26 launch date. A more realistic prediction, based on this new report, is ten to twenty years, unless NASA takes drastic action, and the Biden administration stops blocking Starship testing.

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GAO blasts NASA for purposely failing to control the budget of its SLS rocket

10:21 am

In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.

This one sentence from the report says it all:

NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.

That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.

This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
» Read more

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NASA reveals three year delay in its New Frontiers planetary mission program

9:21 am

NASA last week revealed that because of “budget uncertainty” it will not begin accepting project proposals in its New Frontiers planetary mission program this fall as planned, and will in fact not begin accepting new proposals until 2026.

At a NASA SMD town hall meeting July 27, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, warned a potential extended delay in the release of the New Frontiers AO. “If the planetary science funding levels that are anticipated as a result of this tight budget environment are actually realized over the next two or so years,” she said, “it is unlikely we’ll be able to solicit New Frontiers perhaps not before 2026.” That delay was made official with the release of the community announcement.

The draft AO sought proposals for missions on six topics, as recommended by the planetary science decadal survey in 2011: a comet surface sample return, a mission to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a lunar geophysical network, a sample return mission to the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, a mission to characterize the potential habitability of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and a probe of Saturn’s atmosphere.

The New Frontiers program previously funded the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission to Bennu.

The article at the first link above as well as the NASA officials quoted attempt falsely to blame the budget problems on the Republican House leadership, which insisted that the committee which reviews the NASA budget as well as the budgets of Justice and Commerce cut 28.8% from among those agencies in its 2024 budget review. That committee (as well as the Senate) however was very generous to NASA, essentially giving it the same budget as previously, with only a 1% cut, while slashing budgets for departments in Justice and Commerce to make up the difference.

The real blame for this delay in NASA’s planetary program almost certainly falls on the Mars Sample Return mission, which has seen gigantic budget overruns that are apparently swallowing the entire future planetary program. NASA’s planetary budget can’t pay for any other new planetary missions as long as it must pay for the cost overruns for the sample return mission.

This is no surprise, as we’ve seen this movie before. When Webb’s budget ballooned 20x, from its proposed $500 million to $10 billion, it essentially shut down the rest of NASA’s astrophysics program, delaying or cancelling all other space telescope projects for more than a decade. Now the planetary program is experiencing its own version of this same pain.

The problem is the Mars Sample Return mission itself. Its design has been haphazard and sloppy and constantly changing. It is also reliant on older technology ideas that will soon be made obsolete by Starship/Superheavy. NASA would be wiser to delay that project to await the development of the launch capabilities that will make it cost effective, and let a fleet of other missions happen instead.

I guarantee however that NASA won’t do that, because it will require some boldness. The philosophy in Washington remains the same: Do the same failed thing over and over again in the vain hope it might work next time.

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West Virginia University: to save money it eliminates 32 majors instead of its bloated overhead

1:15 pm

West Virginia University logo
West Virginia University: An example of bankrupt academia?

Bankrupt academia: The bankruptcy of intellectual thought in modern American academia is finally beginning to percolate down to the bankbook, at least in West Virginia. On August 11, 2023 the administration at West Virginia University released a report proposing the elimination of 32 majors while also eliminating 169 faculty positions.

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources. The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

You can read the full report here. It is important to look closely at it, as it reveals some stark facts about how bankrupt academia remains. » Read more

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Biden reverses late Trump decision to move Space Force headquarters

9:00 am

President Biden yesterday reversed a late Trump decision to move Space Force headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, allowing it to remain in Colorado where most of the former Air Force space operations have been.

Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs has been the preferred choice of the top military space brass ever since the basing process began way back in 2018. Trump’s decision was made over their concerns that moving SPACECOM from its current home (previously the home of Air Force Space Command) would needless delay its full operational capability.

Biden, in the end, shared those concerns. “The most significant factor the President considered was the impact a move would have to operational readiness to confront space-enabled threats during a critical time in this dynamic security environment. U.S Space Command headquarters will achieve ‘full operational capability’ at Colorado Springs later this month. Maintaining the headquarters there maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel,” a senior administration official told Breaking Defense in an email. “A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced upon that command a transition process between the mid-2020’s and the opening of the new site in the early to mid-2030’s.

Of course, politics was involved as well, with Colorado lawmakers putting great pressure on Biden to make this decision. Alabama lawmakers now say they will fight the decision, but because of the relative speed in which new headquarters can be established, their task is difficult if not impossible.

That difficulty will be reinforced by the proposal of the Senate Appropriations Committee decision to cut the Space Force’s ’24 budget by $1 billion, a 3% reduction. That proposal also has support in the House, which suggests it will become law. Though the cuts are scattered throughout the agency, it will lack the cash necessary to make the expensive shift to Alabama, a fact that will hinder any arguments for making that shift.

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NASA puts off planetary mission competition for budget reasons

9:55 am

NASA has decided for budget reasons to delay the competition by scientists for a planetary mission by at least one year because of new budget constraints which the agency claims come from the budget limits imposed by Congress.

NASA has planned to release the announcement of opportunity, or AO, for the fifth New Frontiers mission in November, after releasing a draft version for public comment early this year. The release of the final AO would have kicked off a competition ending with the selection of a mission in the fall of 2026 for launch in the early 2030s.

However, after a debt-ceiling agreement enacted in early June that would keep non-defense discretionary spending at 2023 levels for fiscal year 2024, NASA tapped the brakes on those plans. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at a June 21 meeting of the agency’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee that the release of the AO would likely be delayed beyond November as NASA evaluates the implications of the debt-ceiling deal.

That claim is likely bogus. I suspect the real reason the agency has been forced to delay this project is because of cost overruns in other already existing planetary missions, most specifically the Mars Sample Return mission, whose budget has apparently doubled from about $4 billion to $8-$9 billion. Congress is likely not going to increase NASA’s budget in 2024, so this cost overrun forces it to find savings elsewhere.

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House committee imposes major cuts to Justice, FBI, Commerce

11:15 am

As had been suggested by its decision to not impose any cuts (or increases) to the NASA budget, the House appropriation subcommittee in charge of Commerce, Justice, Science-related agencies imposed all of the 28.8% cuts required by the House leadership on the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Commerce department.

Overall, the bill appropriates $58.4 billion for programs under the jurisdiction of the committee, a $23.8 billion cut compared to the current fiscal year. It eliminates 14 “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs in the covered agencies, cuts spending on “wasteful” climate change programs, and saves more than $50 million by ending the Biden administration’s plan to replace auto fleets at the Department of Commerce and Department of Justice with electric vehicles.

According to the GOP summary, the Commerce Department would see a $1.4 billion cut in discretionary funding, and the Department of Justice would see a $2 billion cut. Federal science agencies together would face a $1.1 billion cut under the bill.

The FBI’s budget is to be cut $1 billion, or 9% (an actual cut, not a reduction in the increase in spending), with $400 million of that coming from salaries and expenses. It also forbids the agency from spending a dime on its planned dream of a new posh and palatial headquarters in the DC suburbs, twice the size of the Pentagon and costing more than $3 billion.

This is exactly what Republicans should have been doing for decades, and were too cowardly to attempt. If an agency of unelected employees in the executive branch abuses its power and causes harm to innocent citizens, something the FBI and the Justice Department have been eagerly doing since Trump became president, then it is the responsibilty and obligation of Congress to use its power of the purse to cut those agencies’ funding.

Even now, however, no one should be confident these cuts will end up in the final bill. This is only the recommendations of one subcommittee. There are still many Republican cowards in the full House, and even more in the full Senate, who will gladly team up with the Democrats (who are all in favor of the abuse of power and the harm to innocent citizens) to reinstate the cuts.

Nonetheless, this is a start. It indicates that we might finally have turned a real political corner towards reform.

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NASA survives first budget review in Congress

9:51 am

The first 2024 budgets approved by Senate and House appropriation committees for NASA maintain about the same current numbers from NASA’s 2023 budget.

The House committee is recommending $25.367 billion, just shy of the $25.384 billion NASA has now. The Senate committee is proposing $25.000 billion, a greater reduction from current spending. Biden requested a 7.1 percent increase for FY2024, $27.2 billion.

In the House the Republican leadership is requiring this House committee to impose a 28.8% cut in the total money allocated to all the agencies under its control (Justice, Commerce, and Science). It appears the committee members have decided to find the cuts in the other departments, such as the Justice Department. In fact, this first budget review strongly suggests Justice is about to see huge cuts, something that corrupt and partisan agency richly deserves.

As for NASA, the Senate report [pdf] had harsh words for the growing expense of the Mars Sample Return mission, and proposed major cuts, including the possibility of eliminating the project entirely. Instead, the Senate committee preferred wasting that money on Artemis and SLS.

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Surprise! The cost for the Mars Sample Return mission is ballooning!

10:11 am

According to NASA, the cost for the Mars Sample Return mission could possibly rise to as high as $8 to $9 billion, more than double the $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion estimated by a 2020 review.

NASA itself has recently become very silent about the project’s expected cost.

NASA officials have been careful not to give any estimates of costs for MSR in recent presentations, stating that it will wait until a formal confirmation review for the program, scheduled for the fall, before providing an official cost and schedule baseline. That will come after a series of preliminary design reviews and a review by a second independent board led by Orlando Figueroa, a former director of NASA’s Mars exploration program.

Those earlier numbers were never realistic, based on NASA’s recent track record. The cost of its big projects — Webb, SLS, Orion, Roman Telescope — always grows exponentially, once the project gets going.

This cost increase however is a serious political problem for NASA and this sample return mission, as the House is demanding major real cuts in the budgets of almost all federal agencies. While I expect NASA to survive these cuts without great harm, a program that shows out-of-control budget growth might become a target by the House, which is likely why NASA scheduled its review of the sample return mission to occur in the fall, after the House approves its next budget. Better to announce bad news as late as possible.

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House Democrats propose and Republicans approve Space Force increasing spaceport fees

9:37 am

We’re here to help you! The House Armed Services Committee, controlled by a majority of Republicans, has approved a defense funding bill that includes an amendment, proposed by a Democrat, that would allow the Space Force to charge much larger fees for the use of its spaceports.

Committee members signed off on the legislation June 22, which proposes $874 billion in defense spending. The full House is slated to vote on the bill in July. Included in the bill is an amendment offered by Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif., that would allow the Space Force to collect fees from companies for the indirect costs of using the military’s launch ranges, like overhead infrastructure or other charges that a traditional port authority might impose on its users.

Today, per the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, the service is limited to collecting fees for direct costs like electricity at a launch pad. The law also restricts the Space Force from accepting in-kind contributions from commercial companies to upgrade its ranges.

The committee’s bill, if approved, would require commercial launch companies to “reimburse the Department of Defense for such indirect costs as the Secretary concerned considers to be appropriate.”

The bill also includes a Republican amendment that encourages the Space Force to charge other additional fees, or require private companies to do work the Space Force is presently handles.

Though the latter amendment might make sense, both amendments will likely achieve just one thing: making it much more expensive to launch from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. Whether those increased costs will be kept as low as possible is entirely unknown. We certainly should not trust officials in the federal government to do so.

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House proposed cuts pose no threat to NASA, despite the screams of agony

10:14 am

Proposed Republican budget cuts
Proposed Republican budget changes

Before even beginning this story, it is critical for my readers to understand that the worst any of these possible cuts could do to NASA’s budget in 2024 would be to bring it back to budgetary levels from most of the last decade, levels that hardly crippled the agency in the slightest.

The graph to the right, posted initially by Roll Call, outlines in detail the required cuts the Republicans in the House are demanding in the federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year. The percentages in the last column list the amount each of these twelve appropriation subcommittees must cut from their area of focus. NASA is part of the Commerce-Justice-Science category, which requires a total cut of 28.8%.

NASA’s budget in 2023 was $25.4 billion. If the House imposes that percentage cut to NASA, it would lower its 2024 budget to about $18 billion.

O my! We are all going to starve!
» Read more

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The modern corrupt legislative way of doing business: Know nothing, fund everything!

1:57 pm

Fill it in with any amount, regardless of facts
It doesn’t matter how much money is in the government treasury,
our government will fill this check out anyway, to the max.

This week the Democrat-controlled legislature of the state of California passed a bill allocating $150 million dollars from which cash-strapped hospitals could obtain loans to help pay their bills.

The state will give out the $150 million in the form of interest-free loans to nonprofit or public hospitals that meet certain conditions. The state will prioritize loans for medical centers in rural areas and those that have a disproportionate number of patients on Medicaid, the joint state and federal government health insurance program for the poor and the disabled.

Loans will have to be repaid in six years, though it will be possible for the loan to be forgiven if the hospital meets certain requirements.

In another news report describing the process in which this bill was approved and passed included one particular quote that illustrated magnificently the modern manner in which almost all American legislatures now function, from small city councils to Congress in Washington, regardless of party. As stated by one state senator during preliminary hearings before the bill passed:

“We don’t know how many hospitals, we don’t know which hospitals. We don’t know which areas those hospitals are (in), we don’t know anything. And now we’re asked to approve $150 million to be doled out without access to plans, without access to the finances that would give us the evidence to feel comfortable with this,” said Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat, during a Senate budget committee hearing on Tuesday. [emphasis mine]

» Read more

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