NASA’s scientific missions have enjoyed spectacular success. But significant cost overruns and launch delays jeopardize future missions.
The $273 million Orbital Carbon Observatory’s plunge into the Southern Ocean shortly after launch last month was a sobering reminder of the unforgiving nature of space exploration. But the ability to put a spacecraft safely into orbit is the least of the pressing issues facing NASA’s $4.5 billion science program. A bigger challenge than the rare but dramatic rocket failure is finding the money to pay for an ambitious, complex, and unique set of missions.
The squeeze on NASA’s science budget arrives as researchers in a host of disciplines (see graphic below) begin planning the next generation of missions. No one–lawmaker, NASA manager, or senior scientist–seems to have an answer to the ballooning cost of space science projects. “There’s no simple fix, or the situation would have been resolved long ago,” said a frustrated Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the new chair of the House of Representatives science committee’s space panel, during a 5 March hearing that covered both science and space-flight overruns.
The community is anxiously awaiting word on who will be the next NASA administrator. Last year on the campaign trail, President Barack Obama promised to increase the monitoring of global climate from space and support a new generation of robotic probes to other planets without throttling back on preparations for returning humans to the moon. The president’s preliminary 2010 budget request, released in February and lacking details, proposes a modest boost to funding for both science and human space flight efforts as part of the agency’s overall $18.7 billion budget.
But those increases do not begin to cover what NASA’s science program needs just to keep pace with the demands of researchers. The agency’s science honcho, Edward Weiler, says he needs $900 million more every year just to keep up with current earth science projects. “There is no greater thing than starting a new, sexy science mission,” he says. “We all love it. The thing that prevents me is I’ve also got new, sexy missions started 5 years ago that are costing more than they were supposed to.”
Back to the future
Complaints about overruns in the science program extend back to at least 1980. Back then, however, NASA’s entire budget equaled that of its science budget today. And today, there’s a much longer line of telescopes, planetary robots, and Earth-monitoring satellites waiting to be designed, built, and launched.
That queue, ironically, is due in part to the success enjoyed by scientists in plotting their future. Since the 1960s, astronomers have created a consensus decadal plan for the next generation of telescopes. Earlier this decade, the other three disciplines that depend heavily on NASA dollars–earth sciences, solar system exploration, and solar studies–followed suit. Providing the space agency with a clear set of missions and their costs has helped scientists make their case with members of Congress and NASA bureaucrats. “I’m a slave to the decadals,” says Weiler.
But that community process relies on accurate cost estimates. And when the costs soar, the process breaks down. The most infamous example is the James Webb Space Telescope, which astronomers pegged at $1 billion, not including operations and launch, in a 2001 report. The true cost likely will top $4 billion by its launch in 2013, forcing NASA to slow down work on a slew of other astronomy and astrophysics missions.
Weiler headed the space program from 1998 to 2004 before becoming director of Goddard Space Flight Center in nearby Greenbelt, Maryland. Last April, he was called back downtown to run the program after S. Alan Stern quit in a funding dispute with then-Administrator Michael Griffin, who left NASA in January. Stern made cutting costs his mantra, and he played hardball with project managers and contractors. But Stern also failed to win advocates for his cause and departed after only 12 months on the job.
“When I walked into this office, there were a lot of promises made out there, and communities were pretty happy,” Weiler said in a recent interview at NASA headquarters. But within days, he says, a team of independent cost reviewers gave him the bad news. “Over a 10-year period there were $6 billion of promises made [in planetary sciences] that could not be met. And so I was put in the position of being the bad guy.”
In the past, human space flight often tapped science to pay for its own shortfalls. This time around, however, the problem is within the science program–too many missions costing too much money. For example, technical difficulties led to a $400 million cost overrun on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which forced Weiler to postpone its launch by 2 years. The decision pushed back other planned Mars flights.
Mars wasn’t the only trouble spot. Few missions in either the solar studies or the earth sciences program were on budget and schedule. The Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO), a Goddard effort to investigate the sun’s magnetic field, is close to 2 years behind schedule and its initial estimated budget has tripled. The Glory spacecraft being prepared to study aerosols and black carbon in Earth’s atmosphere was more than 50% over its original $266 million price tag, and its 2008 launch has been postponed until at least the middle of 2009.
Such problems have triggered a round of finger-pointing. In 2007, nearly 100 earth scientists warned that the global monitoring system for understanding climate change was “at risk of collapse” because of NASA’s failure to promptly move ahead with its projects. Last month, solar scientists complained that nearly all of their proposed decadal missions have been delayed or deferred.
Weiler, in turn, blames the science community for its unrealistically low initial projections. “Scientists cannot do cost estimation,” he says. He notes that their numbers typically come from NASA centers, which assume that a low estimate will make the project more politically viable. “I won’t call it lying or cheating,” says Weiler. “It’s optimism.”
Such criticism doesn’t sit well with those who took part in the decadal studies, most of which were completed during Weiler’s first stint as science chief. They defend their efforts and resent what they see as his Monday-morning quarterbacking. “We got independent cost estimates as well as numbers from NASA–and added 10% to 20% as a fudge factor,” says Louis Lanzerotti, a physicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark and a member of the 2003 decadal panel for solar studies. “We had tremendous cost awareness.” Lanzerotti says his team worked hard “to make sure our report was credible.”
Joseph Alexander, a former director and current officer of the Space Studies Board at the National Academies, which oversaw the reports, says estimates have gotten better since the infamous James Webb episode. But he believes that even the solar decadal–the last of the four to be completed–“still didn’t have a rigorous process.” The next round of decadal studies will feature a much more rigorous cost analysis, he says, aided by engineers and managers with extensive experience in putting spacecraft into orbit. At the same time, none of the missions chosen for the previous decadal study will be grandfathered into the new study. “Anything not in the works gets thrown back in the hopper to be recompeted,” he warns.
No quick fix
Even as the decadal panels try harder, so too must NASA, according to independent reports presented at the 5 March congressional hearing. The Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit organization in El Segundo, California, found that only five of 40 NASA missions–mostly to do science–came in on time and on schedule, and that more than a quarter were at least 40% costlier than anticipated. Spacecraft grew an average of 40% heavier by final design. (Weight is a critical factor in boosting the cost of a mission.) And when one project goes over budget, “the resulting domino effect impacts all missions that follow,” noted Aerospace Corporation Vice President of Civil and Commercial Operations Gary Pulliam at the hearing.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported similar results. The congressional watchdog found that costs for 18 projects, the bulk of them science missions, grew by an average of 13% within 3 years–one rose by 50%–and were delayed by nearly a year. The study faulted NASA for moving a program into development before it has a stable design and for assuming that new projects will save money by drawing on the technology of previous missions. “Time and costs were consistently underestimated,” says GAO’s Cristina Chaplain.
Acting NASA chief Chris Scolese confessed to the House panel that the agency’s ability to pinpoint cost and schedule issues have been “less than desired in the past” and described early estimates as “at best, educated guesses.” But extending the lifetime of successful missions is also a factor, he said, because it shrinks the pot of money available for new efforts. In the agency’s defense, Scolese said NASA had no control over overruns and delays on half of the 10 projects cited in another GAO report. SDO, for example, has had to compete with commercial and military customers for an Atlas launcher. NASA officials say there was no way to predict the sudden paucity of launchers.
Prices taking flight. The cost of major missions for each of four disciplines has vastly exceeded estimates contained in the most recent decadal study for those fields.
CREDITS: NASA; SOURCE: NASA/NRC
The root of the problem, say several scientists who declined to be quoted for fear of retribution, is an iron triangle among NASA centers, lawmakers, and contractors. “There is a lot of fat at the centers,” says one researcher with years of experience on NASA science missions. Adds another: “Industry, academia, and the centers all know that NASA headquarters folds on the issue of cost overruns.”
Weiler disputes that assessment. “If you think we don’t get mean with contractors, go talk to some of the CEOs who’ve gotten an earful from me,” he says. And he did kill more than a half-dozen projects in their early phases during his previous tenure as science chief. But the big savings would come from canceling missions under construction, a step that requires taking on that iron triangle. Goddard’s SDO, for example, has won consistent backing from Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) despite the cost increases, and the large and influential California delegation protects efforts such as MSL based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The desire to preserve high-tech jobs is especially strong during economic downturns.
Weiler suggests that such increases come with the territory. “Can we forget that Hubble overran 300%?” he asks. “It’s the greatest success in NASA history, but I could give you a list of prominent people in the community who wanted Hubble killed during its development. I won’t, because it turns out many of them made a career off the Hubble data.”
Many space scientists agree with Weiler that most of NASA’s greatest science accomplishments suffered cost overruns and that such increases are unavoidable for unique missions. But will a new NASA chief try to shake up the current system in search of a better approach? That’s what scientists planning to choose what projects matter most to them for the coming decade are anxious to find out.
