Pick any two!

The sign on my office door reads,

"Software: fast, cheap, reliable. (Pick two.)"

Unfortunately when it comes to engineering in the larger sense, you can't choose "better" if you've chosen either one of "faster" or "cheaper". Good engineering takes time and money. So Goldin demanded "faster" and "cheaper" and deluded everyone into thinking he was getting "better".

You can never achieve 100% reliability. The fear over at NASA was that $2 billion projects like Viking would be political catastrophes if they failed. Galileo (the spacecraft, not the scientist) was just such a failure. It sat in a warehouse for two years while the space shuttle fleet was grounded, so when it got out to Jupiter its high-gain antenna was stuck shut. Congress reacted like the stereotypical New Jersey mom: "A fortune, ****ed away!"

Better, Goldin decided, to send fleets of small, cheap spacecraft with redundant missions so that if one failed it wouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately there's really no such thing as "cheap spacecraft" only a "poorly built spacecraft", so the political sting is just as bad for the Mars failures as it was for Galileo.

What's the answer? We need to realize that space travel is expensive because it relies on reliable, cutting edge engineering, and such engineering is inherently costly. We need to accept that it's both costly and risky, and either decide to do it or decide not to do it. We can't "sorta" do it and expect favorable consequences.

I am comfortable with the "better, faster, cheaper" approach if only due to my fear that it's that or nothing. (But then I also work at one of the primary beneficiaries of this philosophy, so I may be biased.) I mean, we got MGS, Pathfinder, and the two failed missions for the same price as the Mars Observer failure, so I think we came out ahead.

The problem is that the political cost of failure is the same no matter the risk. Too, Goldin never really defined "better, faster, cheaper" - it seemed like more of a mantra than anything - so the engineers didn't know how to implement it and ended up cutting too many corners and too many of the wrong ones.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I am comfortable with the "better, faster, cheaper" approach if only due to my fear that it's that or nothing.

That's my fear too. What I wrote above sounds like an ultimatim: give us two billion dollars or don't give us anything. The taxpayers might solve the dilemma by giving us nothing.

In the culture of governmental funding, you always ask for more than you need, regardless of the nature of your work. But Congress knows that's what you're doing, so if you ask for a billion dollars they "know" you can really get by on $750 million. Congress and the taxpayers are used to hearing inflated cost estimates, so when NASA says, "No, we really need that much," it falls on jaded ears.

The problem is that the political cost of failure is the same no matter the risk.

Yes, and this is where the program failed. It was based on the assumption that the taxpayers would think, "The failure of a $100 million mission is more easily borne than the failure of a $1 billion mission." Rather, the taxpayers think, "More missions are failing than used to -- NASA is losing its edge."

Taxpayers regard missions as discrete entities of roughly equal stature, not pie-slices of budget allocations. Go grab someone off the street and ask him to compare the cost of the Mars Pathfinder and the Viking landers. The average person will assume they cost roughly the same.

Too, Goldin never really defined "better, faster, cheaper" - it seemed like more of a mantra than anything

And that's the problem: it's contradictory. What he said is not exactly what he meant. You simply can't have a "better" spacecraft if you shorten its development schedule and slash its budget. What he meant was that by making each spacecraft "cheaper" and "faster", he would provide a "better" space exploration program.

Goldin was thinking like an engineer. He was trying to localize and contain the cost of failure. If you have a budget of $1 billion, you can either buy one Lexus spacecraft for $1 billion or ten Ford Escort spacecraft for $100 million each. Granted, the Lexus will have a much greater probability of success than each of the Escorts, but if it fails there's zero return for the entire budget expenditure. If one or two of the Escorts fail, you may be out $200 million but some of your program will succeed.

That is correct thinking. If the probability of failure is significant and unavoidable, you limit the consequences of failure. So Goldin can't necessarily be faulted for mismanaging the agency's funding. But the public policy consequences are disastrous. Because Goldin was not able to sell the strategy and benefits of "better, faster, cheaper" to the public, he lost the battle. Much of the public sees the modern NASA as a bunch of buffoons who can't even convert pounds to kilograms.

the engineers didn't know how to implement it

Correct. Using a fleet of spacecraft depends on redundancy of tasking and independence of operation. You can't assign any of the Escorts a mission-critical role, because if that's the one that goes wonky your whole plan is down the crapper. But the Mars exploration plan does some of this. A spacecraft is given the comm relay task, and subsequent spacecraft are designed to use that. Failure of the comm relay means the whole fleet goes silent.

ended up cutting too many corners and too many of the wrong ones.

Also right. There is confusion at the mission planning level (which isn't my area of expertise) but also at the spacecraft design and testing level (which is).

From 1960 to 1990 the aerospace industry had evolved a procedure for designing, building, and testing spacecraft. That equates to an organization, procedure, and associated expenditure of funds. Now when you tell them they have to provide the same level of service at one-tenth the cost, they have to start over from Square One. They have to invent a new process and a new organization. Obviously there will be mistakes.

I would add that most taxpayers really don't understand the difference between millions and billions, either. They are just HUGE sums of money, in taxpayers eyes.

Relatedly,
NASA's budget has been roughly 0.85% of the Federal budget... last year it was about 14 billion. If a major project goes overbudget or wastes a billion dollars, that is about 0.06% of the Federal budget. But "we" hear this colossal number "ONE BILLION DOLLARS" and freak out...

So when a mission costing "HUNDREDS" of millions of dollars goes bust, it's seems immesurably huge... even if it is a fraction of the previously mentioned "ONE BILLION."

CJSF

__________________
Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

A related phenomenon is that when it comes to government-related activities most people think they are experts. There is some research on this, but I can't recall the cites off the top of my head. The point is that when Mr. X's car breaks he goes to a mechanic, and when his tomato plants aren't growing he asks an experienced gardener (or just lets the plants die), but as soon as he hears a 10-second soundbite on the "Drive at Five" about the federal budget or some new point of public policy he thinks he's qualified to accurately critique the policymakers. I think some of this spills into NASA territory as well. Example: A few years ago I was on a commercial flight to New Orleans (I think) and several minutes into the flight the pilot said we had to return to the airport because the aircraft had experienced "an engine stutter." All of a sudden everyone on the plane was an aerospace engineer, authoritatively explaining causes and effects of such a stutter. Of course there are various explanations for this phenomenon, from psychological to biological, there is even a class-oriented analysis, but whatever the explanation I think this is a part of people's reaction to NASA failures. People really do often think they could have corrected NASA's mistakes if they had been involved.

The real shame is that there are private citizens (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, the Bass family, the Cox sisters, etc) who, if they chose, could better afford to fund a space mission than the Gov't.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

<a name="20020129a"> page 20020129a {aka Night or day}?
1:dark at 4:17 PM EDT July 20th 1969
2:. PAGE 268 We Reach The Moon "4:17pm edt" [so i agree so far]
3:The landing site was 0.67 North Latitude by 23:23 East Longitude.
4:. page 269 it required 1.3 seconds for radio waves / 238,000 miles
5:The sunlight at the time of landing was at 35 degrees East.
6: "It was just just before dawn over the sea of Tranquality
7: with the Sun low over the Eastern horizon behind them."
8:thus? I must `poise that much of the landing light was
9:Earthshine, and that Earth shadows must exist at 4:22 [VIDEO]?
----------------------------------------------
I think the Landing Shadows ? VERY Valid
as its based upon TIME of arival
Posted 3 IMIX 19 MUAN
at the start of a 20 DAY Mayan Calendar ROUND
at 11:18 A.M. PST

JayUtah: NASA is losing its edge.

I'm not sure about that. They seem to be slowing down a bit.

JayUtah: Much of the public sees the modern NASA as a bunch of buffoons who can't even convert pounds to kilograms.

No, I don't think so. I think the general public still sees NASA as a bunch of scientifically intelligent people who do complex calculations. Some people at NASA are quite ignorant, but not everybody.

I'm sorry Jay, but it seems you're rambling a bit. I still enjoy NASA today, as much as back then.

No, I don't think so. I think the general public still sees NASA as a bunch of scientifically intelligent people who do complex calculations.

Sure, but that's always going to be a matter of opinion. Your view of the game depends on where you sit. It's difficult to distill the whole space exploration experience down to a single one-dimensional metric.

It's not as fashionable as it once was to work for NASA, so there's something of a brain-drain. But I don't think that's the real problem. It's not really valid to compare NASA of the 2000s to NASA of the 1980s or NASA of the 1960s. Today NASA isn't on a "wartime" footage. There's no race for some goal. The motivation is different.

If the media explains NASA's failures as insufficient testing or failing to convert measurement units, these sound to the public like elementary mistakes. They say NASA should be above such things. And they are correct according to that simplistic conceptualization.

But you and I and other insiders know how incredibly complicated and complex these things are, and how mistakes in high-stakes engineering very often come down to simple elementary errors. Rocket scientists are not immune from making dumb mistakes.

And we know that NASA is trying to meet and exceed mission expectations that were formerly funded at the billion-dollar level by systems engineered at the million-dollar level. It's very hard to maintain the same level of performance at a tenth the cost.

In the late 1950s and 1960s NASA had to solve some very fundamental problems with working in space. They evolved ways of dealing with them. My point is that in the 1990s they had to learn how to solve those same problems with only a small fraction of the resources. So it's a relearning process accompanied by the same sorts of failures we saw in the early space program.

In the 1960s some very smart people worked on those problems, nevertheless there were setbacks. So if equally smart people work on reinventing those solutions in the 1990s, we should still expect some failures. It's most certainly not a matter of NASA being dumber than it used to be. But it's easy for people to misinterpret the recent failures that way. It's natural to expect monotonic improvement.

My point is less that NASA has diminished in skill and more that public perception of NASA suffered from the effects of Goldin's strategy. The problem is that Goldin's plan was partly intended to improve public perception. It simply backfired for reasons that Goldin probably didn't anticipate.

There will always be people who think NASA is a waste of money at any funding level. And there will always be people who think NASA needs more money. It's that large middle-of-the-road group whose imagination we need to capture -- the couch potatoes who cheer when the lunar module touches down and jeer when Mars probes auger in.

As usual the key is taxpayer education. You and I may believe that NASA still has brains, but it's up to us to explain to people why NASA is different now, and what the challenges are, and the value of having patience while they engineer a different type of program.

Ah, I see your point Jay. You're suggesting NASA is more careless with it's failures than back then.

Ah, Jay, but if you listen to the right people, that's simply explained: only the Giza pyramids were built by The Aliens/The Atlanteans/The Time-Travellers/Your Auntie Bertha, while the others are evidence of Mere Humans trying to learn to copy them. See, they're proof that ancient Egyptians couldn't have built such perfect structures, when they couldn't even copy them correctly.

That's why Orion's Belt doesn't have 70-some-odd stars in it, only three. No, wait, that's back'ards, ain't it? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

The (the voices in my head can out-rant the voices in your head) Curtmudgeon

Or taxpayers just assume that every NASA mission costs a billion dollars or more. I've had a number of online discussions with people who talk about the "billions" wasted on the failed MPL and MCO missions without realizing that the two of them together cost about the same as Pathfinder (which in itself was much less than Mars Observer, which was much, much less than Viking).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You've also got to figure out at what point this ceases to be useful: it may be better to have ten Escorts than one Lexus, but you're probably better off having ten Escorts than fifteen Yugos. I think that's effectively where the recent Mars missions got into trouble.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

So when a mission costing "HUNDREDS" of millions of dollars goes bust, it's seems immesurably huge.

Yes, people have a hard time evaluating such immense budgets.

There is also a qualitative difference. Grab someone off the street and ask him which mission costs more: a Boeing 601HP communications satellite or the Mars Pathfinder. The answer will likely be the Mars Pathfinder, when in fact the Pathfinder mission cost about $150M while construction and launch of a Boeing 601HP costs between $175M and $250M depending on customer-specified configuration.

Because the Pathfinder mission is unique it receives more media coverage, and rightly so. But we tend to believe that one-of-a-kind things are inherently more expensive than a similar commercial product.

People often apply personal budget principles to national finance. That is, we start out with a fixed amount of money each month. We allocate that fixed amount with the idea that if there is a cost overrun in some area of our budget, it will have to be compensated for by subtracting funds from some other area. When it comes to national finance, we fund we believe is worthwhile to fund, to the extent we believe it's worthwhile. There isn't as much compensatory shifting of allocation. The U.S. doesn't have a fixed income.

The entire Apollo project is estimated to have cost $30G in 1970 dollars. By comparison, funding for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was on the order of $75G per year during that time. Social aid is generally held up as the natural opponent of space exploration, but if we had not decided to spend the $30G on Apollo, don't think that HEW would have received a $30G budget increase.

Consider also the visible effects of funding. An STS orbiter costs about $2G. If NASA wanted another orbiter, it would have a very hard time selling the need for it to the American public. That's mostly because the $2G is concentrated into a single piece of machinery not much bigger than a Boeing 737.

But if it were announced that HEW's budget has been increased from $75G to $77G, people would see the figure, nod their heads, and then turn to the sports page without another thought. Another sobering thought: the war on terrorism is estimated to be costing us a billion dollars a day. We spent half a space shuttle yesterday, and most of us probably don't know what was accomplished with that money.

Because NASA deals with single pieces of equipment with enormous price tags, the public perceives NASA's spending differently than it does other kinds of government spending.

Then there's the difference between the perception of success and the perception of failure. Mars Pathfinder was an enormous success. We cheered for a few weeks and then went back to watching sitcoms. We never really thought, "Wow, the did all that on only $150 million."

But when another $150 million spacecraft plows into the surface, we lament for years about how $150 million was wasted for want of a little testing.

It's all perception. Goldin didn't correctly anticipate how the public would react, nor did he anticipate the difficulty contractors would have translating the new paradigm into a mode of operation.

This is a problem even within NASA (as I know from personal experience). It's a lot easier to get a budget approved for something that costs a moderate amount per month for a long time than something that has a big initial cost but is a lot cheaper in the long run.

And a nit: the Pathfinder lander cost $150 million; the whole mission (including launch and operations) cost more like $265 million. Still a bargain, IMHO.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You're suggesting NASA is more careless with it's failures than back then.

Closer, but not quite.

Every NASA mission, regardless of budget, carries a distinct chance of failure. Even a Lexus can break down. At a certain point it stops being a matter of funding and effort and starts looking like the inherent properties of any complex system.

You don't put all your eggs in one basket because if you drop the single basket you lose all your eggs. Goldin's idea was to put NASA's eggs into several baskets so that the loss of any one basket wouldn't disastrously affect the egg supply.

"Careless" isn't a word I would use for this. It implies that NASA is not interested in mission success. That's not precisely the idea. NASA accepts a greater probability of failure for each individual mission and compensates for it by placing less responsbility on each mission for the success of the entire program.

If you graph programmed reliability on the vertical of a graph and budget on the horizontal, the curve looks something like an inverse proportion, or similar to 1/x. (Reliability is probability of failure; low numbers are desired.) The point is that at the high end of the budget scale, huge additional expenditures buy only small increases in reliability.

The goal is to move the budget line back toward zero and find the ideal cost-benefit breakpoint. Scaling back accepted probability of failure from, say, p < 0.01 to p < 0.05 may reduce cost by half an order of magnitude. If by doing that you increase the number of possible missions from, say, three to 12, the overall reliability of the program (encompassing all missions) is increased.

(There are qualitative procedures for scaling back costs too, but I don't want to bog this down.)

In engineering-speke, this approach decouples the system. The failure of any one component (mission) is limited in how it can affect the system (exploration program). This is a desirable circumstance.

So where did it go wrong?

As I already explained, Goldin was not able to communicate to Congress and to the public what I've just explained. I'm sure he did the best he could, but some people just never get it. That's not necessarily Goldin's fault.

Second, moving the cost line on the graph until a suitable reliability is obtained doesn't translate well into the procedures of an aerospace corporation. They achieve reliability in their product by following procedures and employing processes they've spent years or decades developing. They've found a way to consistently produce good results, and that comes at a predictable cost.

When you tell them they have to meet the same goals with an order of magnitude less money and half the time, they have to come up with new processes. They can't usually just scale them down. If a design process takes ten engineers one month to do, you can't just assign one engineer to it and expect an answer in two weeks. You have to invent a new process that can produce a usable result in two man-weeks.

It can be done, but it cannot be done painlessly. Goldin did not anticipate this, either. He didn't fully realize that if you force the industry to reinvent itself, it will have to go through all those Apollo-era growing pains again. It was hard for smart people to do it back then, therefore it will be hard for smart people to do it now. That means the reliability curve flattens and his carefully established global reliability estimates are no longer valid. The probability of failure increases for each individual mission, and the probability of overall program success decreases.

Finally you have to consider the linearity of the system. This is another way of organizing systems so that component failure is contained and manageable. Mission planners didn't fully account for this when implementing Goldin's program, so there are nonlinear elements in the Mars exploration program, such as the shared communication system.

Unfortunately here's where you get to a catch-22. You can only linearize the system by enhancing each component, and that's contrary to the component design philosophy of "better, faster, cheaper". So again you have to find a happy medium and again that requires another iteration through the design paradigms which historically take years to complete a cycle.

It's not a matter of being careless. It's a matter of how you distribute your capacity to care. You concentrate your efforts on where it does the most good. The only hard part is trying to figure out where that is. We're witnessing NASA undergo that process of discovery, and unfortunately the fickle and impatient public isn't cutting them much slack.

This is a problem even within NASA (as I know from personal experience). It's a lot easier to get a budget approved for something that costs a moderate amount per month for a long time than something that has a big initial cost but is a lot cheaper in the long run.

NASA has matured into a federal agency. In the 1960s it was primarily an organization for engineers, managed by engineers or ex-engineers. Nowadays it's a government organization managed by accountants and bureaucrats.

Still a bargain, IMHO.

No question about that. It's difficult to get hard-and-fast cost estimates for the Boeing 601HP too. When you're spending that much money, Boeing doesn't necessarily want its future customers to know how much it either gouged or coddled its previous customers. They're surprisingly tight-lipped. And now they're pushing the 701 series, which I've heard has a spacecraft sticker price of about $300M.

Jay, you know plenty more about NASA than I do, so I guess my statements would be pointless. I'm not an engineer or a scientist; I just read astronomy books.