N.A.S.A. is wasting time on failure after failure?

Question

should we shut the organization down or hold our leaders and those at the head of N.A.S.A. responsible

WASHINGTON - A former NASA manager issued a critical report Monday of the agency's "faster, better, cheaper" approach that has pushed the agency's engineers and scientists to crank out more frequent, low-cost and stripped-down missions since the early 1990s.

The report was written by Tony Spear, who worked on several missions and headed up much of the Pathfinder mission that successfully air-bagged its way onto the Red Planet in July 1997 on a relatively modest budget.

In his 18-page report, Spear wrote that NASA's "current mission failure rate is too high and must be reduced."

While there can be "honorable" failures, he said, most NASA duds in the past 10 years "can be attributed to poor communications and mistakes in engineering and management."

Spear, a veteran Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, was the top project engineer for Mars Pathfinder -- a mission that epitomized an econo-class space mission that worked. That project cost $270 million, a fraction of the budgets for NASA's more typical missions in years past, such as the Galileo spacecraft at Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft now en route to Saturn, which frequently climbed higher than $1 billion per mission.

The now-retired Spear was asked last July by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to help the space agency gauge and chart its "faster, better, cheaper" approaches to its missions; an edict that Goldin himself spearheaded when he first came on board to head up the ailing space agency in the early 1990s. To fulfill the task, he conducted a series of interviews and workshops at various NASA centers.

"As with any major human endeavor, there have been successes and failures in the stress and strain of venturing onto new ground, trying new things, taking risk to gain significant return," the report said.

However, "failing due to mistakes is not tolerable," it concluded, particularly when contrasted to failures occurring due to use of exotic technology or a spacecraft that encounters a strange, unknown environment.

Spear even tackled NASA timidity. The report, which lapsed into a folksy tone at times, advocates a reward system whereby faster-better-cheaper projects -- and those working on them -- would receive a "Badge of Courage."

The report also said:

Achieving the goal of faster-better-cheaper missions can invoke an infectious "team spirit "at NASA. However, some mission teams report that the fun had gone away after their funding resources were cut too deeply.
No magic is required to achieve all three elements of faster-better-cheaper missions. It's back to basics: lots of hard work and dedication, follow through on details.
There is a need to prod the NASA centers to better coordinate space projects.
NASA must watch for potentially high-payoff technology breakthroughs that can be a plus for space missions, as well as give the nation a competitive advantage.
In an interview with SPACE.com following the report, Liam Sarsfield, a senior policy analyst at RAND's Science and Technology Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-think tank, said that what NASA has experienced in the way of failures cannot be necessarily tied to the faster-better-cheaper way of doing business.

"NASA is facing problems that are endemic to the aerospace industry at large," he said.

"It's clear that teams in NASA, industry and the military are all experiencing burnout because they are moving too fast, trying to accomplish too much with too little," Sarsfield said. "The Spear report is an excellent road map. Now NASA has to design the right on and off ramps and they've got a lot of work to do."

NASA has long been chasing a faster-better-cheaper approach in its space projects, said Frank Hoban of the Institute for Public Policy at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. A 30-year veteran of NASA, Hoban said the agency is trying to be less risk-averse, a philosophy already in full swing in the commercial world.

"In the past, you weren't entitled to take risks. Today NASA is saying let's lose a few, but do them a lot cheaper," Hoban said.

He gave kudos to Goldin for pushing hard and demanding faster-better-cheaper space projects.

"At some point in time, this is what commercial space is all about," Hoban said. "You make it cheap enough so if you lose one, you haven't gone bankrupt. That's what this is all about. I think we're driving toward commercial space with thisand that's the name of the game."

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/business/spear_report_000313.html

Nobody is acknowledging my question of whether or not we should hold the people responsible accountable. I agree that research should never be given up on but I also believe that a failing system should be restructured or replaced.


If it isn't broke don't fix but if it is broke please do.

Answer 1

NASA suffers from three problems:
1: Chronic underfunding
2: Ever-changing priorities
3: Being a US Federal government bureaucracy

1 & 2 go together: Congress and/or the President will produce a new
"plan" which will only be partially funded - NASA will attempt to implement
it by robbing Peter to pay Paul (moving money between programs). The
result is that both programs do not fulfill expectations or down-right fail.

3 is true throughout the entire government, but it is glaringly obvious
here - any corporation would fire deadwood to keep themselves
streamlined. Theres a lot of talent at NASA, but there are a lot of lifers
who simply contribute to its size, not its mission.

When the agency was new, properly funded and had a single mission
(beat the Russians to the moon), it performed stunningly well. It attracted
the best and the brightest and used them to their full potential.

If all of the other non-moon/mars projects were jetisoned, I think you
would see a much higher success ratio. If the projects they were
chartered with were fully and properly funded, things would get better.
Certainly, some of the running costs would be eliminated by getting
rid of people who aren't effectively contributing to the end goals.

However, lets not forget that a HUGE amount of NASA's work has
nothing to do with space flight, but more to do with ground and air
navigation and propulsion technologies. There, it has been quiet, but
remarkably successful. They work hand and hand with the FAA and
the various companies developing aviation equipment to help guide
it into a workable future.

In any case, the "big products" - the high risk undertakings - will always
have high failure rates and though there are lots of reasons within NASA
that the failure rates are higher than need be, it does not alter the
worthwhileness of the endeavor. Its not clear to me that we can make
it commercially worth anybody's effort to go to Mars without major
guarentees from the government - the risks would be too high for
anybody's stockholders to want to engage.

In terms of money, yes, NASA isn't cheap. However, it has always
been easy to cut funding to NASA for more immediate needs. That
money is an investment in our future, both scientifically and
technologically. It may be that the "company" we're investing in has
problems, but there is no other company out there doing it, at least
at that level. Moreover, it is usually less than 3 cents of your tax
dollar. The "tons of money" that people keep referring to is psaltry
compared to the pork, etc, that the government spends elsewhere.

Personally, I favor the idea of creating a new section of NASA or
specializing Code-R (where their budgets come from), whose function
is to simply sponsor promising technology TOWARDS A GOAL. That is,
create prizes for small leaps in technology that get us where we want to
go. The people who run that department have to be smart enough to
be able to recognize what will work and plan, but they themselves do
not produce any technology. All they do is hand out prizes and figure
out what the next prize will be for (like the X-prize consortium).

They are actually beginning to do that. For instance, if you want to
make a killing, give NASA a design for a more pliant, thinner space
glove. You'll make a lot of astronauts happy too.

The point is, it reduces the risks so that companies are more likely
to undertake them, and it keeps NASA out of the low level management
of these programs.

I wouldn't do this with all of NASA, but I would certainly be trying to
figure out how to privatize the parts of it that can be.

As Dr. Hawkings has pointed out, if we don't figure out how to colonize
off the planet within the next century, the species will probably end up
destroying itself, either through disease, war or misadventure.

Answer 2

NO, NASA is NOT wasting money. They just need to stop running that place like it's a car dealership. The "faster-better-cheaper" motto sounds too much like an entrepreneurship style. One must remember that NASA is built up of mainly scientists, researchers and engineers, not ENTREPRENUERS!! They need to provide more leadership, and training courses to teach their employees how to work better in groups and how to communicate better. They also need to stop putting all their employees under such pressure about saving money, because this is how these disastrous mistakes happen to begin with. What NASA needs to do is get back to focusing on returning to the Moon and then on to Mars... however this will take new strategies and a different approach than what they are already taking. It's NEVER a waste to conduct research in outer space, especially since space exploration is our future and much of what is gained in outer space research, can be applied to our life here on Earth.

Answer 3

NASA is a socialist state like most government organizations. Raises and advancement are based on time in grade and there is no reward for hard work, brilliance, or ambition. It may sound exciting to launch a rocket in to space but, after you've done it once, you become more concerned with the size of your house, sending your kids to college, buying a new SUV, and taking a trip to Europe. There is a fear of the political fall out from failing but, there's no reward for succeeding. You spend every day covering your *** instead of reaching for the prize.

Simply implementing a bonus program would lead to better results. Commercialzation of the space program with all of the risk/reward characteristics involved in any venture would lead to faster, more rewarding advancement.

Answer 4

It's easy to avoid failure. If you never try anything really hard, you'll never fail.

It's true for NASA. It's also true for you. I suggest that it would be really bad if you lived your life out never trying anything really hard. Failing is not necessarily all bad. It's just a part of life. The important thing is how you deal with failure.

Your question makes it clear that NASA is trying hard to deal with it well. This is a good thing, not a bad one.

Answer 5

Governments (and NASA IS a government agency) tend to reward failure with increased funding ("we can do it, we just need more money"), whereas successes such as Apollo get "rewarded" with being ended.

NASA has no profit motive, unlike private companies. Thus success has different meanings to them.

Answer 6

Faster better cheaper went out the window years ago. They don't do that anymore.

You cannot expect people to try things that have never been done before with 100% success. If you just want to give up when problems are encountered, then you are just a looser!

Answer 7

You can't have high quality AND low cost (in spite of what Consumer Reports might say) NASA is afraid of failure but with outsourcing, with cost cutting, they are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The days where technology was important are past. Unfortutately, we all lose

Answer 8

I AGREE....THEY ARE WASTING TOP DOLLARS TOOO........HOW CAN THEY KEEP HAVING THESES SMALL ELECTRICAL MIS HAPS....THEY'RE NASA DAMN IT!...

Answer 9

No. They are also wasting ALOT of $$$$$$$$!