Space program faces three threats

Space program's survival faces 3 key threats
 
John Kelly - Florida Today (Viewpoint)
 
Saving the space program is important to me, and to many of you.
 
Launching people and spacecraft from our soil to Earth orbit is important to United States’ leadership around the world and to our national security. A thriving, bustling spaceport is critical to a healthy, growing economy in Brevard County and across Central Florida. Venturing farther into our solar system is fundamental to expanding human knowledge.
 
The importance of the transition demands more attention, so the focus of this column throughout this new year will narrow to one topic: saving the space program.
 
That sounds big and broad because it is, but there are three main threats to the space program successfully navigating this post-shuttle period of transformation.
 
A clear, simple mission. Few goals are clearer than this: “Land a man on the moon and safely return him to the Earth.” That was NASA’s goal.
 
Today, ask 10 NASA managers, employees or contractors to state the agency’s mission, and you’ll get 10 different answers. None will be so succinct.
 
The problem is muddy, often conflicting, guidance from the White House, Congress and other political players in Washington. The agency’s management is fractured, and its programs are sometimes working at cross-purposes. Projects, some with multimillion-dollar price tags, crop up time and again that have little or nothing to do with exploring space or advancing aeronautics research (the primary reasons NASA exists). Most are birthed by a member of Congress trying to create jobs in his or her district, without regard for NASA’s mission. Others come from bureaucrats or scientists with neat ideas. You’ll have a hard time proving they’re off mission because NASA has no clear, over-arching mission. It has sets, and subsets, of directives and objectives that are so wide-ranging you could fit almost any project into one NASA silo or another.
 
Less waste. NASA wastes money, just like any big federal agency.
 
In small amounts, some is the almost-cliche kinds of lavish overspending you hear about in “Fleecing of America” style news clips. Some is the result of poor management oversight, like mis-spending using government issued credit cards or disappearing property that’s poorly tracked. Some is because it’s scattered across 10 under-utilized centers across the country, harkening to a bygone day when that would help muster enough political votes to keep the program going.
 
The most expensive waste is NASA’s epidemic of cost overruns and schedule delays, repeated so many times in projects over the last couple of decades that it’s a surprise if a space project comes in relatively close to its budget or schedule. Recent studies have indicated that the typical NASA project runs about 50 percent or more over budget. And, sadly, the reasons listed are the same year after year.
 
Add in the kinds of congressional earmarks noted earlier, and the budget’s loaded with unnecessary spending.
 
Agency leaders and some of their supporters in Congress argue NASA has for decades not been provided with enough funding to accomplish the objectives assigned to it and could do better with more funding. However, perhaps cutting some of the waste would allow money to spent on the priorities and lessen the gap between goals and budget.
 
Lose the “not invented here” mentality. NASA needs to collaborate more with private industry. It needs to collaborate more with the military. It needs to collaborate even more with other countries when it comes to space exploration. For instance, why isn’t the money that’s been invested in Boeing’s wildly successful X-37 mini shuttle leveraged to modify that craft as a possible cargo, or even crew, ferry for the International Space Station.
 
And, NASA continues to come back to wanting to develop brand new heavy-lift rockets from scratch — at a cost of billions of dollars and a decade or more of development time — rather than building upon the successful Delta IV and Atlas V rockets. They are capable of being upsized to perform that duty, and they have retired tons of development costs and risk in a decade of mostly successful flight. It was an idea once studied and dismissed, but worth revisiting as the agency moves forward in tougher fiscal times.
 
Those are some of the issues. I’m sure you have ideas about those, and others. I want to hear your ideas, too. I aim to utilize the column to shine the light on wasteful spending, off-mission projects, opportunities for collaboration and anything else you think is important to saving the space program.