Dawn's demise

Dawn's demise

I wasn't going to post anything much about the Dawn mission cancellation. There has already been plenty of reaction from other space bloggers about it. That is, I wan't going to say too much about it until I saw this at the Planetary Society blog, where Dawn Co-Investigator Mark Sykes was whining about the demise of the Dawn mission:

"Yeah, well, but basically I've been hearing nothing but negative things out of [NASA] headquarters about this mission for years, and so when they did the stand down thing it seemed clear to me that there was a desire to cancel the mission."

Mark continued, "Here we were eight months out from launch, and they not only stood us down for three months but they forced a reduction in personnel at JPL and Orbital Sciences Corporation by more than two thirds." Orbital is the chief contractor building Dawn. Why the stand down? "They were really angry about cost overruns, tens of millions of dollars." The original budget was $373 million, and the mission had requested another 40.

Now, it isn't obvious whether the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla got that $373 million figure from Sykes or whether she got it from another source. The thing is, that number is totally wrong.
Sure, the Dawn mission might have already cost $373 million, but that was not the original budget. According to the Discovery missions page on NASA's website:

The cost for the entire mission (design, development, launch vehicle, instruments, spacecraft, launch, mission operations, and data analysis) must be less than $299 million. The development time from mission start to launch can be no more than 36 months.

(emphasis mine)(screenshot)

So, they already went 74 million dollars (25 percent!) over budget and were asking for another 40 million dollars, and were already several years overdue.

If Mark Sykes and Dawn Principal Investigator Chris Russell were in the private sector, they would be facing jail time for fraud. At the very least they would both certainly be fired along with everyone else in charge of the Dawn mission.

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