pissing away other peoples' money

pissing away other peoples' money

Back in early March, I wrote about the Dawn mission cancellation; in late March, NASA brought back the Dawn mission.

Originally, the Dawn mission was supposed to cost a maximum of $299 million, as were all the Discovery missions. The Dawn mission managers had that figure extended to $373 million. Now that Dawn is back on, it will cost $446 million, which is 49% over the original budget.

And now today Rand Simberg reports that the cost of modifying the shuttle solid rocket boosters to serve as the first stage of the Crew Launch Vehicle has risen from an estimated $1 billion to a new estimate of $3 billion, a whopping 200% over the original budget.

I guess it is easy to piss away money when other people are paying for it.

I for one am not willing to give NASA and ATK Thiokol the benefit of the doubt on this one, unlike Jon Goff. This stinks, and at the very least ATK Thiokol should lose the contract for the first stage of the CLV.

Here's an idea for NASA, proposed in the comments at Rand's blog by David Summers:

Wouldn't it be great if they offered a "prize", such as anyone that builds a comercially available launcher that can get 3 people to ISS for less than the predicted launch cost of the stick gets as an award half the remaining development budget.

In other words, if SpaceX (or any other company) could develop a vehicle to get 3 people safely to the ISS for a cost to NASA of, say, $500 million, then SpaceX would receive a ($1B-$500M)/2 = $250 million bonus. Or, if SpaceX could do it for $200 million, then they would receive a $400 million bonus.

Or, NASA could simply put out a contract, $50 million or $100 million or $200 million or whatever for delivering 3 astronauts to the ISS and back. Or, $500 million for the first company that can deliver 3 astronauts to and from the ISS, plus a contract for 10 additional flights at $50 million apiece.

That would bring the full power of the market to bear, and give 11 launches of three astronauts per launch to the ISS at a cost of $1 billion. In other words, for the price that was originally quoted by ATK Thiokol just to modify the SRBs to be the first stage of the Crew Launch Vehicle (ie not counting the development of the rest of the CLV or Crew Exploration Vehicle), NASA would get 11 launches.

Wanna bet that, even without such a contract, SpaceX (and others) have their own orbital manned vehicles flying before NASA gets the CEV off the ground? And at less than 10% of NASA's cost?

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