Comments on: Washington Post: space plan “stalled”

By: Paul Dietz

Paul Dietz — Sun, 09 May 2004 12:49:41 +0000

This is just lazy speculation, but it’s also possible that continuing development ballooned because the stopping condition (a shuttle that satisfied the promises, or came close) was not attainable.

By: Dwayne A. Day

Dwayne A. Day — Thu, 06 May 2004 03:47:31 +0000

Mr. Dietz wrote:
“but Phase II (continuing development after the first flight) far exceeded projections.”

I know Howard and have worked with him, but never asked him about this. It is possible that “continuing development” was impossible to predict because the requirements kept changing. One could easily see how, once the thing is flying, officials are constantly redefining what they need to change.

As I understand it, there are a number of things that traditionally go wrong in predicting the costs of advanced development projects. One of the big ones is that the decision makers keep revising the requirements. As a result, the vehicle that gets built is usually not the one that was defined in the initial cost estimate. Of course, there are legitimate excuses and illegitimate abuses of the requirements process. Supposedly, “spiral development” is a way of getting a handle on the requirements creep problem, although I have no idea how it affects cost estimating.

By: Paul Dietz

Paul Dietz — Thu, 06 May 2004 02:34:53 +0000

According to McCurdy, NASA managed to get a good estimate for STS development costs by splitting the development into two phases. The first phase (which led to the vehicle flying) was close to budget, but Phase II (continuing development after the first flight) far exceeded projections.

By: Dwayne A. Day

Dwayne A. Day — Tue, 04 May 2004 23:39:24 +0000

Mr. LaValley wrote:
“…but NASA has and still has this nasty habit of dropping zero’s from many qoutes from the past. Shuttle build costs, Shuttle maintainance, Cost per shuttle launch…”

NASA’s estimate for the cost of _developing_ the space shuttle was remarkably good. I would have to look this up again, but I believe that it was only off by about 20%. Now considering that this was a completely new vehicle with many new technologies, and it was built during a time of high inflation (the late 1970s) that was not bad.

In addition, NASA actually _overestimated_ the cost of building the shuttle Endeavour and it turned out to be about 15% cheaper than they expected.

NASA was, of course, completely wrong about the costs of _operating_ the shuttle and also the flight rate.

There is lots of evidence that NASA is not really much worse than any other government agency at predicting the costs of high tech goods. Take a look at the SBIRS-High satellite, which was predicted to cost $2 billion and enter service in 2004 and is now predicted to cost $9 billion and enter service in 2007.

It is worth noting, however, that government agencies are often bad at predicting costs even for mundane and low-tech things. A large road construction project in Northern Virginia actually cost significantly more than expected because of stupidity by the government accountants. For one thing, they forgot to include the cost of inflation over the seven-year lifetime of the project (something that anybody in Accounting 101 should know about). They also made a lot of dumb assumptions, like assuming that the state could simply “take” property belonging to a local school district. When they told a high school principal that they were going to take his football stadium and running track for an on-ramp, he told them that they would have to provide another one, which of course they had to build.

By: Keith Cowing

Keith Cowing — Tue, 04 May 2004 16:54:38 +0000

Harold: read Dwayne’s article. Nothing is going to cost a trillion dollars. And no, NASA does not drop zeroes from cost estimates. It is usually the first digits that change. Again, read Dwayne’s article.

By: Harold LaValley

Harold LaValley — Tue, 04 May 2004 15:08:53 +0000

I agree that 1 Trillion is out of the question but NASA has and still has this nasty habit of dropping zero’s from many qoutes from the past. Shuttle build costs, Shuttle maintainance, Cost per shuttle launch, ISS project cost….
I think when most people look at a huge number, we all would like to know what we will get for the cash. The senate is doing the same. They are asking Cev, is this a new rocket or shuttle derived, does this include any new lunar or Mars landers, what kind of base and size is to be used….
They just simply want more details..
So far we know the return to flight estimate, number of shuttle flights to finish the ISS and very little of anything else.

By: Keith Cowing

Keith Cowing — Tue, 04 May 2004 07:06:58 +0000

Harold: the 1 trillion dollar number is utterly bogus. So stop using it. Dwayne put that topic to bed quite efficienty a week or two ago.

As for your posts: try putting them through a grammar checker – or have someone else read them – before you post them. They are rather hard to follow.

“Tangibleness” is not a word.

By: Harold LaValley

Harold LaValley — Mon, 03 May 2004 13:23:22 +0000

Also not knowing the out come of the MoontoMars commission hearings and of any mandates from the President. Those things may change what is done, how it is accomplished as well as when it will be done. Which to me anyways it makes no sense to speak of numbers that have very little tangibleness to them, when they can very so greatly from as little as 229billion to 1 trillion dollars. O’Keefe has given hard numbers with regards to all shuttle work and precieved cost to start any work on the CEV. Also depending on the direction of building from current rockets or from starting from scratch changes the totals as well. There is so much new hardware to design for both the Moon missions and for Mars of which a small amount of these items are common for use to both.

By: Rand Simberg

Rand Simberg — Mon, 03 May 2004 06:48:16 +0000

Who are “they”? Are you implying that NASA, unlike all other government agencies, is leakproof? The fact remains that O’Keefe probably wants to keep number close to the vest until he can justify them publicly.

By: Dwayne A. Day

Dwayne A. Day — Sat, 01 May 2004 20:37:09 +0000

It may be true that they are trying to get a level of comfort with them. But there are two problems. First, they have circulated the numbers to others. I actually heard about them months ago. So they are showing them to some people, just not the congressional committees. It is easy to see why the committees would be upset at this. Second, while seeking a level of comfort with their numbers, they must be getting mighty uncomfortable with the language coming from the Hill. So if this is what is actually going on, then NASA has decided to take the heat that the Post is referring to.