Comments on: Improving SOFIA

By: Dark Blue Nine

Dark Blue Nine — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 06:09:57 +0000

“‘[I]t appears the Program is capable of more than 960 research flight hours per year,’ the report concluded, recommending that the hours requirement be balanced ‘with quality of science and other competing priorities â€“ such as technology upgrades, outreach activities, and researcher funding.'”

This is a specious claim. Per the table in this article, SOFIA averaged less than 15 hours of observation a month over almost three years from May 2011 to January 2014:

http://www.nature.com/news/sofia-irons-out-technical-kinks-1.14769

At less than 15 hours a month, SOFIA achieves less than 180 hours of observation a year. That’s a far cry from the 960 hours referenced above. In fact, it’s less than 20%.

“Hertz said NASA concurred, and would look at trades between flight hours and supporting instrument development.”

There’s almost no hours left to trade. 15 hours of observation is less than two work nights (assuming 8-hour shifts) a month. What can Hertz do? Reduce the hours to one night a month? One night every other month? This is like the SLS launch rate (once every two to four years) on a smaller scale.

The SOFIA project is in a death spiral. Development cost overruns cut its instrument suite in half, and years of delays made the few remaining instruments outdated and irrelevant. So to buy back the development of some modern instruments, the only place Hertz has left to go is operations. But contrary to the IG’s advice, there are almost no operations that can be cut because the operational costs have grown to the point where there are almost no operations.

It’s the SLS death spiral on a smaller scale. Almost no payloads and almost no flights. There’s nothing left to do but to terminate the project and redirect the savings elsewhere. Given the huge size of SLS and SOFIA relative to comparable projects, that’s not a bad option. SOFIA’s annual budget in larger than the rest of the suborbital program combined. That would buy a heckuva lot of astrophysics and space physics research on other platforms.

By: common sense

common sense — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:42:50 +0000

Which is in agreement with their planned cost for the whole program for 1 year I believe. I still don’t know how to come up with $1M per night even if I assume 1 night = 12 hours. And I am sure others have the same problem. Pretty sad I think.

So now what?

By: common sense

common sense — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:41:04 +0000

Yes and no. I have seen an effort to actually provide the “real” cost to some organizations but I don’t know if this is true all across the orgs and centers. It will have to come to this and soon otherwise NASA may end up with a lot of nice facilities unused. Just as SOFIA may end up.

By: common sense

common sense — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:39:15 +0000

Right. So you see my point.

By: vulture4

vulture4 — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:33:27 +0000

Of course if the cost is really $1M/night this suggests only 80 nights of observation per year.

By: vulture4

vulture4 — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:29:06 +0000

“Obama was free to extend the shuttle program.”

You might wish to read the commentary of Wayne Hale on this. He said no. In 2008.

By: vulture4

vulture4 — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:23:08 +0000

I might mention that the same thing happens with other NASA facilities like wind tunnels, aircraft crash simulators, etc. that are made available to industry “at cost”. Once in awhile industry rents them but the cost is so high they sit idle most of the time. One solution is to just advertise the entire facility for long-term lease to the highest bidder, as was done with LC-39.

By: vulture4

vulture4 — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:18:37 +0000

Yes, my guess on direct cost for flight time is $5000/hr or about $50K for the whole night. For the instrument crew for one night I would guess about 100 manhours or another $10K. So my thought was that they are trying to market this to a university, institute or science support contractor with income from grants. But I agree that they are taking the full program cost and trying to recover it, not just the marginal cost of one day of observation. $1M is a lot of grant money and I can’t imagine many groups with that to spend.

By: amightywind

amightywind — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:38:46 +0000

vulture4 and I are in full agreement again!

By: Donald F. Robertson

Donald F. Robertson — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:30:00 +0000

SOFIA is wonderful scientifically (though space based sensors and the infrastructure to cheaply change them out with, say, a Dragon, would be more wonderful; note that the money spent on SOFIA would come pretty close to paying for that and those space based sensors would be opperational 24/7), but SOFIA is irrelevant if your goal is space industrialization or colonization. It is $80 million / year that would could, and should, spend on other things.

— Donald