NASA's
announcement yesterday to delay the planned October 2009 launch of its
car-sized Mars Science Laboratory rover until 2011 is the latest example of a
pervasive problem within the space agency to bail out missions that go over
budget at the expense of other projects, one former NASA official says.
"It
has gotten to be epidemic this decade" among NASA missions, said S. Alan
Stern, a planetary scientist and the former associate administrator of the NASA
Science Mission Directorate (from 2007 to 2008).
The jumbo
rover and its cadre
of instruments are geared to test the Martian surface for signs of past
potential habitability, continuing the work of the now-lifeless Phoenix
Mars Lander and the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, still trundling across the Martian surface.
A major
review of MSL in October concluded that the rover had a good chance of making
its 2009 launch window, but since then, technical issues and delivery delays
have tossed that out of window. The delays won't take two years to address, but
because of the relative positions of Earth and Mars, the next opportunity to
launch MSL won't
come until 2011.
Those two years
do, however, come with a price tag of around $400 million, NASA officials
estimate. And that extra money to keep the already nearly $2 billion project
up-and-running will likely come at the expense of other NASA Mars and planetary
missions, though officials haven't decided exactly how they'll make room in the
budget.
Testing,
testing and more testing
The
hardware for MSL, including the rover itself, its cruise stage and the shell
that will protect it as it descends
towards Mars' surface, are "largely assembled," said Doug
McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters
during a press briefing on Thursday.
But a few
technical issues remain to be solved, mainly with the rover's actuators, which
control everything on the rover that moves, including the wheels and robotic
arms.
All of the
rover's components must also be put through rigorous testing to make sure that once
MSL arrives on Mars, the mission can "hit the ground running," said
MSL project manager Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "There's a lot of testing still ahead of us."
Cook said
that MSL's complexity and novel landing system and science made it more of an
engineering challenge than previous Mars missions, such as Pathfinder, which
was a "babystep" on the path to "regaining our knowledge of how
to send things to Mars."
"The
number of new challenges were kind of really limited," Cook added.
Compared even to Spirit and Opportunity, MSL is "an order of magnitude
more complex," he told SPACE.com (meaning, about 10 times).
But Stern says
that MSL's delay and cost overrun are prime examples of a pervasive problem
within NASA to "reward" missions that go over-budget and punish those
that don't.
"It is
unhealthy" to the entire NASA program, Stern told SPACE.com, and is
the reason he resigned
earlier this year from his NASA job.
Sunk
costs and overruns
Here is how
it happened: NASA's first cost commitment to MSL came in August 2006 during the
mission's "confirmation review" for $1.63 billion, McCuistion said
during the briefing. Problems in the middle of 2007 bumped the cost up to $1.88
billion. The extra $400 million from the mission delay, which will cover operations
costs through 2014, will bump the lifetime cost of the mission into the $2.2
billion to $2.3 billion range, he said.
This cost
is far beyond the original price tag the mission was given, Stern said, with
NASA and Congress always upping the ante when asked. And "it's not just
MSL" that keeps raising its price-tag, he said.
NASA
officials say the reason for the ever-increasing costs is the new ground being
broken by flagship missions like this, which are attempting things no one has
ever tried before.
"We
have not been very good at cost estimates, and I take responsibility for
that," said Charles Elachi, the JPL director. "This has been just a
very complicated mission." Costs were extrapolated from past experience,
but the newness of the mission meant that extrapolation didn't work well.
Stern
acknowledges the difficulties in estimating mission costs and that often
problems can be unforeseen.
"There's
always reasons these things go off track," he said. "Sometimes
they're not even bad reasons."
The problem
comes when you "coddle missions that are always over-price." This
creates a "psychology" where deadlines and budgets aren't taken as
seriously, Stern said.
McCuistion,
Elachi and other NASA officials cite the importance of the mission science-wise
and the investment already made as reasons to keep MSL going at the potential
expense of other projects.
"A
mission like this ranks just behind a manned mission in importance," said
NASA administrator Michael Griffin during Thursday's briefing.
"The
investment of American taxes payers compels us" to continue funding the
mission, added Ed Weiler, the current associate administrator for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
But Stern
said that "sunk cost is a poor argument to make because it doesn't change
behavior." He added: "You can only look to the future cost and its
benefit."
Repercussions
The extra
$400 million tacked on to the MSL mission will likely have impacts on other
Mars missions, possibly spilling over to other planetary projects, though what
that impact will be is currently uncertain.
"We
obviously haven't had enough time to fully evaluate that," Weiler said
during the press briefing.
"We
think we can get by without canceling anything," Griffin said. Instead,
the agency will likely delay other missions.
Money will
first come from other Mars programs, but if enough can't be found there, which
Stern suspects will be the case, other planetary programs will be impacted.
"There
will be some pain in planetary and Mars [programs] to help us get through
this," McCuistion said.
Stern said
that the options in the Mars program were limited: data analysis of completed
missions (such as the Phoenix Mars Lander, the first so-called Scout mission)
could be delayed; operations of the two MER rovers could be cancelled; MAVEN,
the next Scout mission could be put on hold. But these options won't free up
$400 million, he said.
Mark
Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University who worked on Spirit
and Pathfinder, said the he hoped NASA "would protect the integrity of the
missions" currently in operation.
He added
that cutting off MAVEN right now would cripple the Scout program: "It's
only the second Scout mission, and if you start trying to save money there, you
effectively destroy the Scout program."
One option
to fill the costs of MSL would be to put off development of instruments that
aren't tied to a particular mission. These projects "aren't a huge amount
of money but can sometimes be easy targets when the budget gets tight,"
Lemmon said.
Budget cuts
have hit smaller programs hard before, Lemmon noted, particularly in Earth
sciences, where satellites aimed at studying issues such as global climate
change have been grounded, even though they are built, because it is cheaper to
maintain them here than launch them.
New
missions could also be affected, pushing them off to "the indefinite
future," which could delay the relatively rapid pace of Mars discoveries
in recent years, Lemmon said, potentially setting up another lapse in Mars
study like the 20-year gap between the Viking and Pathfinder missions.
Cook is
optimistic though that "the momentum [of Mars science] will
continue." "Mars will be there for us," whenever we get there
again, he noted.
Any options
will be taken to NASA advisory committees so the scientific community can vote
on which missions they would prefer to defer.
"This
is math that we'll be doing in public, we just don't have the answers for you
yet," Griffin said. "We're going to find the least damaging way that
we can."
Stern said
that this choice should have been presented to the scientific community
earlier, as soon as the mission topped the $1 billion mark. The choice should
also have been presented only to the Mars community, keeping the cost to those
scientists who most support the mission (the same would go for an astronomy or
lunar mission, he noted).
Above all,
what needs to happen is a wholesale change in the handling of over-budget
missions to preserve the integrity of NASA science missions and roadmaps, Stern
said. But it will take a number of changes — simply giving NASA more money or better
cost-estimating won't do it alone.
"There's
no magic bullet," Stern said.
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