[X] My Assistant

[Rakhir]

NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told To ‘Stand Down’ .

The decision to stand down, according to SPACE.com sources, appears related to budget-related measures and workforce cutbacks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051107_dawn_qown.html

Rakhir

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The trouble with blithely doing this for Dawn is that -- unlike the MERs -- it was accepted as the result of a competition in which one of the supposed central ground rules for the proposing teams is that you do NOT exceed the maximum possible cost that you stated in your proposal without getting cancelled. Allow a mission to seriously break this rule, and you open the gates of Hell: EVERY team will deliberately understate its mission's real cost, and then look innocently amazed when they tell you that they need lots more money than they thought, and that they're sure you'll provide it...

It may have been a mistake to decide to break this rule for Messenger, and in fact NASA did so only after considerable wrangling. They've already broken it much more seriously for Dawn -- they'll fly it, albeit delayed, even if it undergoes a cost cap overrun of fully 1/3. But no higher. Nor should they -- and maybe they shouldn't fly it even if the cost doesn't go that high.

By the way, Kepler has also totally shattered its cost cap -- its cost is now $500 million. However, as Andy Dantzler told us, that's now the problem of the Universe Division -- which now has custody of the Kepler project, and which has already decided to adopt Kepler as a "Strategic" mission that is therefore immune from the Discovery cost-cancellation rule.