[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_Analyst_*]

Orbital, the company building the Dawn spacecraft, is doing this for the first time. Contrary to all the talking about doing this cheaper and faster and better than the majors (LM, TRW, Boeing etc.), they can't. It's not their fault, because is hard. What makes me mad is they are proposing to do it cheaper and faster and better. And a lot of people believe them. And wonder now.

Other topic, but the company building the Falcon rocket is talking about boosters in the Atlas and Delta range now, before their first launch ever. For much less money of course. Spaceflight is not cheap because it is hard and therefore expensive, not because LM is overcharging. They don't burn the money for joy, they test and test and redesign and test and test ... and sometimes fail even then.

Last example: During MPF and later MPL there has been a lot of talk about how expensive Viking was and we can do now better and cheaper. They doublechecked during the 1970ies, even tested chutes in real flight, and trusters ... They didn't with MPL and Deep Impacts camera. And used a very risky approch for Contours departure ...

Analyst

[mcaplinger]

Last example: During MPF and later MPL there has been a lot of talk about how expensive Viking was and we can do now better and cheaper. They doublechecked during the 1970ies, even tested chutes in real flight, and trusters ... They didn't with MPL and Deep Impacts camera.

Your post implies that spending more money decreases risk. It ain't necessarily so, at least not at all times and not linearly. There have been plenty of failures in programs where few expenses were spared: Hubble and Galileo, just to name two.

The MPL failure had little or nothing to do with parachute or thruster testing, and it's really hard to estimate how much more money would have been needed to find the problem. If a couple of people had been thinking just a little harder, a few more lines of code would have been written and there's a good chance we wouldn't be using MPL as a negative example.

[ljk4-1]

The following is quoted from the FPSPACE list:

From ALLEN THOMSON thomsona at flash.net

Thu Feb 9 12:59:02 EST 2006

Relayed from a source who does not wish to be identified.

******************

One of the things that nobody here seems to understand is that many of the NASA programs that are getting cut or placed under review have their own problems, and they are on the chopping block not explicitly because of the Vision for Space Exploration, but because NASA officials have lost confidence in their ability to come in on time and reasonably close to schedule.

For instance, DAWN suffered from sudden cost increases last year. But that is not the whole story, because what really made NASA officials worried was the nature of the increases. They occurred in parts of the program (the ion drive) that were supposed to be easy. So when DAWN started to experience cost overruns on the easier parts of the spacecraft, NASA understandably became worried that it would also experience cost overruns on the harder parts as well. They lost confidence in the management of the program and put it under review. Put a simpler way, DAWN would not be in danger of cancellation if the program was running smoothly. The Vision is not threatening DAWN.

The complete post is here:

http://www.friends-partners.org/pipermail/...ary/018939.html

[djellison]

they are on the chopping block not explicitly because of the Vision for Space Exploration, but because NASA officials have lost confidence in their ability to come in on time and reasonably close to schedule.
......
They lost confidence in the management of the program and put it under review.

As someone mentioned over at the HZ, pity they don't apply the same logic to Shuttle/ISS/VSE.

Doug