[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

"MSL Heat Shield Woes" - Aviation Week

Anyone else see this?

[Mariner9]

The 800 million figure was rather informal. I was at a JPL open house 4 or 5 years ago and had a chance to speak to one of the engineers on the project. I asked him about the estimated cost, and he said that they felt it would be no more expensive than MER. I was rather dubious about it, but he said that since there would be only one MSL, as opposed to two MERs, that the cost savings in only a single launch, flight operations, etc, should help contain the costs and it would not be any more expensive than the MER project.

Uh, huh.

Admitedly this was a very un-official conversation. But he made it sound like this was the internal consensus at the time. Right off the bat it occured to me that an Atlas V launch costs a heck of a lot more than a Delta II, so this didn't look like a very realistic expectation on their part. I had this very bad feeling that JPL was being too optimistic in their cost estimates, and overly ambitious on the project technical challenges.

Later I remember seeing numbers that kept climbing with every report, such as like 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion in Aviation Week. A few months ago when the third cost overrun was reported (and Alan Stern made them scale back some of the instruments) the figure had crept up to 1.7 billion.

If additional problems recently identified adds another 1-200 million, that takes the project cost as high as 1.9 billion.... so I thought it reasonable to throw out a ballpark figure of 1.8.

I'm not going to say "I told you so" because I've never built a MARS rover personally, but that bad feeling I had at the time seems to have come true.

[mcaplinger]

The 800 million figure was rather informal....
Later I remember seeing numbers that kept climbing with every report, such as like 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion in Aviation Week. A few months ago when the third cost overrun was reported (and Alan Stern made them scale back some of the instruments) the figure had crept up to 1.7 billion.

You'll forgive me if I call BS on this. A hallway conversation with somebody at a JPL open house? Media reporting? Are those figures with or without margin and reserves? Are they in real-year dollars? Do they include the launch vehicle? How about the RTG? How about foreign contributions? Is this through the end of the mission? What are the ops cost assumptions?

If you're going to condemn the whole project on the basis of cost overruns, you might want to really understand what the initial cost estimates were, what has actually been spent, and what is further costs are expected and authorized.

[Mariner9]

You'll forgive me if I call BS on this. A hallway conversation with somebody at a JPL open house? Media reporting? Are those figures with or without margin and reserves? Are they in real-year dollars? Do they include the launch vehicle? How about the RTG? How about foreign contributions? Is this through the end of the mission? What are the ops cost assumptions?

If you're going to condemn the whole project on the basis of cost overruns, you might want to really understand what the initial cost estimates were, what has actually been spent, and what is further costs are expected and authorized.

I don't really appreciate your flame. Someone asked where I came up with the 800 million, and I honestly replied it was an informal number given to me in a non-official setting. As for "include the launch vehicle?" ... yes, it was a number that was supposed to reflect total project costs.

As for "media reporting"..... Aviation Week is one of the most respected aerospace journals out there. Is it always dead on? No, but it used to be nicknamed "Aviation Leak", and foreign govenrments routinely used it as a source for intelligence gathering.

Last fall Alan Stern stated that JPL had come to headquarters with three different cost overruns. This latest one would be at least the fourth.

If you are going to slam me, then I would ask you to provide me with your source of information that there have not been serious cost overruns on MSL. Because my supposedly "BS" sources have turned out to be remarkably accurate from what I can see.

[mcaplinger]

If you are going to slam me, then I would ask you to provide me with your source of information that there have not been serious cost overruns on MSL.

How about the annual NASA budgets from the beginning of the MSL project to now? It's a matter of public record how much has been spent to date.