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from the But-it's-only-$2-milllion-per-week! dept.
NASA spent a decade and nearly $1 billion for a single launch tower:
"NASA exacerbated these issues by accepting unproven and untested designs."
A new report published Tuesday by NASA's inspector general looks into the development of a mobile launch tower for the agency's Space Launch System rocket.
The analysis finds that the total cost of constructing and modifying the structure, known as Mobile Launcher-1, is "at least" $927 million. This includes the original $234 million development cost to build the tower to support the Ares I rocket.
After this rocket was canceled in 2010, NASA then spent an additional $693 million to redesign and modify the structure for the SLS rocket. Notably, NASA's original estimate for modifying the launch tower was just $54 million, according to the report by Inspector General Paul Martin.
<no-sarcasm>
Does NASA understand what a sunk cost is?
</no-sarcasm>
Related: NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS - but Forgot About Egress Costs
(Score: 5, Informative) by theluggage on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:50AM (7 children)
Used that way, a meaningless buzzword used to sweep past mistakes under the carpet and help incoming managers justify "not invented here/new broom" policies without learning from past mistakes. So, probably, yes - that's part of the problem.
Your 5 years of accumulated Moviepass subscriptions are certainly "sunk costs" (and were from day one) along with any processing fees you've sent to the former crown prince of Nigeria. That nearly-finished $100M bridge that just needs another $10M to become a valuable, working asset... well, you'd actually have to do some investigation into whether it was still needed and, if not, what the scrap value vs. demolition cost was etc. Or, of course, as incoming Vice President of Building Bridges you could just declare it a "sunk cost" and sell it to your nephew for $1... Thing is, to invoke "sunk costs" you need a well-researched evaluation (with no thumbs on the scales) of the potential value of the work to date (not just "can you get the cash back").
In this case, NASA had spent $230M on building a launch tower for a rocket that got scrapped and got an estimate of $54M for adapting it to the new rocket (presumably vs. a 9-digit sum for junking what they'd done and starting from scratch). The problem was that $54M somehow spiralled up to $700M - but I very much doubt that was because of any "sunk cost" fallacy as opposed
to political (NASAs job is to distribute government money to contractors who will lobby for us) and legal (if you cancel a large contract these days you are liable to be sued regardless of how justified you are, and it costs a fortune even to get a case laughed out of court) reasons.
Also, if after dumping the contractor you still need a frigging launch tower who are you gonna call? It's not some commodity product that dozens of companies can compete for. The real elephant in the room is that these over-running projects are the result of a fundamental flaw in the tendering and subsequent management process for complex, non-routine projects: result - completely unworkable bids with unrealistically low prices and impossibly short timescales based on ignoring the advice from engineers that would have failed anyway even if the management didn't move the goalposts after the contract was signed.
NB: From the wiki article "In other words, a sunk cost is a sum paid in the past that is no longer relevant to decisions about the future"... which excludes virtually all examples, even if the relevance is "don't do that again" - or, in this case, "fix your methods of predicting and managing the cost of projects!" - but, hey, no, that's hard and may involve difficult decisions and actually listening to those sweaty engineers and snobby scientists - better to write it off as "sunk costs" and pretend the past mistakes didn't happen.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:59PM (1 child)
How much is that in F-35s?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @07:37PM
A more useful currency comes in several denominations:
* representatives
* senators
* judges
Forger F-35s, how many senators is that worth?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: -1) by MyOpinion on Saturday March 21 2020, @06:27PM (4 children)
There is no "outer space": gas always expands into all available space, filling up its container entirely. Whatever "gravity" theory you come up with, and even in theory, cannot stick it to the outside of a ball against empty space, because gases expand into empty space. It is what they do, this is a fact of life, 100% verifiable 100% of the time.
Yet, some men want to convince you that there is some "outer vacuum" where they venture to, conveniently have their cameras off most of the time, "losing signal" despite the "tens of thousands of satellites", and see the world we live in from a vantage point that is thermodynamically impossible to exist.
I don't know what NASA do, if they are solely clowning around scamming you for more than $50 million a day, or if they actually do some work that they do not publicly disclose, but I surely know how gases behave because I can test and observe them all day long. And so can you.
Cool story, "sphere worlds inside a vacuum", not a single shred of proof though. Pure fantasy.
Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:00PM (1 child)
Get coronavirus.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:42PM
No thanks.
I'll wait until it goes on sale.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:19AM
Hilarious! But how do you explain that the higher you go from the Earth's surface, the thinner the atmosphere is? Obviously some sort of evil scientist trick probably already debunked on facebook.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:39AM
It still remains that there's many orders of magnitude less dense gas in space than on the surface of Earth, and it has a vastly different composition, mostly of hydrogen and helium, some which is ionized.
There's a variety of reasons that happens, for example, passing over the limb/horizon of Earth so that communication needs to switch from one communication node to another, or reentering Earth in which case, the spacecraft is surrounded by relatively high density plasma (visible from the ground, I might add) which blocks communication via radio waves.
Further, most of the "satellites" are bits of debris, unsuitable for any purpose, much less communication.