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NASA Spent a Decade and Nearly $1 Billion for a Single Launch Tower

posted by martyb on Saturday March 21 2020, @07:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the But-it's-only-$2-milllion-per-week! dept.

DannyB writes:

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

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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday March 23 2020, @06:09PM (1 child)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 23 2020, @06:09PM (#974507) Journal

    Yes. It used to be that if you wanted to get any senior IT staff irate, all you had to do was just mention IBM. Recall that M$ learned most, but not all, of their dirty tricks from IBM before refining them and taking them to the next level. Back then, what IBM was doing was considered bad enough.

    Now even the idea of having an IT department is long gone. All that are left in their place, if there are any staff on site at all, are just packs of M$ resellers. The double bite is that the M$ resellers are on company payroll despite working actively against their ostensible employer on behalf of M$.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @07:36PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 23 2020, @07:36PM (#974549) Journal

    The double bite is that the M$ resellers are on company payroll despite working actively against their ostensible employer on behalf of M$.

    1. A "double byte" is called a "word". Thus: "the word is that . . ."

    ;-)

    2. M$ resellers are on company payroll despite working actively against their ostensible employer

    Yes. Remembering back to 1989. I was a lot younger. A coworker of that time, formerly worked at Boeing (remember 1980s) on military contracts told me a few stories. One was how IBM had a sales shop right in the department. If you needed anything related to a computer, the IBM shop and sales sharks are right there on your coat tails. I'm sure it was to ensure that taxpayers got the best value from their money.

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    The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.