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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: 1) by khallow on Monday March 23 2020, @06:36PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 23 2020, @06:36PM (#974518) Journal
    I notice a couple of interesting phrases in your linked article: "currently 17 states divert more than $1 billion per year to private schools" and "Vouchers exist in many forms, sucking untold billions of dollars from our public schools." So in other words, considerable educational spending is ignored because it doesn't go to the right recipients. And, of course, the story obsesses over Arizona, the only state in the United States. A quick glance shows that spending per pupil [ed.gov] in the US has gone up massively, contrary again to narrative.

    Back in the day, Reagan aimed for a 30% cut out of educational capabilities for the US which was mitigated to only 10% damage as a "compromise". His real target was to just plain abolish the Department of Education.

    Ignoring that eliminating the Department of Education was probably a really good idea, we see that there was no long term decline in spending for the Department of Education contrary to narrative.

    Once again, we're ignoring that we're spending more on education and getting progressively worse results. I would look at the people demanding more funding without demanding more accountability as the starting point for why this happened.