NASA Cancels Satellite CO2 Monitoring Project

That’s not it. Having retired from the satellite design business, I can tell you where the money goes. A lot of design work goes into job before you even win the contract. Contractors are paid between 10% and 50% of the cost of that effort. 15 years ago, on a job like this, you’re talking at least $30M per contractor over the years it took to produce the proposal. Assuming only two bidders, NASA may have spent $30M total. NASA will take a year or two determining the winner. In most cases, thew contractors are forced to let the design engineering group go into other program. It’s way too expensive to pay them to just sit around and wait. So, after the winning team is selected, a new team of engineers has to be assembled/hired, as the programs they went to will not want to let them go.

The new team will have space experience, but they’ll still need time to come up to speed for this specific application. They’ll be writing specifications, selecting potential vendors, contracts with partners. During the specification development, NASA will descend with a small army of college whiz kids who know how to spell CO2, and not much else. They will require (and get) offices at the contractor’s facility that will dwarf anything the contractors get for themselves. They will have a million questions that require analyses and formal answers at the cost of time to continue development of the original contract. Eventually, a whiz kid will come up with a really great idea for a no-cost contract change (under $100K) that will greatly enhance the satellite mission.

An example: some whiz kid wants a sensor added. A contractor engineer will tell him that can be procured for only $30k. Awesome. Add it to the requirements. However, it adds 100 pounds to the weight of the vehicle. Larger fuel tanks will be required (an extra 500 pounds of RCS/ACS propellant. The TTCS will need more power and additional modules to support the command and telemetry required for the new sensor. All this adds $3M to the total cost – not $30k as the lone engineer mentioned. He wasn’t asked about the system cost – just the cost of the space-rated sensor. The whiz kids weren’t interested in the details.

This will happen a dozen times, requiring bigger RCS/ACS thrusters, additional batteries, larger solar arrays. A bigger booster is required at an additional cost of $50M. Systems engineering is now working to figure out all the impacts of adding these systems. The price has gone up $85M. Original orders are being thrown away (no one can use them) or stored indefinitely at high cost as NASA wants detailed tracking and carefully controlled environments.

A couple years of this and NASA finally figures out they can’t afford the CO2 mission because all the add-ons. Money was already spent on hardware that can’t be re-sold. There is no assembly yet. It is all the contractor’s fault because those dozen little add-ons were only supposed to cost $360k – not hundreds of millions of dollars in growing the satellite and booster. The NASA kids are upset because they know it is the contractor managers that screwed everything up.

The NASA whiz kids learned nothing (because it was the contractor’s fault), and they will return to screw up another contract the same way. Meanwhile, Taxpayers just laid out $170M for nothing.

Been there, done that. This is a brief explanation of how it happens time after time after time. I left the details out. A full explanation requires a book. Ask any system architect with 10 years of experience and they’ll be able to tell you plenty of stories. These systems are not simple. The contractor gets mud on his face, and nobody wants to blame the NASA whiz kids. We can all think of dozens of ways to stop this – and NASA program management knows dozens of ways to circumvent them.