Washington Post: “NASA’s $349 million monument to its drift”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8087
A 16 December Washington Post front-page, above-the-fold article pronounces NASA lost and purposeless. At great length, it ties this diagnosis to a single symptom that Bloomberg Businessweek summarized almost a year ago this way:
Early this year, NASA will complete work on a $350 million tower to test rocket engines at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. When it’s finished, the 300-foot steel-frame facility will stand unused—because the agency doesn’t need it. The engines it was supposed to test were part of a Bush-era space program that was canceled in 2010. And NASA isn’t developing any new rockets that would require the A-3 tower for testing. You might think congressional leaders scouring the federal budget for fat would have welcomed such an obvious, painless cut. Instead, its funding survived thanks to Mississippi Republican Senators Roger Wicker, who wrote an amendment to a 2010 NASA bill requiring the agency to wrap up the work, and Thad Cochran, who advocated for the spending from his seat on the Appropriations Committee.
A passage early in the Post piece calls the tower “evidence of a breakdown at NASA, which used to be a glorious symbol of what an American bureaucracy could achieve.” It charges that the aerospace agency “has become a symbol of something else: what happens to a big bureaucracy after its sense of mission starts to fade.” The passage continues:
In the past few years, presidents have repeatedly scrubbed and rewritten NASA’s goals. The moon was in. The moon was out. Mars was in. Now, Mars looks like a stretch. Today, the first goal is to visit an asteroid.
Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space.
In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift.
The useless tower was repeatedly approved by people who, in essence, argued that the American space program had nothing better to do.
A NASA write-up explains that the structure was meant to enable full-scale rocket engine tests at simulated altitudes of up to 100 000 feet using “chemical steam generators to reduce pressure within the stand’s engine test cell, thus simulating high-altitude vacuums.” The stand was designed to accept up to a million pounds of thrust, allowing full-duration tests (“the amount of time the engines will have to fire during an actual flight”) and letting operators gimbal the engines (“rotate them in the same way they must move during flight to ensure proper trajectory”).
The Post reports the project’s huge cost overrun: $349 million, nearly three times the original NASA estimate, in a project that was expected to take three and a half years, but took seven. The article quotes former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver:
Decision-making about NASA was twisted, she said, because of a mismatch between its huge funding and its muddled sense of purpose. “There’s no ‘why’” in NASA anymore, Garver said.
Instead, she said, there was only a “how,” a sense that something big still needed to be done. “And the ‘how’ is all about the [construction] contracts and the members of Congress.”
The Post also quotes Norman Augustine, the former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, who led a study of NASA: “We have to decide in this country whether we want a jobs program or a space program.”
The article concludes that the “tower stand has taken its place on NASA’s long list of living dead,” given that six other test stands have either been mothballed or are about to be.
At the end, Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold notes that “NASA would not allow a reporter to visit the disused tower up close.” The only way for a journalist from a national newspaper to be allowed “to see it at all was to pay $10 at the visitor center and take the official Stennis Space Center bus tour.”
In his human-spaceflight-focused NASA diagnosis, Fahrenthold doesn’t address exploration and scientific research via probes, rovers, and space telescopes.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.