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Some Sunday NASA News Vignettes

A few items on NASA stitched together . . .

In a Q&A with the New York Times Sunday Magazine, NASA’s Drew Shindell predicts that we’ll know less about the climate system if his group at NASA doesn’t get more funding:

If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.

To understand NASA’s budget priorities doesn’t require one to be a rocket scientist. This Reuter’s news story contains what may be the most laughable cost estimate from NASA that I’ve seen in a long time, for deflecting a killer asteroid from hitting the Earth.

[Former NASA astronaut Rusty] Schweickart wants to see the United Nations adopt procedures for assessing asteroid threats and deciding if and when to take action.

The favored approach to dealing with a potentially deadly space rock is to dispatch a spacecraft that would use gravity to alter the asteroid's course so it no longer threatens Earth, said astronaut Ed Lu, a veteran of the International Space Station.

The so-called Gravity Tractor could maintain a position near the threatening asteroid, exerting a gentle tug that, over time, would deflect the asteroid.

An asteroid the size of Apophis, which is about 460 feet long, would take about 12 days of gravity-tugging, Lu added.

Mission costs are estimated at $300 million.

NASA’s track record of cost and schedule performance does not lead one to optimism about any projection of costs, as indicated by this report from the Seattle Times:

Boeing received a bonus of $425.3 million — 92 percent of the potential award — for work on the international space station that ran eight years late and cost more than twice what was expected, according to federal auditors.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report set for release today that the fee was paid on a $13.4 billion so-called "cost-plus" contract where NASA reimburses all costs and pays a bonus for exceptional performance. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin received similar bonuses for troubled programs.

"NASA paid most of the available fee on all of the contracts we reviewed — including on projects that showed cost increases, schedule delays and technical problems," the GAO said in its report for U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., who chairs the House Science Committee.

Maybe they should have instead sent that bonus money to Dr. Shindell’s lab. Alternatively, if in fact we’ll know less in five years, maybe we should stop climate research altogether, as it seems like we know a lot right now . . .