Why do space missions go over budget? John Kelly of Florida Today did a solid summary of some of the key issues in his Saturday column, based, it looks like, on a Government Accountability Office report on the same topic. The key points are similar to those I made here based on my experience writing a book about three over-budget missions across about 60 years of the American space enterprise. I wasn’t the first to make these points, either. Kelly’s/the GAO’s key ideas:
- Project teams are optimistic about their technical abilities
- NASA lowballs the costs of major missions thinking they’ll get more money if they need it later
- There’s not enough contingency (rainy-day fund) to cover the inevitable technical hurdles.
Points he doesn’t mention:
- Smaller missions go way over budget, too. Its just that the overruns aren’t as painful or visible as the James Webb Space Telescope type budget-annihilators.
- Once a mission gets going, NASA’s appetite for failure dries up, requiring less “aw, it’ll be fine” and more “prove it.”
- Cost overruns feed contractors and engineers, and while Congresspeople don’t like overruns on the one hand, they do quite like the work coming to their districts.
Elon Musk and Alan Stern had some interesting comments on this whole dynamic in the fifth paragraph of this post, particularly the punishing of on-budget, well-run missions by out-of-control missions.
