Kepler Mission Will Launch In Spite of Itself
I know I rail against NASA on this blog probably a little more than is fair, but this time, I have to hand it to ‘em.
In 2006, the Kepler team asked for, and received, a 21% budget increase. They also said they needed more time, an additional five months, in order to get the thing into space. NASA gave ‘em that too.
Then:
This spring, the Kepler team - which consists of Ball Aerospace & Technology, Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) - told NASA science chief Alan Stern it needed an additional $42 million in their budget and an extra four months to finish the spacecraft. (Full article here)
NASA chief Alan Stern Says:
“My response was ‘no, [the Science Mission Directorate] no longer manages by open checkbook. You need to find a way to get it back in the box because I don’t have $42 million in the astrophysics program anyway,’” Stern recalled in a July 9 interview. (Same article).
Yah, no more money in the astrophysics program because he’s gotta pay for that ISS boondoggle. Who needs science when we’ve got a living room in space?
Anyway, he then tells them to go out and find a way to make the mission go without any extra money, that basically, they are out of luck.
Amazingly, the Kepler team responds with a request for an increase of 54 million! You’re going the wrong way dude.
How does ‘no, you’re not getting any more money’ translate into ‘Oh OK, he said ask for MORE money’?
I mean, what part of ‘no more money’ didn’t you understand?
Clearly this project isn’t paying attention.
So, with a don’t-make-me-come-over-there look on his face, Stern gives them one more chance to get it right or he’s going to cancel the project. He testified before Congress in May that the project was essentially cancelled anyway.
In what has so-far been an uncharacteristic demonstration of ‘getting it’, the managers come back with a ‘umm-ok-we’ll-do-it-for-what-you-gave-us’ response. The launch date took a hit though, now it’ll launch in early 2009, two or three months late. Stern said he could ‘live with that’.
Here’s the full story, I’m not going to go over every detail, I just wanted to roughly outline the sequence of events.
It’s hard enough to get missions like this approved at all by NASA these days and this kind of management gives all projects trying to get science done a black-eye.
At a time when NASA is looking for any excuse to cut you out of their budget, you damn well better pay attention to what you’re doing.
Good project management is worth it’s weight in gold. Managers who understand the funding environment, have good political skills and know how to run a lean, efficient program are rock stars because they will have missions that actually get off the ground.
Everyone else will be standing around the clean room looking at half-finished satellites and rovers up on blocks.
For those of you who don’t know, Kepler is designed to look for extrasolar planets. Not just ANY extrasolar planets, but ones more like the Earth. The data provided by this mission will help us narrow our search for reasonable locations of other civilizations and will provide us with information in order to more accurately model the frequency and distribution of earth-like planets in our galaxy.
I know, I know, I said model… sigh. At least the models will be based on actual data.
The Kepler mission figures prominently in my video on life in the universe. There are some cool animations in here:
Technorati Tags: extrasolar planets, kepler mission
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POSTED IN: NASA, space program
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