THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 23, 1997 TAG: 9701230002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By MICHAEL LOWREY
LENGTH: 81 lines
Stories about outer space made headlines often in 1996. The possibility of life on Mars, new Hubble telescope discoveries, Russian space failures and astronaut endurance records made front-page news worldwide. One of the most promising developments, however, went largely unnoticed: a new series of NASA spacecraft to explore the solar system. On Feb. 17, NASA launched its Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft toward the asteroid Eros. And two probes, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Pathfinder, were launched last year. Aside from the scientific goals, these missions seek to change radically the way NASA does business.
NASA once did great, difficult and exciting things often. Most obviously, it sent a man to the moon. Aside from the missions of Apollo, NASA sent a fleet of unmanned probes throughout the solar system, exploring everything from the rings of Saturn (and discovering the rings of Jupiter and Neptune), to the innermost planet Mercury, to probing the soil of Mars.
In recent years, though, such great deeds have become uncommon. Put more correctly, any such missions have been rare. Between 1977 and 1995, NASA launched only three probes to other objects in the solar system - the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Magellan radar mapper to Venus, and the Mars Observer. These missions cost a half-billion dollars at minimum and were years in the planning (for Galileo, read over a decade and closer to $2 billion). Part of the cost came from a NASA cultural problem: Since this was the probe to this planet, everything had to be on it. So the projects just got bigger (and more expensive). And since they just couldn't be allowed to fail, very conservative design practices were followed.
Unfortunately, this philosophy didn't always produce success. The Mars Observer, designed to be a weather satellite orbiting the red planet, was lost just before reaching its target. A review determined that the spacecraft's design was fundamentally flawed; a repeat mission with an identical spacecraft would likely have meet the same fate. The Galileo probe, after a six year trip to Jupiter, is now returning data; unfortunately, its main antenna didn't fully deploy, reducing the amount of information which can be sent to Earth.
NASA also gave the terms ``schedule'' and ``budget'' a bad name. And such problems weren't just limited to deep space probes. A 1992 congressional study revealed that NASA spacecraft typically came in 75 percent over budget. The GOES series of weather satellites, which are used, among other things, to track hurricanes, was a particular problem. A key satellite, GOES-I, the first in a series of improved spacecraft with updated sensors and longer life spans, was launched five years late while costing more than twice what was originally budgeted.
It is with this background that the recent launches must be viewed as a remarkable change for the better. As Daniel Goldin, current NASA administrator, likes to say, the goal is to do things ``faster, better, cheaper.'' NASA hopes to fly about one ``Discovery'' mission like NEAR a year. Each probe can't cost more than $150 million (in 1992 dollars). Launch should occur within three years of the contract signing. Discovery missions need not be run by NASA. (NEAR was designed, built and administered by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and not NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, another first.) Most unusual of all, if a program can't stay within its budget or is seriously delayed, it will be canceled.
The space agency's Mars program is a 10-year, $1 billion effort, with the same general rules applying. One or two missions are planned for each launch opportunity to Mars, which occur every 26 months. A sample return mission is likely by 2005.
These are revolutionary changes. NEAR and Mars Global Surveyor accomplish the main scientific goals at perhaps a quarter of the total cost of a spacecraft of the Mars Observer type. And it is not just a matter of doing little with little money; as Tom Krimigis of Applied Physics put it to Aviation Week and Space Technology, ``The cost is in the paperwork, the way you assign engineers. . . . The issue is not how to fly the minimum science at the minimum cost; it's how to fly first-class science at an affordable cost.'' Both missions were launched on time and under budget.
As wondrous as this transition at the nation's space agency sounds, there's nothing unique or special about it. While what NASA does may be rocket science, spending government money wisely and efficiently isn't. The nuts and bolts of what NASA has done - eliminate paperwork, shorten design and contract cycles, take advantage of technological developments, prioritize needs, seek innovative solutions and be willing to get private industry involved - can be applied to almost any other government agency. MEMO: Michael Lowrey teaches economics at UNC-Charlotte and is an
adjunct fellow with the John Locke Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
think tank in Raleigh, N.C.