A few weeks ago, the US Department of Defense canceled a project to upgrade the ground control systems for the Global Positioning System (GPS). Of course, this is not the first instance of a software project in the government (or the private sector) run amok, this time around having spent $6.7 billion, multiples of the initial cost estimate.
I can relate, feeling déjà vu as the cat walks by, again.
Long ago, NASA also tried to upgrade its Space Shuttle launch control system – twice. Yes, there were two canceled upgrades to the Kennedy Space Center launch processing system. Practice did not make perfect. The grand tally there (inflation-adjusted) was about a billion dollars by the time the second plug was pulled on the project in 2002, then called “CLCS.” (The first effort was called “LPSM”.) The Space Shuttles would finish launching in 2011, mostly using the system they began with in 1981, with modest upgrades to the control centers.
NASA also canceled another project recently – the SLS Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), opting to procure a smaller upper stage already in production. Mostly, the curiosity here, though, is not the cancellation of one more project where you see hundreds of millions disappear, generating nothing but PowerPoint slides, tip-toeing quietly past the billion-dollar mark with blank faces unsure what you are upset about, with little more to show than would fit on a 16 GB SD Card, with space to spare, though with so many meetings over-filling calendars.
Rather, it’s the forgetfulness that’s curious. That this is the third time NASA has canceled its super-duper next-gen, new-and-improved upper stage.
I joined the CLCS project in the late 1990s with some trepidation, sensing something amiss from the start, mostly that there was no there there, that it was unclear what was happening, or when it should, due dates, and when the old launch control center would get ripped out. New, modern computers are coming soon, right? As in the modern meme, right?
In a harbinger of things to come, I got my bearings enough to start interjecting myself into meetings. I raised the matter of goals, asking what the project wanted to do, easy matters to get out of the way like costing less to maintain than the current system, and being more capable, and – wait for it – daring to ask how many fewer people would be required to launch a Shuttle versus the chorus of hundreds at the time. (I had a diagram!) This was a natural line of inquiry, as I was invited into the project not through my Shuttle system (others had that covered), but because word got around that I had skills, skills of the analytical kind, and that this could be handy.
I was not invited back. So much for those Outlook invites I expected to go out to the end of the year.
And the manager I’m talking to knows it.
Long after, but before the project is canceled, honest conversations concede there is no cost savings, now or ever, or a goal of fewer people being able to launch a Shuttle, or of the same number of people launching more often. I learned something – that when the conversations become frank and the tone of voice calm, Zen-like, and leadership has a thousand-yard stare as they share, this means we are about six months from a program being taken into a room with a plastic sheet draped across the floor. And the manager I’m talking to knows it.
Institutions are not like individuals. If you took Psych 101 in college, an easy A+, to fulfill a requirement for some coursework outside your major, under the pretense that it would create a well-balanced, rounded engineer (Good luck with that!), you will have learned a list of biases. Selection bias, seeing only evidence that supports what you already believe. Not very scientific. Negativity bias, a leaning to what might go wrong, this time selecting for bad news. Natural, as it’s best to make a mistake and laugh off an over-reaction by the campfire that night, rather than not be around to tell the tale. And then optimism. (A NASA classic, feature or bug?) Not quite selecting for good news, more like seeing the Sun rise and feeling today will be different. Every day. This is handy if you want to get up and face your short, brutish, and nasty reality, as if it’s not, passing along the positive vibe to us, your descendants. It beats staying curled up in a fetal position and missing opportunities to make Xerox copies of your delusion.
We are the children of people who saw what they wanted to see, patterns where there were none, who over-reacted to a sound in the forest, who got out of bed against all odds. By this logic, the cancellation of yet another NASA project should inform next steps toward caution. Projects should be stronger with every round and prosper.
But institutions are not people.
Ahh, the possibilities.
It’s 1998 and I am looking into the GPS control center at a large glass window seemingly purpose-built for the tourists, like me. There to share notes with my DoD brethren, I am impressed. The room is sleek and modern and not very big, and hardly anyone sits at the consoles. Though I’m subtly aware the back-rooms seem to go on and on, as the rest of my visit reveals. Compared to what we have at Kennedy, though, this is a generation or two ahead of our game, more in common with the computer I have at home than with what launches our Shuttles. Our setup at Kennedy, even at my arrival in 1988, immediately seemed to me more like Three Mile Island meets Ma’Bell, and all I could think of at this later time is – Ahh, the possibilities!
Fast forward, only slightly, and NASA’s second attempt to upgrade its Shuttle control system are scrapped. Flash forward 28 years and we hear about billions spent by the DoD on its GPS control system upgrade. So much for my being impressed. Karma. Another similarity though is likely missed, that the DoD, like NASA, cancels projects but no one shows up to the funerals.
Which brings us back to the canceled NASA EUS – and my sense is I have also seen this before. Twice before.
A common plot device in Star Trek is to have the crew trapped in a time loop, unaware of it. The five-minute sequence plays out, then again, and again, and the viewer will wonder who sees it, who gets the vibe that’s off, who gets that uncanny valley feeling. (“Cause and Effect,” “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” “Face the Strange”) The foreboding draws you in, living the same usually traumatic experience over and over, but not realizing – you’ve been there before. For the NASA EUS, is this the case?
The initial NASA lunar program, Constellation, lasted about 5 years, ending in 2010. When canceled, very little was actually canceled. Call it a soft-reset. The end of Constellation could be seen as the end of only – yes, you guessed it – an upper stage for the Ares I, a smaller rocket for only crew. The large core of a future heavy lift launcher? That went on – as SLS. Boosters, check, that continued. Old Shuttle engines, kept those. Orion, renamed and repackaged with a bright new sticker saying “New and Improved” (Same Ingredients). The only truly canceled project in Constellation’s end was that new NASA upper stage.
Not to end there, the original stage for the large, heavy-lift launcher was the Earth Departure Stage or EDS. Considered to be too much stage, too soon, and likely to take too long, and something that could wait as money got tight anyway, it disappeared off the radar as NASA opted to acquire a (so-called) off-the-shelf stage from Boeing, the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). Of these, one remains, the two Artemis flights to date having used the only other two.
The EUS is, by proper reckoning, then, the third NASA upper-stage project canceled in the last fifteen years or so.
Institutions like NASA, it would appear, are not akin to individuals, though we can enjoy giving analogies a try. Institutions (Congress included) pass along their culture, ideas and methods which succeed in persisting, or not, much like genes. Is not persisting also succeeding? To live to tell the tale, to carry on behavior that make copies of the tendency, and back to persisting. But to complete the comparison, we must include maladaptive considerations, how newborn turtles go to the light, which is a beach house, and certain death, not the shore. What worked once is undone in modern circumstances, making the habit that once spelled success certain death instead. The failures of the “primes” and yet NASA still carrying on with mainly activity-driven “cost-plus” contracts that have no sight of producing results would seem to be those turtles, all the way down. The persistence is there, for sure, as is the guaranteed poor outcome from the maladaptive behavior.
…all this will soon be forgotten…
The choice of a new “standardized” upper stage for the SLS will not yield payload performance comparable to that of the envisioned EUS. (The new one will be larger than an ICPS but smaller than the EUS). This may be a slight annual savings for a lot less performance. Not that anyone would defend the EUS project any more than the Mobile Launcher 2 project that went with it, also canceled, more billions spent, and called a “clown show” even by the friendliest of press. Neither is this making an example of anyone, nor rewarding a new company that gets it. The new stage chosen, the Vulcan Centaur upper stage, is also a Boeing product (United Launch Alliance is a 50/50 Boeing/Lockheed venture).
Of course, all this, to go by history so far, will soon be forgotten. Just as with the prior upper stages, Constellation’s lessons learned, warnings about fixed costs eating up a budget (fixed costs being the jobs kept because…Congress). A scary proposition to think about. What do they do, all those positions, all those people, all those “good jobs”?
The timeline will reset, of course, but maybe someday, someone will notice, leaving them to convince others that something must be done. There is plenty of history to go on, but the memory of that is lost. Anyone listening may have nothing to go on but faith in that crew member…
…resetting…
NASA also canceled a project recently…
Zapata Talks NASA 