More Mission Than Money

"If they can put a man on the moon…"

Thirty-five years after it joined the lexicon, that nine-word preamble to complaints about complicated tasks has come full circle. As NASA looks to send humans back to the lunar surface to stay-and then on to Mars-America is asking, "Can they?" According to a blue-ribbon panel reporting this month on ways to implement President Bush's new space policy, the short answer is: They can't.

The president envisions an affordable and sustainable series of robotic and human expeditions reaching deeper and deeper into the solar system and at least 40 years into the future. With his policy, Bush proposed to satisfy a complaint from investigators who blamed the February 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, in part, on the lack of an agreed national vision for space exploration. The policy announcement Jan. 14, 2004, just before the first anniversary of the disaster, lifted spirits at NASA. But it raised numerous questions about price and practicality. It also sparked a fierce debate about whether NASA is up to the task.

In a report delivered to the White House June 7, the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond was expected to declare that NASA will not be able to implement the vision unless the storied U.S. space agency undergoes a major structural overhaul. When the commissioners last met publicly May 4, they had not settled on the 10 strategies they will recommend to accomplish that goal. But they were clear on the need for change in NASA's personnel and acquisition management systems, its commercial and public outreach efforts, and its interagency relationships.

"The NASA that has been has become inwardly focused. It's become exclusive. It's become risk-averse, and it's become, in many people's minds, a drag on the budget," said commissioner and former House Science Committee Chairman Robert Walker, R-Pa. "The NASA that can be is one that will be forward-looking. It will be inclusive. It will be focused. It will be risk-taking, and it will be economically vibrant," Walker said. "The NASA that can be, can do the mission of implementing the president's vision. The NASA that has been, cannot."

The agency is striving to regain its safety focus in the aftermath of its second catastrophe in 17 years. During the next several months, cultural reforms will cascade from executive suites to shop floors at NASA installations across the country. New offices for safety oversight will be established. Meanwhile, astronauts and engineers in Texas are struggling to develop an in-orbit inspection and repair capability for the shuttles. Once they are deemed safe enough to fly again, the agency will need to launch at least 28 shuttle missions to finish assembly of the orbiting station by the president's deadline of the end of the decade. They would fly at a rate of almost six per year, two more than recommended by a panel that studied NASA's space flight management troubles in 2002.

At the same time, astronauts, flight controllers, logisticians and procurement specialists in Washington are toiling over written requirements for the spacecraft and equipment that future explorers will need. Experts from all corners of the agency-many of them shuttle program employees on temporary assignment-are engaged in the effort.

Speaking to reporters May 19, former astronaut Richard Covey, leader of the federally chartered Return to Flight Task Group, worried aloud about the shuttle workforce being stretched too thin. "NASA acknowledges it needs to work on how to grow its technical staff to meet the challenges of the new organizational alignment and the exploration initiative," he said.

To the Universe, and Beyond

He also ordered NASA to develop nuclear power generation, nuclear propulsion and life-support technology to enable such voyages. The explorers will ride in a new spaceship that Bush directed NASA to develop, test and fly with people by 2014. The president also said NASA will increase its use of unmanned probes to search for life and locate resources on Mars and on Jupiter's moons, and will use more advanced telescopes to search for Earth-like planets and habitable environments around other stars.

Bush did not say what it will cost to bring his vision to reality. His aides have provided little more than a chart showing how NASA would distribute $315 billion over the next 15 years-the $87 billion it hopes to get through 2009 and the $228 billion it would get between 2010 and 2020 if its budget keeps pace with inflation. To launch the initiative, the president wants to increase NASA spending by a total of $1 billion over five years. The agency would shift $11 billion from existing programs that do not support the vision, an idea few lawmakers with NASA oversight have welcomed. Retiring the space shuttle would free up billions of dollars in the next decade. NASA says the pay-as-you-go philosophy makes the program affordable.

Under NASA's plan, the overall cost of the initiative will depend on the architecture. The agency will do only what it has funding to do, and funding will be based on its progress. Ultimately, NASA officials insist spending will continue to represent less than 1 percent of the total federal budget. Administrator Sean O'Keefe says the exploration initiative conforms to the Bush administration's limits on spending growth. He angrily rejects published estimates that the vision will cost $1 trillion. "I wish we had 10 percent of that!" the NASA boss told a meeting of space industry leaders in April.

Bush's plan immediately ran into trouble in Congress, thanks in part to NASA's poorly timed Jan. 16 decision to cancel a fifth shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA cited concerns for astronaut safety, and continues to insist the decision had nothing to do with the new space policy. The vision's first public hearing by the House Science Committee on Feb. 12 foreshadowed more trouble. Ranking member Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., goaded White House Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger about the exploration program's cost.

"You told me that the president was very engaged in this. Now, surely, the president wouldn't have a pig in a poke," Gordon said to Marburger in a prosecutorial tone. "Did the president never ask you what this was going to cost?" The courtroom-style interrogation went on even as Marburger tried to respond. "It's important to realize that this is not a single-mission, Apollo-like program," the science adviser said. "The emphasis in this vision is on [a] sustainable, affordable budget, so we do not want to devote more of our discretionary budget than we can afford in any one year, and we will adjust the timetables in this budget to suit that."

The Bush administration's fiscal 2005 budget request for NASA includes $866 million in new spending, 15 percent of which would fund the exploration initiative. Almost 63 percent of funding over the next decade would go to exploration. The rest would go to the shuttle, space station and nonexploration activities such as aeronautics. In documents provided to Government Executive, NASA estimates it will cost $63 billion to achieve a human lunar landing by 2020-if the mission is accomplished in the Apollo style, independently, with similar rocket, lander and surface operations.

Checkbook Challenges

But lawmakers already are expressing concern about potential spending on space exploration. In April, House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., scolded the administration for proposing to increase NASA's budget to $16.2 billion next year. "Total federal nonsecurity, domestic discretionary spending in fiscal 2005 is likely to increase by less than half a percent. Congress may even freeze spending," Boehlert said in an April 21 speech to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. "In such a budget, should NASA receive almost a 6 percent increase? Is it the highest domestic spending priority? I don't think so, and I doubt my colleagues will either."

NASA's fiscal credibility took another hit last month, when news reports aimed a spotlight at the agency's continuing struggle with cost control. The agency's former auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, reported that it could not render a judgment on NASA's 2003 financial statements. PwC discovered that NASA secretly had changed its checkbook balance to the tune of $2 billion to match Treasury Department figures. More astonishingly, the auditor found a staggering $563.5 billion worth of undocumented year-end accounting adjustments in the 2003 statements. To put this mess in perspective, that number is more than double NASA's total appropriations from its inception in 1959 through 2003.

NASA Chief Financial Officer Gwendolyn Brown says the figure represents the mistakes and mathematical corrections NASA bookkeepers made while "cleaning up" data from 10 field center systems and feeding it into the core module of the agency's new $980 million integrated financial management system. "We had a method in place that was mostly manual, reconciling all those different features. Not all of them had the same level of detailed information that was required as we migrated to the new system," she told reporters May 20. NASA's integrated financial management chief, Patrick Ciganer, likened the complexity of the project to a corporation acquiring 10 companies all at once. "We knew the auditors were going to be overwhelmed," he says.

How the data conversion could result in such a sum-when NASA's annual budget is only $15.3 billion-is a "fascinating discussion" that detracts from the real issue, says Greg Kutz, director of financial management and assurance at the General Accounting Office. He notes that three components of the integrated financial management system-asset management, procurement and human capital-are not yet on line. "[But] the system is not the root cause," he adds. "The problem is human capital."

Kutz contends that inadequate training on the system, compounded by the unavailability of its budget planning tools, threatens the agency's ability to manage programs, oversee contractors and allocate its budget among numerous projects. O'Keefe says a number of large, profit-making organizations have adopted the same accounting system NASA is using and experienced the same learning curve. "This need not bring an organization to its knees or compromise its strategy, and we are seeking to learn from each of those experiences every step of the way," he says.

A New NASA?

Zuber proposes putting universities in charge of NASA's research centers and giving state governments control of its space flight centers to eliminate duplication and help fund infrastructure improvements. Similar ideas are making the rounds as "better than rumors" on Capitol Hill where, a congressional source says, there also is talk that NASA plans to scale back its enterprise structure with possible "staffing implications."

Since it was chartered in January, the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond has viewed Bush's proposal as a national vision with broad requirements that NASA alone cannot meet. Commissioners contend that many of the necessary resources and enabling technologies will be found in entrepreneurial industry and government-funded energy and defense laboratories. "The broader aspect of a national vision gives us an opportunity to look at things differently, to manage things differently," says Lester Lyles, a retired general who headed the Air Force Materiel Command.

In the May meeting, Lyles proposed reviving the National Space Council, a cabinet-level policy group that advised President George H.W. Bush. Without revealing specific changes the commission would recommend, chairman Edward "Pete" Aldridge, a former undersecretary of defense, agreed with Lyles that management of the program "probably has to be elevated to a higher level in government" to incorporate multiple federal agencies.

O'Keefe, who told the commission May 4 that "business as usual . . . isn't going to work," anticipates a substantial transformation of the agency he left the Office of Management and Budget to lead in December 2001.

In an interview with Government Executive, O'Keefe said change will come "as expeditiously as we can make it," but was circumspect about exactly what lies ahead. "We'll see," he says. "What they've laid out . . . is a different model from the one we currently employ. It's a different way of looking at the challenges. We're hearing that, and trying to adapt to it, right now."