Commission report blasts space station management
BY JEFF FOUST
SPACEFLIGHT NOW

Posted: November 2, 2001

  ISS
An illustration of what the completed international space station is supposed to look like. Photo: NASA
 
Calling the current plan to complete the International Space Station "not credible", an independent panel recommended Friday that NASA make a number of changes to the management and structure of the program.

The report by the ISS Management and Cost Evaluation Task Force (IMCE), released by NASA Friday afternoon, made a number of general recommendations to improve the ISS program, ranging from the creation of a new NASA official responsible for the station to reducing the shuttle flight rate.

At the heart of the IMCE's report was a recommendation that NASA in the near term plan on a "core complete" version of the station, one that would lack a habitation module and crew return vehicle and thus could only support three people.

"NASA should be focused on completing the core complete program over the next couple of years," said Thomas Young, a former executive vice president of Lockheed Martin who served as chairman of the IMCE, during a Friday afternoon press conference. "We're not confident about going beyond core complete until NASA's credibility is established."

The lack of confidence comes from a number of problems with the management and cost accounting for the station program. The IMCE report concluded that NASA's current estimate of $8.3 billion for the cost to the remainder of the core complete station was "not credible." Young said that the panel did not have enough information to estimate the true cost of completing the station under the current plan, but believed that the $8.3 billion figure was off by "something beyond" a few hundred million dollars.

The report blamed an emphasis on year-to-year planning, rather than long-term budgeting, for the increasing cost overruns. Such an emphasis, required in part by the $2.1 billion annual cost caps on the program placed by Congress in the mid-1990s, led to increases in the total cost of the program and schedule delays as program managers worked to keep the program's annual costs within the caps. "The focus on fiscal year management is probably the number one item" in the list of causes for the overruns, said Young.

The report also concluded that the station was being managed as an "institution" to benefit NASA's field center, rather than a program with a defined purpose, set of goals, and milestones. "The institutional needs of the centers are driving the program, rather than the program requirements being served by the center," the report concluded.

To address these and other related problems, the IMCE made a number of recommendations to NASA. Among them is the creation of a new associate administrator position within NASA responsible solely for the station. This administrator would preside over a new ISS Program Office that would be based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. This office would manage the station using schedule and total cost as well as annual budgets as primary criteria.

As one way to save money, the panel suggested that NASA reduce the flight rate of the space shuttle during the remainder of the assembly phase of the station from an average of six missions a year to four. This change would increase the average length of a crew increment on the station to six months. The decrease in the flight rate would save NASA over $660 million and would delay the completion of the station by only two months. Young noted that decreasing the flight rate should not have an adverse affect on shuttle safety.

Other cost savings in the station program could come from reducing the number of people currently working on it. Young said that most of the costs associated with the remainder of ISS assembly come not from hardware but operations, assembly, testing, and other efforts where salaries and wages are a key factor. "If you're going to make reductions in the cost, it's going to imply that you're making reductions in the staffing of the program," said Young. Young would not say how many jobs should be trimmed, although recently published reports have suggested that as many as 1,000 jobs may be at risk.

NASA also needs to make an effort to prioritize the science to be performed on the station, given limited time and financial resources. "The top priority thing you should do on the space station is to understand the problems and the issues associated with long duration human space flight," said Young. This would require accelerating development of a centrifuge module that Japan is providing: according to current estimates the centrifuge may not be ready until 2008.

Although the amount of science a three-person crew can do is limited -- as little as 20 hours a week -- there are ways to enhance the science with a "modest" cost impact, according to the report. One suggestion was to fly Soyuz missions to the station every five months, instead of six, and have the two spacecraft docked there together for a month, providing a temporary six-person crew. It is unclear whether Russia would go along with such a proposal, since it has shown an interest in selling seats on Soyuz taxi flights for commercial purposes, including to non-professional space tourists like Dennis Tito.

If NASA is successful in getting the station program on track, the IMCE report said that in about two years the agency could look at "enhancements" to the station that would increase its utility. One enhancement would include a stretched version of the US Node 3 module with additional environmental support systems to support more crew, along with a second Soyuz spacecraft to serve as an additional lifeboat. A second proposal would be to use Enterprise, a commercial module being developed by Energia and SPACEHAB, as a habitation module, with a second Soyuz as an additional lifeboat. A third proposal would include a habitation module proposed by the Italian space agency ASI, along with a full-fledged crew return vehicle. Young said that there is not enough information about any of the three proposals to recommend any of them, and that additional study was needed to assess their credibility.

Despite the problems, the report praised the station for its technical accomplishments and its emphasis on safety. "The risk in design and development of the vehicle has been largely retired," the report noted.

Young was confident that the station will overcome its current problems and, through the study of the long-term effects of spaceflight on humans, help open the door to future exploration. "I have no crystal ball that tells me when we're going to do something beyond space station," Young said, "but I don't have any question in my mind whatsoever that we're going to do something beyond the space station. I want our country and our world to get ready for it, and that's what NASA is doing on the space station."