LAUREL, Md. — With billion-dollar space missions possibly consigned to history, the new realities of aerospace funding call for smaller, faster engineering teams, better cost controls, and thoroughly considered project goals, said Henry Spencer in a keynote speech Tuesday (Sept. 26) at the Military and Aerospace Applications of Programmable Devices and Technologies Conference (MAPLD).
Mission costs need to be reduced, said Spencer, a key architect of the Canadian space program. That will require the extermination of "dinosaur" teams and the creation from scratch of nimbler organizations. "You can build mammals," he said. "You cannot shrink a dinosaur into a mammal, however."
Spencer is working through these issues himself as the software architect for the Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars (MOST) project, a space telescope being funded by the Canadian Space Agency.
As an example of the new funding reality, MOST is challenged with designing, developing, building and testing its small telescope — and operating it for one year — with a budget capped at $3 million. If the project experiences cost-overruns, decisions will need to be made to curtail parts of it, he said.
So far, MOST is on track to make its budget, Spencer said. "The new funding picture just means a new set of limits. There is no way around that; we just have to learn to live with it," he said.
In the "faster-better-cheaper" mantra that's ringing in the ears of aerospace managers, it's the "faster" part that's most important, Spencer said, because concentrating on speed will create better and cheaper results.
As an example, he cited the Hubble Telescope, which launched years behind schedule. "The Hubble Telescope was going to be the big space project of the 1970s — and it would have had much more impact then," Spencer said. NASA launched the Hubble Telescope in April 1990.
Achieving speed means setting different goals, Spencer said. That in itself is a change for operations such as NASA, where middle managers tend to wait for funding to come back, he said.
Spencer's message to the engineers at MAPLD was that the funding is absolutely not coming back. "The change is permanent. The days of billion-dollar missions are over, gone," he said.
Working with the new no nonsense budgeting will be tough if using old-school mentality, he said. To succeed, he recommended the following strategies:
Goals: It's important to set goals based on engineering possibilities — let the team engineers define a project's goals, rather than assuming they can make someone else's plan a reality, Spencer said.
Size: The size of a team should be small enough to fit in one conference room so they can talk rather than spend time writing documents for one another, he said.
Speed: Groups on tight deadlines don't have the time to drive up large budgets, and they can finish a project before the goals are changed by senior management — or worse, before the project becomes obsolete, he said.
Location: Members have to be located together — the "virtual corporation" approach won't work here, Spencer said. The idea is to keep communications fast and to prevent the growth of politics or bureaucracy within the group, he stressed.
Separation: When creating these smaller, nimble organizations, it's important to keep them insulated from the old guard, whose participation will only bog things down, Spencer said.
"One of the things you don't read about in the news reports of the Mars Pathfinder is that everybody inside JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] expected it to fail," he said. "When it succeeded, everybody wanted to jump onto the next batch of Mars missions," which became the victims of some embarrassing failures.
Despite the new funding realities, testing should not be sacrificed for speed, he said, because thorough testing on the ground is imperative. "If it's going to spin, put it on a turntable. We're doing that with MOST," he said. "We're going to put it on a turntable and see if the communications works."
NASA has had its share of embarrassments in recent years, but they aren't the reason for tight budgets in aerospace, Spencer said. Rather, he blamed the end of the Cold War, which took away the Soviet enemy and with it, the primary motivation for getting into space: to beat the Russians. These days, Spencer said, the cliche in aerospace is that support for the space program is a mile wide and an inch deep — everybody likes the idea, but few are willing to commit funds for it.
Separately, Spencer mentioned the issue of launch costs, which often are the target of cost-cutting proposals. But that's the wrong approach, he said, because launch costs don't dominate the budget for these missions the way that construction and operations do.
At the same time, Spencer noted that cheaper launches will be required in the future, but he admitted he had no good suggestions for that issue.
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