Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Pork in Space!

I saw an article last year that claimed the reason NASA has had so much trouble making any progress – or getting any respect – that that most of its multi-billion dollar budget gets swallowed up by various pork-barrel projects in the home districts of key members of Congress. I was a little dubious about this, both because it’s a given that any spending bill in the United States will be loaded with money that rewards the rich and powerful while simultaneously getting long-serving politicians re-elected, and also because while many of the projects cited do not have anything to do with rockets, space flight, or anything that would match off with the agency’s public image, space science does include things like global changes on Earth, biology in space, long-term empirical research, and so on. The fact is, claims of government waste and inefficiency are as common in the United States as the budget outrages they claim to document, if not more so, because it sells newspapers or television advertising time and is more interesting than watching CSPAN to find out what our government is actually spending its money on…

Then I read this article off of the Quartz site, about Elon Musk of Space-X claiming that his company lost out on a multi-billion dollar contract because they declined to offer the government official awarding that contract a job, but the competition did. The facts of the case are a little murky, but no one is disputing the fact that a contract for 36 satellite launches were awarded to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, on a no-bid contract, or that the official who approved that contract (Roger S. Correll) was subsequently given an extremely lucrative executive position with ULA immediately after his retirement from government service. And while it seems fantastical to believe that anyone would risk “fixing” a government contract in such a blatantly improper fashion, I’m unable to come up with any other explanation for what is going on here…

As a taxpayer, I find this sort of thing infuriating, but not really surprising. During the previous Administration we saw no-bid contracts for Halliburton (and others) supplying the invasion of Iraq, and if you look you will find similar arrangements in every Federal budget since President Eisenhower warned us about the consequences of a “Military-Industrial Complex” taking control of our government. What I find especially heinous about this particular story is that the United States government stands to gain more from the commercial development of outer space than anyone in this Hemisphere, and possibly in the world, which makes stifling all opportunities in that industry not merely corrupt, but also self-destructive. If the claims made by Space-X are true, and they really can launch satellites for a quarter of the price we are currently paying, then our government is quite literally squandering billions of your tax dollars while borrowing ever-larger amounts on credit…

Now, it must be admitted that at least some of the money being given to ULA will benefit our economy; they will have to at least produce launch vehicles (even at a 400% markup) or risk having the contract rescinded. And this will, in turn, allow the participating companies to hire and pay their employees, and order parts and materials from other companies that will do likewise, thus cycling more money into the economy and improving our present conditions. I just can’t help thinking that on a no-bid contract there is no reason for company executives to include huge bonuses for themselves – and while I have no objection to paying for value received, regardless of the form it takes, I do have a problem with people enriching themselves at the expense of the public while returning nothing of value except electable politicians…

I will leave the comments about the ethics, morality or legality of no-bid contracts to those better qualified, and just close by saying that from a business standpoint they can indeed be categorized as “criminally stupid” – and that there is no way we will ever advance into space if we keep trying to haul this much pork along with us…

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