According to this press release from yesterday, NASA is stretching out their buy of Shuttle External Tanks. I mention this because it’s a perfect example of why space is so expensive, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s “hard,” or because it’s persnickety rocket science.

No, we’re going to spend more money to save money.

The original tank contract was to deliver eight tanks per year. Because of annual budget constraints, imposed by the International Space Station overruns, they can’t afford that many. You see, NASA doesn’t have a program budget–they only have an annual budget, and they have to go back to Congress for more money each year. It saves them money by flying fewer Shuttle flights each year, so this is a way of keeping that annual budget down.

The problem is, that they still have to fly the same total number of flights to accomplish the space station assembly, so they have to stretch out the schedule. That means that the contract to deliver the external tanks has to run longer. That means that the contractor (in this case Lockheed Martin) has a longer period of time in which it has to keep its facilities and staff available, even though the number of tanks being produced is the same. That means that the total program cost just went up, even though the annual cost went down.

I don’t know what the total original contract value is–the press release doesn’t say, but knowing that tanks have been costing around fifty million dollars apiece, and they’re buying thirty five of them, one and three quarters of a billion dollars is a not-unreasonable number.

[Update at 2:50 PM]

Doh!@

Have to work on my reading comprehension–it does say, in the first graf, that the original contract value was 1.15 billion, so this is actually a much greater percentage increase.

[End update]

The press release says that they’re increasing the contract value by about $340M, (presumably) to cover the overhead costs of keeping the lines going for the additional period of time. That means that they’ve increased the total contract cost by about twenty percent, or roughly ten million per tank. For exactly the same tank–no extra features, no new alloys, same weight so there’s no payload benefit–just delivered later.

Instead of stretching the contract, couldn’t they have warehoused the extras? Perhaps, but that would mean building warehouses (these things are not small), and hiring people to keep an eye on the stock, and making sure that it didn’t corrode or deteriorate, or get damaged in any way. The system’s not really set up to operate like that–it’s Just In Time.

So, we’re spending more, to do less (or at least to do it more slowly).

This is, in fact, a microcosm of exactly why the Shuttle overall costs as much as it does. During its development, the budget constraint was on annual budget. They had to pinch pennies in development to maintain the annual budget cap, which meant that there were many design decisions made at the time, back in the seventies, that saved money in any given year, but had many billions of dollars of program consequences down the road as they got into operations.

This is one reason (of many) why we should never expect NASA to reduce the cost of access to space.