Re: The Hubble Should SPLASH!

From: Steve Willner (willner_at_cfa.harvard.edu)
Date: 09/13/04 

Date: 13 Sep 2004 17:11:42 -0400

In article <4141225c$0$65607$a1866201@newsreader.dsl.net>,
 gherbert@retro.com (George William Herbert) writes:
> Reference is escaping me (AvLeak? SpaceViews?), but recent reports
> indicate that the NASA project inflator (early costs to final costs)
> is about 1.45, about the same as major DOD programs in the US.

Somewhere in my files, I have a viewgraph made years ago by a "NASA
beancounterm" whose name I forget but who was in fact a very smart
guy. It shows the cost inflator of many missions as a function of
the fraction of the cost already spent. The upshot is that once 10%
(from memory) of the money is spent, costs can be estimated pretty
well, but before that there can be (and usually is) quite a bit of
escalation.

Unfortunately, there was one very large "outlier" on the plot, where
despite 10% of the money having been spent, there still turned out to
be very large cost escalation: HST.

Another viewgraph, possibly from the same source, showed that mission
cost (corrected for inflation) was proportional to the square root of
payload mass. Though incredibly simple-minded, mass alone turned out
to be a very good predictor, at least for the missions shown. (I
don't recall whether HST was on this second graph or not.)

It would be very interesting to put together updated versions of
these plots, if anyone has the data. 

-- 
Steve Willner            Phone 617-495-7123     swillner@cfa.harvard.edu
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA                 
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