Threatened with
cancellation, the team building NASA's Kepler planet-hunting telescope found a
way get the spacecraft to the launch pad by early 2009 without a new infusion
of cash.
Kepler consists of a
single instrument, a 0.95-meter Schmidt telescope optimized for scanning a
field of stars for signs of potentially habitable Earth-size
planets. Integration of the spacecraft gets under way this summer, with the
telescope due to be installed a year from now. A Delta 2 rocket is slated to
launch Kepler into an Earth-trailing orbit.
The price tag for the
Discovery-class mission has risen several times since its 2001 selection due to
a combination of factors, including management problems, technical challenges
and budget fluctuations beyond the project's control. In mid-2006, believing
Kepler's problems were largely in the past, NASA accepted a 21-percent cost
increase for construction of the telescope, pushing the total cost of the
mission above $550 million. The launch date also slipped another five months
past its original 2006 target to November 2008.
This spring, the Kepler
team - which consists of Ball Aerospace
& Technology, Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
- told NASA science chief Alan Stern it needed an additional $42 million and an
extra four months to finish the spacecraft.
"My response was
'no, [the Science Mission Directorate] no longer manages by open checkbook. You
need to find a way to get it back in the box because I don't have $42 million
in the astrophysics program anyway,'" Stern recalled in a July 9
interview.
Stern told the team to
come back in June with a plan for getting the job done within the revised
budget NASA approved for Kepler last year.
"On June 1, they
came with a request for $54 million instead of $42 million, at which point I
said: 'Kepler project, apparently you don't think I'm serious ... If you don't
think I'm serious just come back to me with numbers like these again and that
will be the end of the project.'"
When he testified before
Congress in May, Stern made clear that the program was all but canceled at that
point - and that was before the Kepler team responded to his call to cut costs
by asking for even more money.
After rejecting their
June 1 request for another $54 million, Stern gave the Kepler team a month to
take another crack at putting their program "back in the box."
On July 6, the Kepler
team returned to NASA headquarters here to present their plan.
"They took us very
seriously," Stern said. "They came back with no cost increase."
The Kepler team,
according to Stern, proposed staying within the budget NASA approved in 2006,
by cutting six months off the end of the four-year mission, scaling back some
spacecraft testing, reducing schedule reserve and making some management
changes.
In addition, Ball
Aerospace & Technologies, the Boulder, Colo.-based firm building the
spacecraft and instrument, gave up "millions and millions of dollars of
their earned fee," Stern said.
The plan passed muster
with Stern and the other NASA officials who examined it - including Stern's
science advisor John Mather, his deputy for programs Todd May and a
representative from NASA's Office of the Chief Engineer - as a clear and viable
path to the launch pad.
Ball spokeswoman Roz
Brown declined to say how much fee the company agreed to forfeit or whether the
project would still prove profitable.
"I can't be specific
on the financial stuff," Brown said July 10. "Profit is just one
tool. We were determined that we were going to get the program back on track
and we are getting the program back on track. We heard NASA loud and
clear."
Kepler will still miss
its November 2008 launch target by two or three months, but Stern said he could
live with that.
"The only thing more
important than keeping Kepler marching towards launch is to have responsible
management in the Science Mission Directorate," he said. "I won't
write checks any more. There's a new team in town and we don't work that
way."
While reducing testing
and cutting schedule reserves might sound like a recipe for failure, Stern said
neither action would put the success of the mission at risk.
"They found some
places where they could responsibly de-scope - where testing was icing on the
cake," he said. "They [also] had very lavish schedule reserves by
normal industry standards. They elected to cut themselves back to JPL
standards."
The new plan also irons
out Kepler's convoluted management structure, long since acknowledged by NASA
as a contributor to Kepler's woes.
When NASA selected Kepler
in 2001 for funding under its Discovery program of scientist-led, cost-capped
missions, the agency required Ames Research Center - the San Francisco-area
NASA field center that the proposed Kepler - to pick either JPL or Goddard
Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., to help run the project.
With JPL added to the
mix, Kepler essentially had, as Stern put it, "three bosses": the JPL
project manager, the Ames project manager, and Kepler's rookie principal
investigator (PI), Ames scientist Bill Borucki.
To simplify matters, NASA
is putting the entire Kepler team under the direction of Kepler's JPL project
manager Leslie Livesay, a seasoned engineer who worked on Mars Pathfinder, was
the flight system manager for Deep Space 1, and ran Starlight before that
ambitious three-telescope project was reduced to a ground-based technology
demonstration.
Borucki's role on Kepler,
meanwhile, has been reduced from mission principal investigator - essentially
the top boss - to science principal investigator.
"They had to make
some tough choices and it takes a professional program manager and not a rookie
PI to do this," Stern said. "But he remains the science PI and will
be in charge of the entire science investigation and lead it to victory."
