Five NASA Glenn Research Center testing facilities that helped forge the Cleveland lab's reputation as an aerospace innovator are under-used and potentially expendable, the space agency's internal watchdog says.
The five iconic facilities at Glenn and its Plum Brook Station annex in Sandusky targeted by NASA's inspector general represent about one-fifth of the center's major testing infrastructure. They include the largest of Glenn's six wind tunnels – a supersonic rig used in 2008 to validate the huge parachute that cushioned the Curiosity rover's Mars landing last year – as well as two vacuum chambers and two rocket-firing stands that played roles in past high-profile space missions.
They are among at least 33 NASA technical facilities nationwide that the inspector general's audit has tagged as outdated, redundant or lacking a clear future purpose. (The full text of the audit is at the bottom of this story).
Glenn has the third most non-essential facilities among NASA's 10 field centers, according to the audit, ranking behind Florida's Kennedy Space Center, with eight, and Texas' Johnson Space Center and its White Sands (New Mexico) Test Facility, with seven.
The nation's space program is facing serious budget woes, and shedding costly, under-used infrastructure is one way of cutting expenses, the inspector general contends.
But NASA's field centers, including Glenn, depend on well-rounded testing capabilities to help them conduct meaningful research and compete for NASA work assignments. The military, other government agencies and commercial aerospace companies also use the equipment. Infrastructure cutbacks ripple through the region's economy, and having fewer technical facilities ultimately could weaken the case for a center's continued operation. The Glenn center employs more than 3,300 government workers and contractors, and annually pumps $1.2 billion into Northeast Ohio's coffers.
The audit's findings, including the disclosure that some NASA officials advocated permanently closing Glenn and Plum Brook in 2005, are sure to fuel long-simmering worries about the center's future.
NASA Glenn director James Free
"I don't think people should be concerned," said Glenn director James Free, who was appointed in January to head the center's and Plum Brook's operations. Since 2005, he said. Glenn has gained additional responsibilities, such as work developing and testing parts of NASA's new crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket. "We just keep delivering good results," Free said. "That's what I've asked our people to focus on."
Because the inspector general does not set NASA policy, the space agency's managers do not necessarily have to follow the audit's recommendations. NASA associate administrator and former Glenn director Woodrow Whitlow wrote to the inspector general that he concurred with the overall conclusions, though NASA says it will keep four of the five Glenn and Plum Brook facilities active for now. One, a Plum Brook testing location called the K-Site, is scheduled for demolition by 2014, though its vacuum chamber may be moved and re-used elsewhere on the property.
The space agency is in the midst of a broad re-assessment of its testing facility needs, as well as re-thinking the responsibilities of its individual field centers, NASA officials said. "There are no current center closure plans under discussion," NASA spokeswoman Sonja Alexander said via email.
Asked about the long-term fate of the Glenn and Plum Brook test rigs on the inspector general's list, Alexander said "assets that have no long-range mission requirements will be potential candidates for decommissioning." NASA's testing-facilities review and a plan to inform the public "about the difficult decisions ahead" will be ready by September 2014, spokesman Allard Beutel said.
The audit results should prompt action to defend the facilities, area officials said.
"If there are those within and without NASA who would like to significantly downsize [the agency], they could use this inspector general's report as a lever," said Kurt Landefeld, a member of the Friends of Plum Brook Station, an advocacy group of business and political leaders that promotes the Sandusky testing facility and its Glenn parent. "I think we're going to be called upon to fight like mad to defend this center and to keep it at the status it deserves."
"This is yet another reminder that, as a community, we must all work together to support NASA Glenn and advocate for a secure future for one of Ohio's most important economic engines," Greater Cleveland Partnership president Joe Roman said in a statement.
Difficult decisions for NASA
The inspector general's report highlights NASA's tough financial situation, and the thorny political and economic issues that anyone trying to resolve it faces.
A shrinking budget and conflicting views on the nation's role in space make it hard for NASA to decide what testing facilities to maintain. While pruning infrastructure may help the space agency's ailing bottom line, it also can hurt individual field centers and the communities in which they reside.
Rivalries among those field centers – particularly between the powerful, politically connected space flight centers in the South and the lower-profile research centers such as Glenn – may be partly to blame for NASA's infrastructure buildup.
With each site vying to protect its turf and boost its importance in NASA's hierarchy, there's pressure to keep and add to a center's testing capabilities, the inspector general determined, even if the equipment already exists elsewhere within the space agency. Glenn officials have fumed privately for years about Alabama's Marshall Space Flight Center duplicating what's available in Ohio.
Finally, each field center is defended by lawmakers who may in principle want to reign in federal spending, but who also are sensitive to the loss of jobs (and votes) in their home districts.
The testing facilities at NASA Glenn and Plum Brook aren't expendable, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said in a statement. But Portman said he "remain(s) concerned about NASA's pattern of reckless spending during a time of record debt and deficits."
Portman's Ohio Senate colleague, Sherrod Brown, who also opposes closing testing facilities at Glenn and Plum Brook, said he's fighting for funding increases for NASA "so its infrastructure will match the programs and aspirations of our nation's missions in space and aerospace."
NASA's under-usedOhio test facilities
NASA's inspector general has identified 33 wind tunnels, vacuum chambers and other large testing facilities operated by the space agency that may be expendable, considering their condition and how often they're used. Here are five in Ohio.
NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland
1955
2012
$299,015
Lack of funding
Remain active
Year built: 1945
Last year used: 2010
Yearly operating and maintenance cost: $207,220
Reason for declining use: Loss of funding
Future plans: Remain active
Vacuum Facility-11
Location: NASA Glenn
Year built: 1942
Last year used: 2003
Yearly operating and maintenance cost: $315,865
Reason for declining use: Poor condition
Future plans: Remain active
B-2 Space Propulsion Research Facility (test stand)
Location: NASA Plum Brook Station, Sandusky
Year built: 1964
Last year used: 2012
Yearly operating and maintenance cost: $469,756
Reason for declining use: Lacks funding for modifications
Future plans: Remain active
K-Site Cryogenic Propellant Tank Research Facility (vacuum chamber) Location: NASA Plum Brook
Year built: 1958
Last year used: 2004
Yearly operating and maintenance cost: $0 (inactive)
Reason for declining use: Poor condition
Future plans: Demolish by 2014
SOURCE: NASA Office of Inspector General
Free, the new Glenn director, said the center already has shut down some test facilities and buildings to save money, and is taking a "hard look" at its remaining infrastructure as part of NASA's overall review. "NASA agrees that we need to downsize and get right-sized," he said. "Of course I worry about Glenn. It's important to me because I'm the center director, and because I'm a Clevelander. But I have to balance that we're part of NASA, and we don't operate as a lone wolf."
If NASA can't make facility-closure calls internally – and so far it's failed to winnow most of what the inspector general's report calls "low-hanging fruit" – the agency may eventually have to hand off the process to an independent body, as the U.S. military has done with base-closing decisions.
"It may at some point come to that," said NASA's deputy inspector general, Gail Robinson. "We did not recommend that any particular facility be closed or mothballed. That's really something the agency has to do. We're just pointing out a problem. If money continues to be the issue that it is at the national level, and you keep getting less and less money, at some point you have to figure out ways to deal with the fact that you have less money."
One option, Robinson said, is eliminating unneeded facilities. Another is undertaking fewer space missions and projects.
Facilities a product of early Space Race
NASA's testing facilities are aging. Many were built in the 1960s, during the Apollo moon-landing era. Some are even older. Though they've been updated, four of the five Glenn/Plum Brook test rigs identified as potentially expendable came online in the 1940s and '50s. They've contributed to the development of many aircraft and spacecraft, from early supersonic jets to the space shuttles.
NASA's operations and maintenance costs for those facilities have jumped 44 percent since 2005, but the agency's budget has stayed relatively flat. This year, mandatory federal spending cuts imposed by Congress through sequestration will carve $1.2 billion from the $17.8 billion NASA got in 2012. Further complicating matters, huge cost overruns in projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope have sapped money from NASA's aeronautics and science budgets that previously supported testing facilities.
Trying to figure out what testing equipment is needed and what can be scrapped is a moving target, the inspector general found. NASA's mission changes at the whim of the president and Congress. Abrupt shifts in space policy can whipsaw the agency and suddenly eliminate the demand for facilities, even while they're still under construction.
The audit cites a startling example. When then-President George W. Bush launched the Constellation program in 2004 to return astronauts to the moon with a new fleet of spacecraft, NASA began developing a rocket engine called the J-2X. The engine required a test stand for long-duration firing in space-like conditions. In 2007 NASA started construction of the test stand at its Mississippi-based Stennis Space Center.
But in 2010 President Barack Obama cancelled Constellation in favor of a deep-space exploration program, with different rocket requirements. Congress ordered NASA to finish building the Stennis test facility anyway, even though it was no longer needed.
That mandate was part of the 2010 Space Authorization Act, the same law that required NASA to downsize and get rid of unneeded infrastructure. So the space agency will finish the $350 million Stennis test stand this year and immediately mothball it, with a maintenance cost of as much as $1.8 million per year.
NASA likewise spent more than $150 million to upgrade Plum Brook facilities – mainly the Space Power Facility, the word's largest vacuum chamber – for Constellation-related spacecraft testing. Unlike other Plum Brook sites, the SPF didn't land on the inspector general's expendables list. That's probably because it has current and future clients lined up, including the commercial aerospace company SpaceX, which is now testing a fairing for its new Falcon 9 rocket inside the huge SPF vacuum chamber.
Plum Brook's B-2 Space Propulsion Research Facility – another large vacuum chamber in which rocket engines can be test-fired in space-like conditions – needs tens of millions of dollars in modifications, limiting its usefulness and raising doubts about its necessity, the inspector general noted. But that issue may be resolved soon.
The European Space Agency is negotiating with NASA about paying for improvements to the B-2 facility, so it can be used to test the new upper-stage engine on ESA's Arianne V rocket.
"The neat part about that is they get their test accomplished and in turn they upgrade the facility to basically negate one of the reasons the [inspector general's] report stated for not utilizing B-2 – that funding wasn't available for modifications," said Jeff Huber, a Norwalk banker and member of the Friends of Plum Brook.
Agency mulled closing Glenn, Plum Brook
Along with the suggestion that a large chunk of testing equipment at Glenn and Plum Brook may be unneeded, the inspector general's audit confirms a long-standing rumor in Ohio: that NASA weighed closing both sites in 2005.
The recommendation came in an internal study, commissioned by then-administrator Sean O'Keefe, that examined the "relevance" of NASA's 10 field centers and their satellites. The study found that a decline in aeronautics-related activities made Glenn dispensable, and that Plum Brook also lacked enough work to stay open. The Stennis Space Center, the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and California's Santa Susana Field Laboratory could be closed, too, and some work at the Ames Research Center in California could be shifted to other centers, the study concluded.
NASA refused The Plain Dealer's request to provide a copy of the study. It was cited in a section of the inspector general's audit that reviewed past agency efforts to trim infrastructure.
Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin said he inherited – but rejected – the study's recommendations when he succeeded O'Keefe in 2005.
There's no doubt NASA has too many centers and testing facilities, Griffin said. "If it were a business, you would not have 10 centers; you would have more like six or seven. But we live in a democracy, and you don't treat federal installations the same way you do when you're running a business.
"If NASA was going to have to deal with the fact of being over-facilitized, and no individual senator or congressman wants his center cut, my attitude was we will absorb that [problem] equally," Griffin said. "I basically spread the pain out. My approach was that NASA is an institution; we're not going to starve one part and have other parts healthy. We're going to all deal with it equally."
As part of his "10 Healthy Centers" initiative, Griffin distributed work assignments for the Constellation program to all centers, giving Glenn and Plum Brook some of their most significant responsibilities since Apollo.
He has frequently criticized the Obama administration's space exploration plans, which propose human landings on an asteroid by 2025 and on Mars in the 2030s, as lacking vision. "A proper space program would be utilizing NASA's 10 centers and facilities," Griffin said. "The problem is not that there's too much NASA; the problem is there's too little space program."
Getting rid of NASA testing facilities that lack an immediate use may save money now, but could hurt America's strategic aerospace capabilities in the long run, said former Glenn director Larry Ross.
For example, there's little current work underway to develop commercial supersonic aircraft, but when that effort inevitably resumes, Glenn's 10 by 10 foot supersonic wind tunnel will be critically needed, Ross said. "It is unique in almost all of its features . . . it is capable of running propulsion systems which other aerodynamic tunnels cannot do."
Such NASA assets were products of a free-spending era when the United States was intent on winning the space race. Scrapping them now, then rebuilding from scratch when a future need appears, would be expensive, perhaps prohibitively so.
"The likelihood of replacing [NASA's testing] capability at some future time is extremely low," Ross, now an aerospace consultant, said via email. "It would probably take a major national security threat to recreate the needed climate," such as China landing its astronauts on the moon. So "the bar for bulldozing them should be set really high."