Why would shutting down the Shuttle program be so expensive?

[tmccort]

I've heard that one of the arguments against shutting down the Shuttle program immediately is the cost involved, but knowing next to nothing about the issues involved I am curious as to why this is.

 

[CalliArcale]

There are two basic ways for a contract to end:<br /><br />1) It comes to the natural end of its lifecycle.<br />2) It is cancelled prior to the end of its lifecycle.<br /><br />The former obviously has no added cost, and is according to plan.<br /><br />The latter may save money, but there will be special costs associated with the shutdown that have nothing to do with the original planned expenses. They are not according to plan, so a new plan has to be created to take care of the shutdown activities. These activities vary depending on the maturity level, development model, and lifecycle phase of the program, but in general they'll involve wrapping up activities that were nearly done, capturing the current baseline of all documents, getting it all stuffed into a vaulting system of some kind, making sure all the paperwork for contracts and such is current, going through all outstanding action items and change requests to see what needs to be dealt with before the shutdown and what should be simply put on hold pending a restart, performing configuration audits to make sure you've got all your ducks in a row before the funding goes away, making final data deliveries, and so forth. Most of it is activities that would have to be done anyway, but must now be compressed into a short time and probably performed long before they were intended to be performed. There are also different activities depending on whether or not a restart is anticipated.<br /><br />I have been through this process before, thanks to the vagaries of the government contracting industry. When politics is a major factor in contract negotiation, sometimes some very unexpected things can happen. It's definitely a time when you find out how good your CM is. The better it is, the less it will cost to get things wrapped up neatly and stored.<br /><br />Believe it or not, you actually have to go through a process similar to bidding (but with less uncertainty) when you get a stop-work notice. You have some deadl <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[radarredux]

> <i><font color="yellow">The same vendors would probably get out of the Space business, thus NASA would have to pay them or others start up costs for CEV support.</font>/i><br /><br />This is part of the reason it is difficult to cleanly separate the budgets of the "new vision" (Moon) from the "old vision" (STS/ISS).<br /><br />For example, suppose NASA decided to terminate STS/ISS ASAP and accelerate the "new vision" to 2014 (date is for illustration purposes only). NASA would have to pay early termination costs on a number of contracts, pay for mothballing and storage of equipment, etc. As an example, in the commercial world when a company announces a big layoff, they also announce a big charge for that quarter to cover the costs of the layoff.<br /><br />Then come about 2011 NASA would need to start hiring <i>and training</i> new launch support staff, new mission control staff, new manufacturing staff, reactivate (and probably replace) neglected equipment, etc.<br /><br />I believe immediate termination of STS/ISS would save money, but it would not save as much as many expect.</i>