OUR DEALINGS WITH NASA
For the first five years, we developed the AST as part of the Center for Automated Space Science (CASS), a NASA University Research Center, following a plan of development outlined in our original CASS proposal. This plan worked well enough despite some major yet necessary changes in the scope of the project. We were originally planning to buy the 2-m telescope as a turn-key instrument from a telescope manufacturer, but after OSEM went out of business, there were none left that we felt were financially strong enough to build such a telescope within our budget. So, with NASA's blessing, we decided to build the telescope in-house. This change implied a major revision of the project's timescale, which we really never discussed with NASA. We also decided to improve the design of the dedicated spectrograph, increasing its cost significantly over the preliminary design we had priced with OSEM. In spite of these changes, our best estimate of the total cost of the 2-m project, excluding salaries of Professors Eaton and Busby, is that it will overrun the original budget by about 15%, most of which comes from changes in the design of the spectrograph.
About two and a half years into the project, after the basic design of the telescope and its instrument were already fixed, we came under scrutiny of NASA's Code S, which arranged a "preliminary design review" (PDR) of the telescope and its spectrograph and established a hostile, adversarial environment for the completion of the project. (The report of this 17&18-Sept-98 PDR, which we got in mid-January, 1999, and our reply of 15-Feb-99 are given here.) As a result of this PDR and subsequent reviews, we had to establish a more "normal" NASA-style management structure for the project, complete with a formal project plan, a worthless configuration-management plan, and a formal project schedule with Gantt charts. These documents and tools would make sense for a project with many employees having independent authority. However, given our perfectly reasonable small-college management structure, the first two of these were completely useless, while we found the schedule somewhat helpful, albeit primarily in the overhead task of communicating with NASA beaureaucrats.
In addition to aforementioned project documents, we submitted monthly progress reports to NASA Headquarters since September, 1999. Copies of them are given below for your edification.
Monthly progress reports for the TSU 2-m AST:
Other documents of interest include (1) a partslist for the telescope, (2) a partslist for the spectrograph
