SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

NASA is currently planning to spend over a million dollars to tear down a rocket-engine test stand. The stated reason for tearing down the stand is to maintenance costs. The test stand, however, costs only about $25,000 per year to maintain. It could stay in place for 60 years before the maintenance costs would equal the cost of demolition. Preventing the demolition would save the taxpayers more than a million dollars... more »

Background: The NASA Langley Research Center and Joint Base Langley-Eustis (JBLE) share nearly 3 miles of common border. We each have our own police and fire departments. The JBLE units are mostly a military force with a small compliment of civil service civilians. NASA Langley has a contract work force in place to mitigate both security and fire protection. Having both agencies in such close proximity creates several... more »

Per the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), federal information systems must be hardened according to security configuration standards such as the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), the U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB), and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.

Government (and contractor) IT shops spend countless hours configuring new and existing systems to ensure... more »

An employee at KSC recently performed an engineering analysis of a broken office chair. The chair was 17 years old, and was subjected to metallurgical and electron microscopy analysis. See the following for full details:

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2011/KSC-MSL-2011-0045.pdf

Performing such an analysis on a piece of cheap 17-year old office furniture is poor use of tax dollars. These kinds of decisions demonstrate... more »

The NRC has been using time and labor software that is cumbersome and outdated, PeopleSoft Human Resources Management System (HRMS). In 2004 the NRC initiated a study to improve the time and labor system. In 2007 the NRC started the process to update the time and labor software, which is still in progress with over one year in delays due to performance issues. In 2001 NASA worked to create an incredibly good piece... more »

Countertrade and / or offsets programs should be part of any federal agency or department when conducting international business. Many multi-nationals based in the US and overseas utilize countertrade and offset programs to maintain cash reserves, generate exports, reduce financial risk and reduce trade imbalances. When NASA pays pay $60M+ for a ride to the International Space Station, they could they not be receiving... more »

Consolidating redundant overlapping activities conducted by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) into fewer focused activities would reduce the resources expended to achieve results. All three organizations fund or conduct similar research and operations such as climate research, amongst others. The respective... more »

NASA has made efforts to move to paperless work, but never completely committed to it. Instead, paperless systems have simply been a second layer on top of the paper system. Many of the obstacles to paperless systems have been overcome with the advent of laptops and tablets (to provide portable access to work authorizing documents), RFID badges (to provide identity authentication for signing task steps) and other new... more »

Paper and supply waste might be reduced by making each individual organization (i.e., the branch, department or section) responsible for paying for what they use. Awareness of these costs at the user level could make conservation a consideration. Additionally, it would allow these organizations to develop methods for reducing waste that will be successful in their particular work environment. For example, a small office... more »

There are sites around the country for which the US Government as financial responsibility for environmental clean-up. Unfortunately, two different agencies have part of the responsibility for the same geographical area. Both agencies complete all of the activities in parallel including NEPA, site characterization, awarding contracts, and contract administration. If the clean-up activities were combined under an overall... more »

Presently each of approximately 10 different NASA centers manages their own patent portfolio and licensing function. While NASA HQ oversees part of these functions, NASA HQ could also consolidate invention disclosures, patent filings, patent maintenance, and foreign activities. NASA HQ could also at the same time manage commercialization activities aligned with their new space vision, to extract maximum licensing and... more »

Eliminate the unnecessary and inefficient budget micromanagement forced upon NASA by Congress. Allow NASA to set its own internal funding allocations based on the space policy priorities set by the President. Congress should not be directing NASA to spend $X million on this program and $Y million on that (or worse, having non engineers design the next heavy lift launch system). To do so is at best wastefully inefficient... more »

NASA sponsors several summits that are not directly related to NASA's mission. For example, the NASA IT Summit. Although this summit may be useful to those in the IT community, NASA is not in the business of developing IT. If we are serious about saving money, then these types of activities that do not relate to NASA's core mission, should be canceled or held less frequently. Another alternative would be to hold on-line... more »