From the Space Review
Psyche-d out
The delay of VERITAS started last year with problems encountered by another Discovery-class mission, Psyche. That spacecraft, going to the metallic main-belt asteroid of the same name, was scheduled to launch in August 2022. However, in May NASA announced that testing of the spacecraftâs software had fallen behind schedule, pushing the launch to a backup launch window in October. By late June, it was clear the mission would not make that window, and NASA stood down from a 2022 launch.
The proximate cause of that delay, the software testing issue, is now in hand, and NASA has rescheduled Psyche for an October 2023 launch. The agency, though, commissioned an independent review to better understand what went wrong with Psyche to prevent something like that from happening again.
That independent review, chaired by the venerable Tom Young, completed its work last fall and NASA discussed them at an online town hall meeting in early November, shortly after announcing the new launch plans for Psyche. That independent review found serious institutional issues at JPL, the lead center for Psyche.
âThere is a large imbalance today between the workload and the available resources at JPL,â Young said at that town hall meeting. âThis imbalance was clearly a root cause of the Psyche issues and, in our judgement, adversely affects all flight project activity at JPL.â
The review highlighted several problems, from the lab struggling to retain engineers who can find more lucrative jobs in the private sector to poor communications within project management and among team members, exacerbated by remote or hybrid work since the start of the pandemic. One example included in the report was a JPL Christmas party in late 2021 that was the first time that many team members had met in person since the pandemic; they âexchanged valuable project informationâ during the party.
Both NASA headquarters and JPL said they were committed to addressing the problems outlined in the report, but the agency was clearly concerned that JPL was overextended. In addition to operating many ongoing missions, it is leading two of the largest planetary missions in development, Europa Clipper and Mars Sample Return. Something had to give.
