nasa wraps in the april edition of one small step for a space activist allen sherzer tim kyger write another problem is what are called wraps or sometimes the center tax when work for a large program like freedom or shuttle is performed at a nasa center the center skims off a portion which goes into what amounts to a slush fund this money is used to fund work the center manager wants to fund this sum is estimated to be over a third of the funds allocated think about that of the billion cost of freedom fully billion won t be spent on anything having anything to do with space stations now maybe that billion was wisely spent and maybe it wasn t but the work done with it should stand on its own merits not distorting the cost of other projects congress has no idea of the existense of these wraps congress has never heard the term center tax they look at the station they are getting and the price they are paying and note that it doesn t add up they wonder this blissfully unaware that a third of the money is going for something else my dear friends your mixing fact and fiction here a couple of weeks ago when i first read this in your posting i talked with one of the cost experts here in space station at headquarters if you wondering why i didn t post a response immediately i do have a real job i m supposed to be doing here at headquarters digging up old khz data looking into sherzer kyger claims rates pretty low on the totem pole of priority also i spent last weekend in kansas city at the national science teachers association conference extolling the virtues of ssf to science teachers first off yes the concept of center tax or wrap does exist if i recall the numbers correctly the total tax for the ssf program for this fiscal year is around million this was computed by adding up the wp wp and wp center taxes with the ssf budget for this fiscal year at billion my calculater says the tax percentage is over the life of the ssf program using your figure of billion for the cost of ssf a tax at a rate comes to million this is alot less than billion but i will concede it s still an appreciable amount of pocket change i should note that your estimate of the tax rate at could be close to the actual rate the tax is only charged on funds that are spent at the center kind of like mcdonalds at some states where you do have to pay sales tax if you eat the food at the restaurant but you don t if you get it take out for example at wp the vast bulk of the funds we receive go to the rocketdyne contract and are not subject to the center tax i don t have the numbers in front of me but i d guess at least of the wp funds go to rocketdyne so you could be right about a tax rate of but it s only applied to funds spent at the center and not to the prime contracts this leads to the obvious question what is the government doing with ssf funds that don t go to the prime contractors i e ok wp gets a slice of the billion pie a big portion of this slice goes to rocketdyne what happens to the balance of the funds which aren t eaten up by the center tax at wp we call these funds we spend in house supporting development funds as they are supporting the development work done by rocketdyne we have used these funds to setup our own testbed to checkout the electrical power system architecture our testbed has a real life solar array field left over from solar cell research research a few years back with lead acid car batteries to simulate the nickel hydrogen batteries on ssf dc switchgear dc dc converter units and simulated loads data from the testbed was used in a recent change evaluation involving concerns about the stability of the power system we have also used the supporting development money to purchase nickel hydrogen batteries which are on life testing at both lewis and the crane naval facility in indiana as a side point of the battery cells on test recently hit the four year life test milestone cells have completed to cycles the on orbit batteries go through cycles per year as a final example my home division at lewis used the supporting development funds to purchase personal computers and work stations for performing system analyses like modeling of the performance of the electrical power system availability calculations using a monte carlo simulation setting up a database with information on weight of the power system elements finally the money raised by the tax does not all go into a slush fund at lewis the director does control a small discretionary fund each year any individual at lewis can submit a proposal to the director to get money from this fund to look at pretty much anything within the lewis charter most of the tax however goes to fund the general services at the center like the library the central computer services division the contractor who removes the snow etc thus it is rather difficult to determine what percentage of the ssf budget doesn t go for ssf activities to get an accurate figure you would have to take the annual expenditure for the library for example and then divide by the amount of the library funds used to support ssf which would be hard to compute by itself how would you figure out what percentage of the bill for aviation week for year is billable to ssf would you base it on the person hours ssf employees spend reading av week versus the rest of the center personnel you would then have to compare this estimate of the ssf portion of the library expense with the portion of the tax that goes to support the library who knows maybe ssf overpays on the tax to run the library but we underpay for snow removal talk about a burecratic nightmare my last point is that i can t believe your claim that congress has never heard of the term center tax unfortunately all of the nasa testimony before congress isn t on a computer so i can t do a simple word search someplace to prove you wrong but surely in some gao audit somewhere these nasa cost methods were documented for congress
