Space business still learning to walk.

• Author: Neff, Todd
• Position: Column

In 1948, a small University of Colorado team told Air Force scientists that for $64,000 they could build path-breaking space hardware to observe the sun from the nose of a rocket. And build it they did, though they came in roughly 10 times over budget and years behind schedule.

In 1959, some of those same CU students, then working for what is now known as Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, told NASA they could build the first sun-observing satellites--three of them--for about $850,000. They built one, and delivered it more than a year late and for about triple that amount.

The Air Force and NASA were OK with these overruns. As Nancy Grace Roman, who served as NASA's astronomy chief in the early 1960s, told me, "We recognized that we were doing something new, and we had to learn how to do it. You could try things, and if they didn't work, you could try something else. I have in the past compared the beginning of the space program to a baby learning to walk. It falls down occasionally."

Some 40 years later, in 1998, Ball Aerospace proposed to NASA a $233 million spacecraft - actually, two spacecraft - to smash into the comet Tempel 1 and observe what pristine solar-system building blocks their projectile unearthed. Deep Impact met its mark on July 4, 2005. The mission launched a year later than planned and cost a reported $333 million, which didn't include the thousands of hours engineers toiled off the clock.

Deep Impact became the first spacecraft to touch a comet more than 43 years after the Orbiting Solar Observatory became the first to fix its gaze on the sun from Earth's orbit. The space program, far from a baby, had grown middle-aged. But the problems of budget and schedule persisted - and persist still.

Not to single out Ball Aerospace - I just happen to know Ball best, having written a book about the company. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Science Laboratory (a.k.a. Curiosity), a rolling chemistry lab for the Red Planet, was initially slated to cost $1.63 billlion. It will cost perhaps $2.3 billion when it launches later this year, two years behind schedule. The James Webb Space Telescope, for which Northrop Grumman is prime contractor (Ball is working on the mirror array), will launch at least...