Here’s a Glimpse of NASA’s $349 Million ‘Mothballed’ Tower
Natalie Johnson /
Washington is routinely accused of spending your tax dollars frivolously, but $349 million toward a project that may never be used?
“All you’ve done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail,” says a project foreman.
The Washington Post exposed the multimillion-dollar NASA construction project, saying it built a $349 million laboratory tower in Mississippi intended to simulate the “vacuum of space” to test a new rocket engine.
But the project, called the A-3 test stand, turned out to be useless.
Immediately following its completion in June, NASA closed off the 300-foot-tall tower without ever testing it.
The reason? The rocket program it had been constructed to serve was canceled in 2010.
A 2011 photo of the placement of a test cell dome atop NASA’s A-3 Test Stand at the John C. Stennis Space Center. (Photo: Danny Nowlin/NASA/Newscom)
“It’s heartbreaking to know that, you know, you thought you’d done something good,” David Forshee, general foreman for the pipefitters of the tower, told the Post. “And all you’ve done is go around in a damn circle, like a dog chasing his tail.”
In the project’s inception, NASA predicted it would cost $119 million to build. This estimate then jumped to $163 million. When it was over, NASA had spent more than twice as much as the second estimate for a program that ended four years earlier.
And the spending is still not over. According to the Post, NASA will continue to spend an additional $700,000 a year “to maintain it in disuse.”
Shortly after the program was canceled, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., sponsored an amendment to reinstate construction and complete it by September 2013, even though its mission would not be revived.
“Administrations come and go. I think it makes sense not to leave a partially constructed asset sitting there,” Wicker told the Post. “I do believe, a decade from now, we’ll look back and see that it has been used in a very positive way.”
The Post noted that Wicker did not name a specific NASA program that could use the tower, and NASA says it doesn’t have any rockets in development that would even need the testing the A-3 tower provides.
So for now, the massive steel structure will remain “mothballed,” according to the Post.