Save Award 2010 National Aeronautics and Space Administration

I suggest you do away with going to the moon. been there and done that.

Where possible, eliminate land line telephones. In some cases, managers and workers have both a government cellular and a land line telephone. This duplication costs the government money. if applied across the federal government, much savings could be realized by eliminating the land line.

Would it be possible to give out vouchers for cell phones instead of buying cell phones through our ODIN services. I can get a better phone at a cheaper rate than using a buying service we are required to use. This would be for non-secure position only; but would save quite a bit for each phone issued.

NASA or your agency would issue a monthly voucher or credit to supplement what you pay through a service of your choice.... more »

The process of patenting ideas at NASA should be streamlined. As it is now (at least at my center) a very long and laborious process, where contracted outside commities who are often unknowledgeable are hired to make a decision what gets patented based on marketability and outside contractors are hired to market these inventions. Most often they make no decision at all and just drag the process on for years which is a... more »

Negotiate smarter software licensing terms for the most common software tools.
Most federal employees spends some time requesting or fulfilling funding requests to upgrade or maintain a core of 5 to 20 software programs due to "full cost"-like accounting systems. Standard communication, calendaring, and document/image processing software are per-employee overhead costs. These should be dealt with by line-management at... more »

Require Contractors to follow NASA processes instead of their own.

There has been a major decrease in productivity at the Johnson Space center since some contractors have implemented their own processes. Their attempt was to make things less prone to mistakes, but instead they have built up unnecessary overhead. Civil servants doing the same task can certify and maintain hardware much quicker. Some of the contractors... more »

Use a Task Order (TO) instead of a Delivery Order (DO) for small contracts.

There has been a push to use DO's for everything even the design and fabrication of small things like a cable. This creates a huge overhead and costs easily 3 times the price of putting a civil servant in charge and using contactors to assist on a TO. $100k's could be saved on a single contract if we used TO's for small projects. The TO is... more »

To have a central agency website where an employee can select which IT equipment (i.e. video card, memory, processor) will be used in their custom order of a system and not worry about vendor competition due to preselection of qualified vendors (Click-Buy-Go).

To model after Google corporate office where employees pay into a meal plan/service and out of that buyin have several different eatires on site to choose from to reduce amount of time employees go out to lunch.

Centralizing acquisition of all CAD (Computer Aided Design) Engineering tool application for the entire agency thus enjoying the economy of the scale and saving hundreds of thousands dollars if not tens of millions of taxpayer's money.
Currently each 10 centers disjointedly make their own purchasing and most to none realize no discount or very little for their specific portion. As if all the CAD/Engineering tools were... more »

To centralize hosting of all CAD (Computer Aided Design) licenses from a central location.
Currently each 10 centers of the agency (NASA) host their own which requires dedicated infrastructure to support such service. By centralizing this necessary yet crucial service the agency should realize hundreds of thousands dollars if not tens of millions in the process. Currently Jet Propulsion Lab center of NASA is equipped... more »

Use the free Microsoft Office equivalent software instead of buying multiple licenses. This free open-source software has been in use amongst savvy business leaders for sufficient time to become a true MS Office replacement option. Reference = http://www.openoffice.org/) OpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is... more »

America’s people are the backbone of our economy, with the heartbeat of the internet flowing freedom of information.
Our nation is made up of a diverse workforce and within each business, projects are being endeavored.
Cloud computing promotes equality, by providing all individuals reliable access to state of the art technologies.
I propose a Collaboration Center of Excellence, which would utilize cloud Internet-based... more »

Maximize Performance-based-outsourcing/contracts for designing and delivering complex Space Systems by focusing on select meaningful Key Performance Requirements (KPRs) to drive efficiency, innovation and reduced Life cycle cost. This has potential of savings hundreds of millions dollars for NASA

Adopt proven best design engineering practices and evolving smart technologies from the industry. Do due diligence to make... more »

I suggest you develop a (Google-like) gadget in which meeting administrators can enter the number of participants and an estimated average salary burn rate. Like a timer, the gadget tool would display the number of tax dollars being spent. Although simplistic in form, meeting chairpersons could use this information to improve meeting efficiency with quick and visible cost/benefit assessments. The ability to determine... more »