I don’t normally deal with defense procurement issues, particularly in this detail, but Dan Hartung sends me this link to an article in the Atlantic by James Fallows on the Joint Strike Fighter. As usual from Mr. Fallows, it provides a riveting bit of history on that subject.

He wonders whether it offers any lessons for NASA.

Having read it once, I’m not sure, but I’ll give it some thought. I’m not sure how applicable the approach is to NASA, given how limited its vision is for spacelift. If it could somehow be coordinated with the military needs, then there might be a chance, but it’s even harder to coordinate NASA with the Pentagon than it is to get the services to agree.

But here were the things that jumped out at me from having read it.

First, it provides a nice little description of Darleen Druyun, and why she may continue to be a major player.

Second, this passage provides some interesting insight:

“There was one point [in 1999] where it was strongly urged that we terminate Lockheed and give the program to Boeing,” Jacques Gansler told me recently. “Even if to do that we had to give Boeing the Lockheed Martin design to build. The skunk works had just lost cost control. The management was in terrible shape.”

We get a clue from it as to one of the reasons that the X-33 program failed. Skunk Works just ain’t what it used to be.

The third thing I saw was this:

At the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, under the guidance of Martin McLoughlin, the JSF’s director of manufacturing, I saw a demonstration of modern manufacturing systems like the ones already in place at Boeing. The wing is formed as two great halves, and the joined halves are matched so precisely to the fuselage that they snap in. The computer industry as we know it would not exist were it not for high-speed, high-precision assembly, nor could America’s car makers compete with Japan’s had they not used these techniques. This is the first time these methods will be used for the military.

This, I believe, does have major implications for the space industry. The reason that companies like XCOR and Pioneer Rocketplane can contemplate building space vehicles for affordable prices is because of the revolution in computer-aided design and fabrication, that throw many of the old aerospace costing models into a cocked hat, even for limited production runs.

In any event, the article’s definitely worth a read for those interested in aerospace and defense policy (including a lot of dirty laundry in the Beltway), and it may spark some further thoughts as to its applicability to our launch conundrum.