Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Brutal

33 Comments

The new NASA administrator’s assessment of both NASA and Boeing’s performance on Commercial Crew:

[Late-afternoon update]

I don’t think that “Yikes!” really covers the waterfront here:

Here‘s Eric Berger’s story.

[Evening update]

Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.

33 thoughts on “Brutal”

  1. Failure to learn invites failure again…
    Somebody cast that in bronze and place in front of NASA HQ….

  3. Jared’s point of “you were more worried about saving face than doing the right thing” is all too true throughout many industries. More people need to speak that truth in the world.

  4. “there will be leadership accountability.”

    Isaacman has it within his authority to fire any NASA staff. Boeing staff, not so much. Now let’s see if there are any actual scalps taken.

    1. Yeah, I think it is the hard political reality that Isaacman has more maneuvering room on Starliner than he does right now on SLS/Orion. He is not going to get much (if any) blowback on the Hill for putting this harsh scrutiny on Starliner. Everyone can see its track record now.

      I’ve heard it mooted that Isaacman might be playing 4D chess with SLS/Orion, setting up a very high standard to clear it to fly, giving the program enough rope to hang itself if it keeps flunking WDR’s and launch attempts, keeps getting delayed, for months on end, rather than attacking it head-on. I have no idea if that’s what he’s up to, but it is nice to think about.

      1. Nice thought, but yesterday’s WDR having concluded with only quite niggling issues would seem to leave little to hang a commanded delay on. I fear Artemis 2 will fly in March.

        Anent Starliner, nobody at NASA got chopped for either Challenger or Columbia where people were actually killed. So it would certainly be a novelty to see some people cashiered for merely almost getting people killed with Starliner. I hope Isaacman is able to “shoot a few to encourage the others.”

        1. Hello Dick,

          “I fear Artemis 2 will fly in March.”

          Yes, I think the odds favor it now, too.

          Then again, SLS and its ground systems have a great track record of finding new ways to surprise us!

          “Anent Starliner, nobody at NASA got chopped for either Challenger or Columbia where people were actually killed.”

          Had NASA been staffed by Japanese, most of the senior leadership of the human space flight program would have resigned en masse!

          Failing that . . . yes, heads should have been chopped. It would not hurt at all to remove a few of the heads involved in the decisions revealed in this report, either.

        2. “Anent Starliner, nobody at NASA got chopped for either Challenger or Columbia where people were actually killed.”

          As far as being directly fired, I think you’re right. I recall some NASA supervisors were “allowed to retire” (at full benefits) in lieu of being fired. Not all animals are created equal.

        3. P.S. Speak of the devil!

          “After overnight data showed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS interim cryogenic propulsion stage, teams are troubleshooting and preparing for a likely rollback of Artemis II to the VAB at @NASAKennedy. This will almost assuredly impact the March launch window. @NASA will continue to provide updates as they become available.”

          I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, Dick.

  6. Dick Eagleson in this thread asked pointedly whether anyone at NASA would get fired for what happened; Eric Berger says the question has been posed, but we do not have any answer from Jared Isaacman to that yet.

    Casey Handmer asks it, too:

    “This is early Soyuz program level failures, where everything went wrong, and a couple of the crews died. We got so damn lucky.

    “I read through 100 pages of recommendations. Not one errant manager is named. Not one recommendation mentions personnel as a potential issue. What are the odds, that of the hundreds or thousands of people working on this program, every single one just happens to be the best person for the job? All they need is for a few dotted lines to be drawn on the org chart and a quick pep talk and their organizational efficacy will magically shift from F to A+?”

    https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/2024721556124160063

    Perhaps Isaacman needs to keep getting pinged with this question on X, where he is in the habit of actually responding to tweets by figures of note.

    1. More in this vein:

      “How many pink slips are necessary to shift the culture from failure to success?

      Let’s think about it in terms of dollars per termination. If we use the US Government’s Value of a Statistical Life at $10m, then Boeing’s total expenditure of $6.2b would imply 620 firings. But I am feeling merciful today.”

      https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/2024706875179385272

    2. Well there external politics (SLS/Congress) and internal politics (Starliner/NASA/Boeing)…

      I think Bob Z. is on the right track. What you do is de-certify Starliner for human transport and retask it as a cargo ferry. A glorified Cygnus with return capability. Boeing gets the message, NASA centers get the message AND when do you the next round of ‘right sizing’ within NASA the focus will be on staff to support that mission. Normal attrition. But do it quickly. If Boeing puts up a stink offer them an alternative: NASA walks away. How Boeing ‘right sizes’ is their problem. If they can’t continue to deliver on Starliner you still have Cygnus & Dragon. All with an eye to the fact that the ISS days are numbered anyway and it looks to me like NASA has all the capability it needs.

  7. I think much more emphasis should be placed on the fact that NASA put their ass on the scale in claiming that Boeing was more trustworthy to build a crewed vehicle than SpaceX. This wasn’t in 2005 during the CEV competition. This was in 2014, when SpaceX was already flying the cargo Dragon variant to ISS. Prior this announcement, it should already be an embarrassment that Crew Dragon has been flying missions for half a decade and Starliner still isn’t safe (perhaps neither is Orion). Yes, managers at NASA should be fired as well as those that went through the revolving door to key contractor positions.

  8. In some PME class I took there was a short story and then discussion we had to go through, involving 4 people in a car driving across Texas to Amarillo.

    (ProTip: Driving across Texas is not a vacation, it’s a career. Or a sentence. It’s a BIG state with not much in the way of enjoyable scenery).

    The moral of the story is everyone should understand, and agree, on the actions being taken. Sounds like NASA is lacking in this concept.

    1. (ProTip: Driving across Texas is not a vacation, it’s a career. Or a sentence. It’s a BIG state with not much in the way of enjoyable scenery).

      Been there, done that. Two days worth….

        1. Count me in too. Solo cross-country move from MI to CA by way of TN in 1974. Drove at 90 much of the way across TX with no other vehicles in sight and the van seemed to be barely moving. Took more than a day. Went right by Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo.

  9. One of the key problems is that Boeing didn’t test the thrusters in flight configuration. In flight, the thruster quad is insulated and covered. Here’s what it looked like on the test stand. No insulation. No cover. I seriously doubt they tested it in a vacuum, either. Heat removal in a vacuum is different than in air.

    https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9MzbEaxWCmUu8cuAf4T8uD-650-80.jpg

    This makes me wonder how rigorous the rest of their testing was. Based on their software, I suspect the answer is “not very”.

  10. I would certainly like to see some names. As for Artemis II, of the main dangers, ECLSS is probably the least, since they have two opportunities to abort before committing to full TLI (25 hours in). LAS is iffy, though not as much as the heat shield.

  11. Boeing likes to tout their experience with human spaceflight. They did do work with the ISS. However, when it comes to actually developing human spacecraft, their history is mostly based on acquisition.

    Mercury and Gemini were designed and built by McDonnell, which later merged with Douglas. McDonnell Douglas was bought (nominally) by Boeing, so they acquired whatever remained of McDonnell’s experience. Mercury and Gemini were developed over 60 years ago. It’s a pretty safe bet that the people who did that development are long retired or dead.

    The Apollo CM and SM were developed by North American Aviation, later North American Rockwell, and ultimately Rockwell Internation. Boeing bought Rockwell International. The Apollo program ended in 1975 with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission. That was 51 years ago. I doubt many of those engineers were still Boeing employees when they developed Starliner.

    Rockwell International designed and built the Space Shuttle. Program development began over 50 years ago and was essentially over by the first launch in 1981. The program continued until the Shuttle was retired in 2011. Few of the Shuttle designers likely were still around by the time Boeing began work on Starliner, although it’s possible many of the sustainment engineers were still around, assuming Boeing didn’t get rid of them when the Shuttle retired.

    Legacy capability involves the people who did the work, not the company they worked for. Starliner was Boeing’s first space capsule, and it shows. Being a fixed price contract, they cut corners everywhere they could. And it shows.

  12. So the question is where do we go from here. There is no point in “fixing” any of these problems. The timelines to satisfactory solutions is so far out there is no possible way to succeed before ISS retirement. I’m certain there are a hundred cases from WWII where projects went t!ts up and we just let it go. I think we’re there. Stopping the whole thing and maybe clawing back some monies might be possible but not likely. This is a lose lose senerio. We’re out the money, and Boeing is out of the rocket business.

    1. Boeing needs to go. They have not had any success in much of anything for government/DoD/Space this century, and their commercial is suffering too.

      And the prevalent attitude that “we can be as late as we want, and charge as much as we want” needs to be beaten out of them with a tie-down chain.

  13. I’m certain Boeing is about to bail on Starliner. First, to move beyond the current and shrinking ISS manifest, they have to qualify it for a new launch vehicle that will probably be non-SpaceX and therefore will require expensive human rating. Second, SpaceX, the new “dependable old pro”, will easily beat Boeing on reputation and underbid Boeing for any transport to next-gen stations. CCP was a prestige project for Boeing, not a moneymaker. They’re going to pull the plug.

    1. It would certainly save everyone involved any further embarrassment if Starliner was just taken out back of the barn and put down. Not really that important if it’s Boeing or NASA that pulls the trigger. NASA doesn’t even need to make it official that Boeing is never going to get another significant contract. Any future Boeing responses to NASA RFPs will fail to make the cut on their merits – or, more properly, lack of same.

      1. imho NASA can’t make that move overtly, but they can advise Boeing privately that it would be in the company’s interests to bow out gracefully “for the shareholders.” Not that Boeing needs much convincing.

  14. Duplicated comment from “Business as Usual” thread because it is directly relavant to this topic as well.

    “Also want to mention this excellent analysis from Scott Manley that pretty much echos what has been already pointed out / discussed here (some time ago).

    Kudos to Scott for going through the process I wanted to but didn’t have the time for. Particularly the photos of the ‘doghouse’ interior, which I independently uncovered via Grok several days ago, but Scott has now re-published for all to see on YouTube. Not that this wasn’t already common knowledge via Reddit. I don’t have original source credits for this photo. Otherwise Grok wouldn’t have known about it either.

    Very much helps explain the Starliner’s RCS nomenclature featured in the report.”

Comments are closed.