Please read: NASA FLY-OFF UNDER STUDY

Excerpt from UPI: WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- "NASA may borrow a development approach from the U.S. Air Force and seek to build multiple prototypes of its proposed new moon landing craft, and then test competing designs against one another in a celestial version of an airplane designers' fly-off."

This is potentially very exciting news. It will be to NASA's advantage-- budget-wise and politically -- to adopt such a competitive bid/prototype process. - Jim McDade

The news about a CEV fly-off has been out for several weeks now. Steidl showed a slide at the Goddard Conference a few weeks ago showing two competing CEVs in 2008, and I believe that Aviation Week reported it a week or so earlier.

However, is this a guaranteed better approach? First, we should keep in mind that the Air Force does not routinely do fly-offs. USAF actually abandoned this practice for a long period of time, resuming it only in the 1990s for fighter jets. I do not think that the Air Force does it for all of its aircraft. There was no fly-off to select the F-15 or the C-17, or even for the new tankers. (No comment on that last one.)

One of the reasons why the USAF actually moved away from doing fly-offs was that--if I remember correctly--they really were not sustainable. The companies spent a lot of money building a prototype with the possibility of losing, so much so that they actually risked the future of the company. Yes, a free market means that there are losers, but nobody has ever argued that national defense is a free market, and you can end up shooting yourself in the foot by killing off part of the industrial base. An alternative is for the government to fund the prototypes to some extent, in which case the government might end up paying for two development programs instead of one.

One can ask some tough questions about the fly-off that led to the F-22. The USAF had a fly-off in the early 1990s where both aircraft did remarkably well. The F-23 lost, apparently by a close call. Now here we are, over a decade later, and the F-22 is still limping into procurement. So the fly-off did not automatically produce a good result.

I'm not saying that a CEV fly-off is a bad idea, only that I question whether or not it is a clearly superior idea.

Thanks, Jim--I was thinking about posting on this, but hadn't gotten around to it.

I certainly think that not doing it for X-33 was disastrous (though there were many other reasons that program was disastrous).

I'm inclined to think that it's a good thing, because I think that competition in general is a good thing and we have far too little of it in the space business. Of course, OTOH, I'm not a big CEV fan...

Oh, and Dwayne--

The companies spent a lot of money building a prototype with the possibility of losing, so much so that they actually risked the future of the company.

Are you implying that they actually spent their own money on these things? I suspect that the idea here is for both to develop their vehicles under a cost-plus contract.

"Are you implying that they actually spent their own money on these things? I suspect that the idea here is for both to develop their vehicles under a cost-plus contract."

I'm not a procurement expert, but I believe that in the past (1950s or so) they did spend their own money on the prototypes. There are many other issues involved, however.

USAF flyoff competitions abandoned?

Most of the combat aircraft currently in the USAF Combat Command, the so called legacy force, were the winners of flyoff competitions held in the 1970's. The YF-16 beat the YF-17 for the lightweight fighter competition, and the YA-10 beat the YA-9 for the A-X competition.

I didn't realize that you were talking about that long ago, Dwayne. Yes, back then companies actually did compete with each other with their own resources, but I don't think they do any more. The Tigershark ensured that the current aerospace industry would stay firmly on the dole. They'll never make that kind of mistake again.

"USAF flyoff competitions abandoned?"

It depends upon the time period, but yes, the USAF did give up on fly-off competitions for awhile before re-adopting them. The F-15 was not a fly-off competition. Neither was the B-1 or the B-2 or the F-117 (and the same can be applied to other military services as well--Commanche, V-22, etc.). There was actually a fair amount of discussion of this in places like Aviation Week during the YF-22/YF-23 fly-off. I'm straining my memory here, but I believe there were some who argued that the competition was in fact counterproductive because the government spent twice as much money than it had to.

A fair competition is always going to produce superior concepts. Criminal corruption of these competitions is always a matter of concern, of course. "No-bid" competition might be understandable if not justifiable when the Pentagon wants to develop a "secret weapon".

Personally, I have no problem with NASA offering some tax incentives or even some "seed money" to promote these competitions.

I discussed this issue with Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt over dinner. Harrison is less worried about the contractors than he is the competency and capability of the NASA side of this process. Schmitt was well acquainted with many of the original NASA center managers and engineers that the space agency brought in back in the days when NASA was exempt from counter-productive civil service, affirmative action and other sophisticated federal human resource policies. Schmitt noted that the quality of the NASA workforce progressively declined with each succeeding wave of layoffs and resignations that began about 1965.

It seems that many of the "old school" Apollo people have serious doubts about the ability of present-day NASA to accomplish a daunting space mission such as a return to the moon or journey to Mars.

I recently spoke with a retired Saturn V 3rd stage engineer (Douglas then McDonnell Douglas) who independently commented about the poor quality of some NASA engineers that he was required to work with. You wont read those kinds of comments in the official NASA histories. Not everybody at 1960s NASA was as motivated, thorough and caring as Guenter Wendt was.

Perhaps Congress needs to change NASA into some kind of quasi-military, but civilian organization. I understand that our military services were been adversely affected by the social experiments of the Clinton years, but there was a time when the US military had the ability to put the right person in the right place to perform critical work. Perhaps NASA can be restored to its original fitness if Congress and the White House will work together (fat chance). NASA should not be operated as just another bloated federal bureaucracy. It is a unique agency and it should enjoy some unique operating orders in order to perform its unique mission.

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search engines only block certain words, there are ways around that. The only one I
have found so far was at http://www.netsx.org , I dont know about most parents
but we dont have time to monitor our kids every second when they want to go on
the computer. Anyway rant off.

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