Category Archives: Space

Business, Political Commentary, Space

More People Are Noticing The NASA Problem

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Fox News has picked up the story on the rocket to nowhere:

Stifled by legislative bottlenecks, NASA will be forced to continue an already defunct rocket program until March, costing the agency half a billion dollars while adding more hurdles to the imminent task of replacing the space shuttle.

It’s always useful to note that half a billion dollars is about what SpaceX has spent to date on: creating a company, purchasing/leasing/modifying test, manufacturing and launch facilities, developing from scratch and demonstrating engines, two orbital launch systems, and a pressurized return capsule. This is the difference between NASA doing a traditional cost-plus procurement versus a fixed-price one. And it’s not just SpaceX — we’ve seen similar rapid, cost-effective progress from Boeing on their fixed-price commercial crew contract.

And of course, Shelby’s spokesman says that it’s NASA’s fault:

Shelby’s office says that there is no reason NASA can’t move forward.

“NASA is just making excuses and continuing to drag its feet, just as it has done for the past two years under the Obama administration,” Shelby spokesman Jonathan Graffeo said Wednesday.

As I note here, this isn’t NASA’s fault — it’s the fault of a Congress that has set them up to fail. They have two contradictory laws, and they can’t obey one without disobeying the other, so it’s inevitable that they will be acting illegally until Congress fixes it.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

How Many NASA Engineers…

31 Comments

…does it take to screw in a bolt? From comments here:

Take a generic piece of Criticality 2 hardware:

1) First there needs to be a released, CM-controlled drawing signed off by (among others) a stress analyst who does calculations to ensure that the bolt is not being over- or under-torqued. The drawing must be referenced later by the technician to verify the proper torque range of the bolt.

2) Then a project engineer needs to write a Task Performance Sheet (TPS) that is no fewer than 4 pages long that documents, in excruciating detail, which bolt to tighten, what tools to use, the exact locations of every piece of hardware involved throughout the entire process. The part numbers, serial numbers, and lot numbers of every part involved are recorded on the TPS. (The work instruction document defining the TPS process is 55 pages)

3) The TPS needs to be signed by the Project Engineer, his/her manager, and two Quality Engineers (who designate “Mandatory Inspection Points – MIPs – where a Quality Assurance Specialist needs to monitor the process); additional signatures (e.g. stress or materials experts) may be needed depending on the job. Then a Quality Assurance Specialist looks over the paper, approves it, and sends it to the Quality Assurance Records Center (QARC) where it is scanned, copied, and then placed in a basket to be worked.

4) Oh, we need the bolt, too. The bolt has to meet certain quality and reliability specifications, so it is purchased from an approved vendor and is most likely a MIL-spec part. When the vendor ships the part, it must be traceable by lot or serial number and accompanied by a Certificate of Conformance (CoC). The Receiving department will open the package, inspect the parts and make sure the CoC is present. Then some percentage of bolts from that lot of bolts will go to the Receiving Inspection and Test Facility (RITF) and be tested to ensure that the bolts actually meet the MIL Specs (in spite of the CoC being present). Then the RITF report is attached to the lot of bolts, with the CoC, and they all go to bonded storage.

5) The Project Engineer takes the TPS to the bond room, and someone pulls the bolt off the shelf, then a QAS makes sure that the proper part was pulled and that the CoC and RITF report are indeed attached. The parts are labeled and bagged and the Project Engineer is called to pick up the paper and part.

6) These get walked to the work area, then the Project Engineer rounds up two QASs and a union technician who has received special training on how to tighten bolts (no joke). The technician gathers the calibrated tools.

7) The technician tightens the bolt and records the tightening torque on the TPS. The QAS and NT QAS stamp the TPS to verify that they witnessed the bolt being torqued. (While the bolt is actually being tightened, 3-4 people are present watching.)

8) The Project Engineer and one of the QASs will take the hardware back to the bond room or wherever it needs to go. If the hardware is going back to the bond room, it has to be cleaned and sealed in a bag first.

9) The Project Engineer takes the TPS back to the quality office, where one or two QASs will go through the document and make sure that all of the required information was recorded and each step in the process was stamped or signed by all of the required people. Then the QAS will stamp the TPS “closed” and send it back to the QARC office, who will scan and copy it again.

I’m not going to debate the wisdom of any of these steps; any one of them are defensible in some instance. But I count around a dozen people immediately involved in the process and in general I’d say it takes a couple of days, assuming none of the required people find something they view as amiss. I’ll also point out that this is the process, as I understand it, as of today; every few weeks someone will get a wild hair up their ass and add another requirement.

In all fairness, though: I’m fairly confident that most of these people don’t make $100k a year. If they do, I need to have a talk with 4 of my managers about my salary 🙂

Every one of those procedures evolved as a response to some kind of mishappening, and they’ve accreted over decades, but if you want to know why NASA programs cost so much and take so long, there you go. And despite all of that, they destroyed two orbiters that cost a couple billion each to build, and shut down the program for years. So even when failure isn’t an option, failures occur. What is needed is an attitude that failures must be allowed for the program to succeed. The other related attitude that’s required is that what we’re doing is important, which allows the taking of risk.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I would note that one of the reasons that SpaceX can avoid a lot of this quality acceptance stuff is that they manufacture so much in house, and are vertically integrated, as a result of the fact that they couldn’t find contractors who were responsive to their needs in terms of price and schedule. The traditional NASA/AF way has bred a culture among the lower subcontractor tiers that isn’t useful for those trying to lower costs. We need to replace the existing infrastructure with more nimble players. The growing new space industry will help make that happen, but it won’t happen overnight.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Restrospective And Prospective

You’ll be seeing a lot of pieces like this one from Leonard David over the next few days, with a look back one year and forward one year at commercial spaceflight. Leonard got quotes from Brett Alexander, Jim Muncy, and me among others. I’ll have a couple up myself, probably early next week, at AOL News and Popular Mechanics.

[Update a while later]

Clark Lindsey has a roundup of the past year as well.

Political Commentary, Space

Good Job, Congress

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The zombie rocket continues:

At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later.

That should have happened before the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year.

But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language.

That means NASA and its contractors are required to keep building Ares I, even though Obama effectively killed it when he signed the new NASA plan that canceled the Constellation moon program begun under President George W. Bush.

“It would be nice if Congress did its work,” said John Logsdon, space expert at George Washington University. “I would not be surprised if there was a combination of frustration and anger [at NASA]. They want to get on carrying out a good space program.”

It doesn’t matter. Having a good space program hasn’t been politically important in over forty years.

[Update a while later]

More from Stephen Smith:

Perhaps the singular achievement by SpaceX with its December 8 launch and orbit of the Dragon spacecraft is to show what American engineering can still accomplish when freed of Congressional shenanigans.

Imagine what SpaceX, Orbital, Boeing or one of the other Commercial Crew Development applicants could do with that $500 million which will do nothing except keep on life-support a brain-dead government jobs program.

Imagine. It’s easy if you try.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

He’s At It Again

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Fresh from his previous escapade into unreality, Loren Thompson has another ignorant (or perhaps he’s just lying — not sure which is worse) post at Forbes about space:

The federal government is planning to spend $19 billion on NASA’s civil space program next year, and yet the agency’s signature mission — human exploration of space — seems to be in its death throes. The Obama Administration has canceled plans it inherited to send astronauts back to the Moon, the Space Shuttle is about to retire, and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology. You’d think that with the nation in the midst of an identity crisis, the White House could have come up with something a little more inspiring.

Congress has stepped in to stop the administration from destroying the human space flight industrial base, but it doesn’t really have a vision of what NASA should be aiming to achieve. So here’s a vision: send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway. Mars is the only other earth-like planet in the known universe. It has water, it may contain life, and it could eventually sustain a human colony. By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding. And in the process, maybe it can help America get its sense of purpose back.

Emphasis mine.

Let’s ignore the silliness about Apollo to Mars. What in the world is he talking about? Who has gotten a “handout”? If he’s referring to Elon Musk, he has been delivering specified milestones on a fixed price, at a very low cost to the taxpayer relative to most other NASA human spaceflight activities. Why is that a “handout” but billions of dollars in cost-plus payments to Lockheed Martin (among others), who fund his Lexington Institute (among others) is not? And if he is referring to Elon, who are the others (note he used the plural)? How about Boeing and CST, out of Houston? Is that a “rich California businessman”?

And what does he mean by “updating old technology”? Does mean like building rockets and capsules based on Apollo designs, and thirty-year-old Shuttle hardware, and then planning to use the horrifically expensive results for the next half century, as Mike Griffin planned with Constellation? Is he completely bereft of a sense of irony and hypocrisy?

Why does anyone take people like him seriously?

Political Commentary, Space

A History Of Space Suits

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…and an interesting one, at the New York Times.

What it doesn’t describe is the lack of innovation since Apollo, like NASA at large, because there wasn’t any competition, even within NASA. It’s nice to hear the history from Joe Kosmo (what an appropriate name — the only thing better would be if it were spelled instead with a “C”), but there is no mention or interview with Vic Vikukal or Bruce Webbon (with whom I reacquainted myself, after a quarter of a century, a couple of months ago in Las Cruces) who worked at Ames, who were shut out of the competition in the sixties, and never allowed back in, despite their superior suit designs. This issue was the primary reason that I suggested the first MillenniumCentennial Challenge, which turned out to be quite successful. There are still a lot of improvements to be made, though, if only NASA would allow it to happen.