The Best Way to Make a Profit as an Aerospace Company is to Fail (https://qz.com/1784335/the-space-military-industrial-complex...), a compelling piece about how massive corporations like Northrop Grumman have little incentive to hit their contract budgets and are arguably incentivized not to. “Northrop Grumman […] won the James Webb Space Telescope contract in 1996 with a promise that the project would cost $500 million and be flight-ready in 2007. The telescope is now likely to launch in 2021 and is expected to cost nearly $10 billion. [...] [W]ith every delay and snafu, Northrop Grumman rakes in more money as missed deadlines extend the timeline and require more funding from the government. One delay in 2018 brought Northrop Grumman close to a billion dollars alone—twice the price the firm originally quoted to the government for the entire project.” According to this document (pdf) released on Jan. 28 by the Government Accountability Office, the JWST has only a 12% chance of launching in March 2021. The massive overruns by Boeing on SLS are a similar example.
*but oddly some major aerospace contractors had their fingers in the pie anyway.
11.5 hour days, 7 days a week for a year?
> I almost burned out
No kidding. Seems like a recipe for much worse than burn out.
I know this well, this seems to be common in large software companies.
Take the Joint Strike Fighter / F-35 for example: 4 bids. Lockheed won the contract but subcontracts major parts to another JSF bidder (Northrop) and Boeing/MD ending up merging. The whole thing is so incestuous.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/shodd...
> In a vibration test of the telescope earlier this year in California by prime contractor Northrop Grumman, dozens of loose fasteners — some 70 pieces in all — came off. A few pieces are still missing and could well be inside the observatory. The locknuts were not tightened properly before the test, according to a report by the board.
This sort of thing (IIRC, this individual issue cost $150M) should come directly out of the contractor's profits.
Companies with no competition and a guaranteed contract will never deliver the goods.
The reality is any such corruption is dwarfed by the corruption that goes on in the award of US govt contracts.
This is all an inevitable consequence of the US being one of the few countries on earth were bribery (by another name) is legal. So long as these corporations keep bribing the politicians, their contracts will continue to get extended.
Can't wait to hear how the Raider program takes forever haha. The US military is already way overpowered anyway, so the way I see it, I'm just getting the money I put in taxes back here plus a little from all the guys who don't play the game. And if you complain I can just seed something on Twitter about it being outsourced engineers who made the mistake. Then you'll rage for a few minutes and give me money.
Thanks, my dudes. Index funds are for losers.
Directly from the financial report from Boeing:
> Fourth-quarter operating margin decreased to 0.5 percent due to a $410 million pre-tax Commercial Crew charge primarily to provision for an additional uncrewed mission for the Commercial Crew program, performance and mix. NASA is evaluating the data received during the December 2019 mission to determine if another uncrewed mission is required.
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2020-01-29-Boeing-Reports-Fourt...
Similar wording can also be used with respect to debt that will never be collected.
I don't understand why (as far a I know) the weak points of the space shuttle weren't addressed, like the heat tiles which were supposedly fragile. Instead, they aborted the entire program.
The argument for Commercial Crew seems clear. The argument for two companies doing it is redundancy, in case one company goes bankrupt or hikes prices or has a huge mishap requiring months/years of investigation and remediation.
That's a valid question since we don't need manned space flight.
that's because it's their job to _convey_ this information. But of course, their conveying is slow and/or wrong, whether by intention or by incompetence.
Also, if the customer and the sub/contractor were in direct communication, then these middle managers and project coordinators will no longer be needed! That threatens their job security!
When a bank collapses, the FDIC steps in, takes over operations, and ensures it keeps running while they find a different bank to take it over.
It's a rather fascinating process: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102384...
Look, the Saturn 1B - the man-rated, 20,000kg-class, safe predecessor to the Saturn 5 - cost ~$330m 2020 dollars per launch. The Space Shuttle could carry 24,000kg to orbit at a marginal cost per launch of somewhere between 500 and 700 million dollars. (This ignores all the costs attributed to the Space Shuttle program that were incurred even if a launch never occurred)
The Saturn V, of course, could put 140,000kg into LEO for ~1,250 million 2020 dollars.
So for half the price of a shuttle launch, you can put the 80% the mass into orbit on a Saturn 1B. Or for double the price of a shuttle launch, you can put 5.8 times as much mass into orbit on a Saturn V. Or double the shuttle's orbital payload mass - but on a trans-lunar injection trajectory instead.
And this is all comparing the shuttle to the technology of a decade and a half earlier.
Yes, a Shuttle Two - get rid of the reinforced carbon-carbon (hell, maybe even move to an ablative heatshield), ditch the SRBs, ditch the wings, lose the cross-range capability and maybe even move the fuel tank internal - might have been viable. But the closest thing to that (the X-33 program/VentureStar) never got the funding it needed, and even then might have been a bit too ambitious. Time will tell if an affordable SSTO ends up ever happening, but I'd bet on things like SpaceX's Falcon SuperHeavy/Starship (fully reusable TSTO craft) being the real successes.
This ability was used a grand total of just four times.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/15094/what-satelli...
It was not remotely worth making the rest of the launch system more expensive by an order of magnitude. Better to pay for a new satellite when they break, or (in the case of returning scientific samples) to design a sample-return function into the satellite.
Now take the same thing but reward any attackable situation. What you get if you cancel the big losing project: You just threw out $100 million of work. The first mistake you make, I will capitalize on that to say why I should be director instead.
LOL. Boeing knows how to handle minor obstacles like that.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-criticizes-addi...
"NASA paid Boeing nearly $300 million more than originally planned in its commercial crew contract in part because of agency concerns that the company might drop out of the program, a new report claims."
You have a project, you estimate the cost, you have a contract, then the customer just HAS to add more stuff, so you negotiate about what to add at what cost in time and money.
So, fixed price with adjustments, why wouldn't that be normal (in a vacuum)?
Yet Boeing has shown consistently that they are only able to operate in the old business model where "profits" disappear into "overhead" and contracts earn only a small margin of profit. Then as something unforeseen happens, as has happened multiple times, they threaten to pull out and force a renegotiation.
This defeats the entire spirit of the fixed-price contract, and costs the taxpayer. IMHO NASA contract officers should call the bluff, and give the contract to Sierra Nevada if Boeing does back out.
To be fair, that doesn't include the cost of a Dragon capsule, nor the extra steps NASA flights involve. It's the "stick your ready-to-go satellite on top of our booster" price.
Gear today is far more complicated. Schedule and cost increase geometrically with complexity.
Many of the 'innovations' on early era fighters were quick iterations made by tiny teams.
But it's no longer the 100's of fighters that will win, it's the one squadron with the best gear, radar, comms backed up by the rest of it (AWACS etc.) that will dominate. Of course, it has to actually work (!) but there's something to be said for that.
The basis of the 'over-budget makes money' is still reality however, there's no doubting that.
So it's going to be a matter of how we apply operational integrity in this new era of sophistication.
So while I agree things are orders of magnitude more complex, our tools are also much more powerful.
JSF studies started in 1993, when the fastest computer was a 235.8 GFLOPS behemoth -- roughly the speed of a midrange gaming GPU today.
Regardless of how complex or expensive a project it, if the people doing it aren't strongly incentivized (positively or negatively) to keep these things under control, the will not. That doesn't matter what era you are talking about.
People and organizations can live in an unhealthy way for a long time before they have a crisis, but that doesn't mean there's a gradual ramp at the end.