There are documentation problems at NASA. It’s endemic to the industry. It’s one of the causes of high costs. And failures. Be sure to read the comments.
One of the advantages that SpaceX has is that with a tightly integrated co-located team, the knowledge is much more accessible, though individuals become more critical
When the weight of the paperwork is equal to that of the fully loaded flight article then you are ready to fly.
Based on RKV’s information, I have a modest proposal for reducing manned space flight costs:
1) Upload consciousness to a paperclip.
2) ???
3) Look Ma! I’m in orbit!
The only problem I can see is that you might lose your mind in the paperwork.
10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD!”
20 GOTO 10
The documentation will be ready as soon as the wall of printers are kept fed for a couple of days.
I’ve seen this kind of thing before with NASA. The projects are around so long in the planning and building that software based documentation is obsolete by the time the program is flying.
I had a friend whose full time job was writing software for nothing but retrieving drawings from old CAD programs and fixing them to run on new CAD software.
When the weight of the paperwork is equal to that of the fully loaded flight article then you are ready to fly.
That’s old school and probably doesn’t reflect today’s conditions. I remember reading an interesting tidbit many years ago about the proliferation of paperwork requirements for government acquisitions. According to the author, when Lockheed submitted its design proposal back in the early 1950s for what became the C-130, the submission paperwork weighed 400 pounds. By the mid 1960s when Lockheed submitted the paperwork for what became the C-5, it took a C-130 to carry it. The paperwork for the submission weighed something like 20,000 pounds. I can assure you that things have not gotten better in this regard since the 1960s.
Back in 1991 and 1992, I was the Space Surveillance Program Manager for what was then the 1st Space Wing. We looked into procuring the engineering specifications for an old 1960s vintage radar in Turkey. The paperwork was never purchased when the radar was built because it was too expensive, so the contractor had a sole source contract for operations and maintenance. Without the paperwork, there was no way to compete the contract for O&M because no one else could possibly maintain it. Because it was sole source, the contractor could pretty well get away with charging the government whatever they wanted and we had to pay it, and it cost us plenty. When we inquired about buying the paperwork, we learned that the cost of getting officially approved and validated paperwork was roughly $1000 a page. In the end, we never bought the paperwork and the contractor kept the sole source contract until the radar was finally retired. Your tax dollars at work.