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Interesting Thread

25 Comments

In response to the rumblings that Boeing, Lockmart, and NG are going to refuse any future fixed-price contracts from NASA.

[Update a few minutes later]

25 thoughts on “Interesting Thread”

  1. NASA needs to burned to the ground and re-built.
    The final ‘A’ in its acronym needs to be replaced with an L(aboratories).

    It’s funding model is ass-backwards. Rather than funding projects it should seek same from commercial companies wanting to do space related projects but lack the laboratory, hardware or skill set to conduct testing of their ideas. Getting NASA back to its NACA roots when it thrived and also helped commercial aviation do the same.

    There is no reason it cannot do the same for space. Albeit much smaller and confined to the existing centers until a demonstrable need for a new center can be shown. Yeah it looses the pork barrel, but it will anyway.

    Like the massive defense base closures of the 1980s, the current model is unsustainable.

      1. Right. And if Eric wants NASA to support other companies than SpaceX, maybe those other companies should look more closely at what Elon’s doing. I mean, we’ve had so many fizzle out after years, but surely Elon doesn’t have *all* the competent people.

        1. Rocket Labs has had 11 launches so far this year. They’re a few years behind SpaceX.

          I think the biggest thing SpaceX has done is eliminate the giggle factor. Nobody laughs at space companies now.

      2. Here’s the problem with that—Boeing may have been forced to eat MacDoug because the military needs a company to be big enough so it can survive even if it doesn’t get a defense contract.

        SRBs kept the energetics folks alive.

        Rocketry development for its own sake has to be a thing…if an aerospace firm diversifies, shareholders will want to cut it off because of aerospace’s front end costs.

        SpaceX is a success because Elon is one of the few capitalists who believes in spaceflight—and was willing to put money into it until it worked.

        Profit-chasing helped kill Boeing as much as DEI.

        I think even Space News had an interview about how sometimes you have to have cost-plus.

        Galling, I know.

        Libertarians, like Greens, just don’t understand infrastructure.

    2. There was a quote I saw a few decades back about NASA–I’m too fuzzy on the details to be able to google it. Somone was talking about how everyone lied to the appropriations committee about how much funding they needed, but NASA’s lies were on a whole other scale. I’d kind of like to dig up the original quote–does it sound familiar to anyone?

      1. I didn’t find it in a cursory search this morning, but I DID run across a transcript of a White House meeting with NASA and Kennedy that I started to read where there was discussion about Fixed Price vs. Cost Plus. Quite enlightening what I took in so far…

  2. Rocket Labs has had 11 launches so far this year. They’re a few years behind SpaceX.

    I think the biggest thing SpaceX has done is eliminate the giggle factor. Nobody laughs at space companies now.

  4. The Elite believe if they band together against SpaceX, things will go back the way they were. What was it somebody said about “a confederacy of dunces?” (Jonathan Swift, I think.)

    1. The quote you are looking for is this
      “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.”
      by Mr. Swift

      I’ve always been surprised Boeing continued to chase the Starliner contract after the first Charlie Foxtrot given the fact SpaceX was now doing regular commercial crew flights.

      I wonder how much of the 4.2 billion they were awarded usually these kind of fixed cost contracts tend to have a balloon payment on final completion usually a third to half the total award. Boeing is almost 2 billion in the hole on this. Their bean counter centric McDonnell Douglas management for all their faults usually aren’t prone to chase low return investments. They’d get MAYBE 5 flights IFF they can complete Starliner original contract by mid next year. I think the odds on that are somewhere between real slim and none. Even at the inflated rates Boeing is getting per seat on a Starliner they aren’t making it back with less than 6 flights.

      1. As for why they have stayed in this long, there is no IRR on embarrassment.

        How many years do you think it would take them to get those six flights and would Starship be flying people by then?

  5. Cost plus contracts have their place, but it’s for things that have never been done, not things like Starliner or (even worse) Boeing’s SLS (Space Launch System). SLS is literally re-flying Space Shuttle Main Engines that have flown before, and there’s nothing about it that fits “never been done before.”

    Since virtually all of the manned side is as safe as can be made, that implies virtually all of it is mature tech and should be fixed cost contracts.

    1. “but it’s for things that have never been done,…
      Just how long and just how much do you think it would cost to prospectively estimate the cost of developing Starliner within less than the margin of profit? Obviously, Boeing didn’t do a good job, but then NASA didn’t want a real number, they wanted one that congress wouldn’t choke on. Just like every other of their hobby horses.

      And, no, it hadn’t been done before. Boeing wasn’t given a finished proven design to produce, they were given a vague set of “requirements” that was guaranteed change over and over again throughout the project. I’m not any sort of Boeing fanboy, but their mistake was to take the bait in the first place.

      SpaceX was successful designing a capsule but I wonder if they are making a profit with it or ever will. Their leverage from the massive cost difference between Falcon 9 and everyone else with their also massively lower cost and massively faster pace of development may not be enough considering the limited market. Lucky for us, it was a sideline they were willing to explore.

      Obviously, the incentives on a cost plus are all wrong, but the government is such a horrible business partner it’s hard to see how anyone sane would deal on something like a new spacecraft on any other basis.

      Most of Boeing’s problems are of their own making, if the rest of their business was as profitable as it should be, the Starliner fiasco would have been an unfortunate blip. Instead, it’s just another sign that they have lost control of the process of developing and delivering very complicated things. That was their business and what made them both valuable and rare and the country needs that more than ever. They aren’t beyond redemption yet but I wonder if their striking employees realize just how close they may be to the edge.

      1. > And, no, it hadn’t been done before. Boeing wasn’t given a finished proven design to produce, they were given a vague set of “requirements” that was guaranteed change over and over again throughout the project.

        …No, that tends to be how cost-plus works. In the case of Commercial Crew, the advantage of the award-fee structure was that the requirements basically *couldn’t* change. Yes, the requirements were intentionally vague, but only because that let the vendors design their own ship to meet them. “Fly four people to ISS every 6 months or so” leaves a whole lot of wiggle room. Under the old way of doing things, NASA would have specified everything down to the last nut and bolt, but would have let the company decide where they were going to buy the nuts and bolts from. As long as it had the proper documentation. Which would be, yes, subject to change.

        Boeing thought, hey, we bought North American, it should be no problem to build a scaled Earth-orbital Apollo with modern electronics. We’ve done it already, after all….haven’t we?

        What SpaceX did was…not that.

        (Aside: there were many at NASA who thought they could still back-seat-drive the detailed design of both ships by over-specifying safety, documentation, and proximity-ops (ISS safety) requirements. They were mostly stymied, though, because of the award structure, and also the fact that they really couldn’t hobble SpaceX without hobbling Boeing. So Boeing being in the mix saved the program).

        It turns out that because a company Boeing bought, decades earlier, built a working space capsule, it doesn’t confer any special insight into how to make another one. Knowledge inheres in people, not in chains of corporate stock buys. And Boeing had none of the people who worked on any of their “heritage” space capsules. Sometimes starting with a clean sheet of paper works better.

        But also…it’s Boeing. Not a space project, but another fixed-fee award they’re losing money on is the KC-46 tanker…a Boeing 767 with a flying boom, exactly like the KC-135 only bigger. There’s no excuse for not knowing what that would cost, there’s no excuse for not being able to deliver on time or on budget or in fact without debris in the fuel tanks. If Boeing can’t manage that, I have no sympathy.

  6. Test flight 6 will happen in about 3 weeks, and 7 could be around Christmas. And 2025 will be very busy for SpaceX.
    And likely to have New Glenn flying in 2025 and Rocket Lab also picking up it’s pace.
    And then we have the rest of world. Japan’s H-3 is doing, well, and is quite improvement compared to decades, earlier, and their plan of launching more rockets, will be more than hope, it will be a serious requirement. And if it can refuel in orbit, it magically becomes a more capable rocket.
    And when will refueling in orbit become a thing?
    Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing towards refueling in orbit. Are others going to get into the race?
    It seems politically, China can’t afford to stay idle in this regard.

  7. “If somehow Congress decides to focus on results rather than jobs, it’s likely that NASA’s budget will decline, since the incentives to vote for targeted jobs will go away.”

    It doesn’t matter what NASA’s budget is if NASA isn’t getting something out of the money spent. Even when it comes to jobs, there is an opportunity cost, especially to jobs at NASA, and getting rid of something like SLS doesn’t mean NASA wont have an alternative way to spend money or that an alternative wont have appeal to the traditional contractors.

    The old contractors don’t want to compete on the more complex contracts but you still want to throw money at them? Fine, create less complex things for them to compete on that their skillset are more appropriate for. The concept of using programs to build capabilities in new contractors can also be applied to old ones.

    Launch is no longer a bottleneck. NASA needs to focus on expanding what we do in space. That means there are lots of opportunities for them to spend money and for the traditional contractors to get in on it. They still might be corrupt and not so efficient but their damage to everything else will be less.

    The persuasive technique it to point out that these companies and districts wont be losing money but that the money will be spent having them build different things.

    1. If you mean satellites instead of launchers, it seems Boeing is even having issues keeping those in working order, like Intelsat 33e.

  8. The legacy contractors seem to believe they have, collectively, the basis of a viable cartel. They don’t. Especially on the eve of a second Trump administration. Trump and his new crew of subordinates and kitchen cabineteers will simply add them to the list of entities slated for rough handling as a prerequisite for Making America Great Again.

  9. Human space travel could pose more severe health risks
    https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Human_space_travel_could_pose_more_severe_health_risks_999.html
    ”
    Human space travellers may face more severe health hazards than previously recognized, according to a new report from The Guy Foundation, an independent UK research organization. ”
    ….
    “The report calls for additional experiments to better understand space-induced health issues and explore potential remedies.”

    So we have to make more people suffer the effects of microgravity in the high radiation environment of ISS.
    That makes so much sense, rather than doing some testing of artificial gravity.
    And doesn’t seem the private sector is doing anything either.

    How about sending mice to the Moon and keeping them alive for 1 year?

  10. At XCOR we had a fixed-price (sub) contract with NASA through ATK GASL that netted us a MUCH larger profit ratio than a fixed-price contract could have. The total amount to us was something like $3M and our costs (not that we tracked them to GAO standards) were under $2M. We felt we made out like bandits.

  11. I understand the value of a robust defense industry. We need companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman, if for no other reason than SpaceX isn’t interested in building weapons (they’ll support logistics and provide launch capabilities.

    There are numerous problems, not the least of which is the Congressional grift that requires an absurd supply chain. Cost plus is definitely another. It is part of how the grift works. These companies can design whatever, but the civil servants will redesign the hell out of it. They would have redesigned Dragon completely if Musk had let them.

    The difference is the traditional defense contractors are made up of people who know the game and make money from it. They have given up the hope of building exciting things, and just take the paycheck and go home. Musk has an agenda and knows he only has a limited time to accomplish it. He doesn’t have time to play games and not progress the hardware. His competitors don’t share that agenda, nor any other directed motivation.

    NASA, however, shouldn’t be a body shop for the defense contractors. I agree with David above, drop the last A and replace it with a L. Slash the budget, make them a lab for research. Release the engineering talent for other fruitful endeavors. Otherwise, find project managers that can manage a budget and schedule. That would require having those managers accept the risk they avoid with cost plus.

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