Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Yes, indeed. Isn't government contracting wonderful? Jerry Pournelle has said for years that NASA exists to keep 20,000 civil servants on the payroll until retirement. Since most of them will be retiring in the next 10 years, we now have an opportunity to get rid of or to reform NASA.

The will be no U.S. human expansion into space as long as NASA exists.

Posted by Kurt at March 10, 2005 11:12 AM

You've nailed it here. I once worked for an outfit whose main revenue source was government research contracts. It took me almost two years of frustration to understand an important point.

I thought the business was concerned with doing research and development. Wrong. The business was actually organized to administer government contracts. Though not necessarily mutually exclusive, they are completely different goals and result in completely different organizations.

Having finally realized what now seems blindingly obvious, I left the company soon after.

Posted by Alan S. at March 10, 2005 11:13 AM

Rand,

I'm curious about this article. There's been a bit
of discussion over on another board about it, and
someone actually looked up the CEV RFP to find out
if it really did require 40-50 reports per month.
Now, he only did a cursory glance through what was
required on a monthly basis, but he claims that he
could only see something like 10 or so monthly
reports, and that many of those were short status
report kinds.

Now, I agree with your sentiment, and am willing
to trust t/Space on this. I'm just wondering if
David was speaking a little hyperbolicly, or if
the contract really does require 40-50 reports
per month.

Anybody have time to do the research? I'm tied
up commisioning a rocket test stand and doing some
igniter and engine design work at the moment, and
should probably get back to finishing up the
drawings so I can send them out.

~Jon

Posted by Jonathan Goff at March 10, 2005 11:20 AM

Jon,

I haven't looked at the RFP, but I can easily believe 10 formal reports turning into 40-50 actual ones. You'll get clarification requests on the actual reports, which may trigger new requests. Most meetings will produce a whole bunch of action items to write up, few of which will have any useful contribution. NASA employees and consultants have to show they're doing something to justify their salary, and forcing a contractor to write a 10-page justification of decision that took 10 minutes to make is an easy way to do that.

One investor dollar is worth two government dollars.

Posted by Karl Gallagher at March 10, 2005 12:13 PM

NASA should develop a simple streamlined interface so they can work well with others. It's not rocket science, afterall.

The only reason for all that paperwork is gutless bureaucrats who don't want to take responsibility for anything. They want a paper trail leading to someone else to blame if things go wrong. These people are pretty easy to identify and fire.

Posted by Kevin Parkin at March 10, 2005 12:45 PM

> NASA should develop a simple streamlined interface so they can work
> well with others. It's not rocket science, afterall.

They think they have developed a simple streamlined interface. The stated model for Constellation, from Day One, has been Joint Strike Fighter, whose documentation deliverables outweigh the aircraft. Private-enterprise models are literally foreign to them.

Posted by at March 10, 2005 12:55 PM

Kevin, no, it's politics. Politics is much harder than rocket science. The moon didn't try to get out of the way. All of those bureaucrats can point at an act of congress demanding they behave that way, and they're right.

As for Joint Strike Fighter, I'm working there now . . . and most of the NASA projects I worked were run better.

Posted by Karl Gallagher at March 10, 2005 01:05 PM

This is just too damn depressing.

Posted by Dan Schmelzer at March 10, 2005 03:07 PM

All the more reason why government, in general, should not be allowed to have money.

Posted by Kurt at March 10, 2005 04:39 PM

Let me get this straight. He's upset that there could be 50 monthly reports a month. Given that this involves just report writing and of legitimate results, then in my experience it could be done with 5 engineers doing 10 reports each/month, that's roughtly 5 EP or engineering personel dedicated to monthy report writing. Since a contract the size of the CEV would likely employ hundreds of engineers, then the amount of engineering time, spread over the whole technical workforce is essentually insignificant. Sounds like a load of sour grapes to me.

Posted by E.Bryan at March 10, 2005 06:23 PM

How many engineers actually doing productive work have to write inputs to whoever is coming up with the report? And how much labor does it take to coordinate all those report inputs?

Do you have any experience in working on projects like this?

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 10, 2005 06:26 PM

And to thing all placement test suggested I go into technical writing.

Thank goodness they haven caught onto this at work yet. I don't mind technical writing if I like the subject. I just don't want to write Watershed Assessment reports or work on the 305b or 303d reports. Dry as hell and I have grown to hate the field of Aquatic Biology.

Posted by Mike Puckett at March 10, 2005 06:37 PM

Why don't NASA place their contract managers actually on-site at T-Space, they can interact productively with the workers, ask questions answer questions on the requirements and produce all the paperwork they want in the format they want it in themselves. And they may even learn something.

At least then the senior management at NASA can rest assured they'll get their paper trail and still maximize the probably that the engineers will actually have enough time left over to build the thing they ordered in the first place.

Put everybody in one room.

Posted by Kevin Parkin at March 10, 2005 08:34 PM

Putting everyone in one room works OK if they share motivations. Civil servants aren't profit motivated. They also have conflicts when it comes to knowing and sharing trade secrets.

There are good reasons to keep the wall up between entities.

Posted by Alfred Differ at March 10, 2005 09:26 PM

Only about 20 years worth, Rand. The difficult part is doing the required analysis/design/flow down/specifications/part procurement/configuration management yadda yadda yadda . . you know, the stuff that you have to do even if you don't have a government customer. The easy part is sending a friggin e mail (or internal letter) to the new hire viewgraph engineers to put together their reports and attend the occasional customer briefing. Maybe you worked for a creatively inefficient company on a cost plus contract.

Posted by E.Bryan at March 10, 2005 10:46 PM

A little add to last post. The time I assumed, namely 2.5 man days per report, would INCLUDE making inputs to the report. I assume taking the inputs and writing the report proper would be a few hours at most. (Big reports, total system EMI, for example, would 1. have to be done anyway and 2. would only be done once.) Ergo, for 50 reports a month, that's around 1000 man hours, which if distributed evenly between 100 engineers would be 10 hours per month/engineer. Hardly crippling that, it's about a 5 percent penalty in terms of labor cost/schedule. Of course, in reality, the load isn't evenly distributed, with some engineers doing nothing and some buried in paperwork. Which might give them an exaggerated idea of how much paperwork is actually involved.
As a final point, how many of the inputs from these reports can be used in PDRs and CDRs and therefore do double duty? I large percentage, I'll wager.

BTW, how did "faster/cheaper/better" work out?

Posted by E.Bryan at March 10, 2005 11:55 PM

"BTW, how did "faster/cheaper/better" work out?"

Pretty well, by just about any measure. Simply count the number of interplanetary spacecraft launched between, say, 1984 and 1994 and then compare to the number launched between 1994 and 2004. You'll see a dramatic increase. The success rate has been fairly decent too. NASA built and launched a lot more spacecraft under FCB (or FBC) than it had in previous years.

One problem the agency is facing now is that they've clipped a lot of the low hanging fruit, particularly with Mars. The next tasks are much tougher and the spacecraft will inevitably cost more.

Posted by James Bright at March 11, 2005 07:17 AM

I'd outsource the paperwork. Hire a separate company to do the job, possibly two competing ones.

Posted by kert at March 11, 2005 08:28 AM

"I'd outsource the paperwork. Hire a separate company to do the job, possibly two competing ones."

The problem with this is that the paperwork often needs to be filed by people with good knowledge of what is actually going on. How can you "outsource" a progress report on a complex system? The people you "outsource" it to have to talk to the people doing the work, taking up their time. In the end, this is probably even more inefficient, as you have now tied up two people doing the paperwork instead of one or 1.3.

The critics of NASA tend to start from the assumption that it is _simply_ a big bloated bureaucracy with pointless requirements and doesn't have to be. That's a simplistic assumption. Reporting requirements and paperwork are certainly more than they need to be, but the reason that they exist is to protect the taxpayer from waste and fraud. Companies are required to report on their progress so that somebody can determine that they actually are making progress. Yes, this can create inefficiencies, but having corporations ripping off the taxpayers is also inefficient as well, only in another way.

Posted by James Bright at March 11, 2005 11:47 AM

> "BTW, how did "faster/cheaper/better" work out?"

> Pretty well, by just about any measure. Simply count the number of interplanetary
> spacecraft launched between, say, 1984 and 1994 and then compare to the number
> launched between 1994 and 2004.

Or the number of successful aircraft produced by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites or Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works -- neither one of whom used hundreds of engineers or tons of paperwork.

Before he accuses Rutan and others of "sour grapes," Bryan should compare SpaceShip One to NASA's suborbital vehicles (X-33, X-34, X-37, etc.) and tell us which were more successful.

Posted by Edward Wright at March 11, 2005 12:17 PM

"Or the number of successful aircraft produced by... Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works..."

How many successful aircraft have been produced by Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works?

Posted by James Bright at March 11, 2005 01:36 PM

"How many successful aircraft have been produced by Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works?"

Well, a quick list would include:

the P-80/T-33,
the YC-130,
the F104 Starfighter,
the U-2, the SR-71,
the Have Blue demonstrators,
and the F-117A Stealth Fighter/Bomber.

They were also responsible for the F-22 prototype and the X-35 (Lockheed's JSF entry)

http://www.f-117a.com/Skunk.html

Not too shabby, in my opinion.

-S

Posted by at March 11, 2005 02:11 PM

Sorry for the anonymous post above. I was distracted by the cool photo on the site I linked.

-S

Posted by Stephen Kohls at March 11, 2005 02:13 PM

I might be able to contribute a bit about 'paperwork'. I work at a company that is rapidly moving from a small ad-hoc org where there are understood processes, they're followed, but little is written down, to an paper-work driven outfit. This is a Good Thing.

However, the culture has not supported the paper work approach - it's never needed to. There is a mindset you have to adjust if you expect to keep up with the paperwork required by the government, or indeed, by the larger aerospace companies.

I don't _know_ what it's like in the T/SPACE companies but I'd guess they put a premium on do-test vs study-meeting-do-test-meeting-study-report. This can be hard to overcome.

Posted by Brian Dunbar at March 13, 2005 09:31 AM

> I might be able to contribute a bit about 'paperwork'. I work at a company that is rapidly moving from a small
> ad-hoc org where there are understood processes, they're followed, but little is written down, to an paper
>-work driven outfit. This is a Good Thing.

Quite so, Mr. Dunbar. We must convert companies like Scaled Composites, that build and fly hardware, into outfits like Boeing and Lockheed, that spend billions on paperwork. The careers of thousands of bureaucrats depend on it.

Only then can we assure the attainment of our ultimate goal -- "No Access to Space for Americans."

> I don't _know_ what it's like in the T/SPACE companies but I'd guess they put a premium on do-test vs
> study-meeting-do-test-meeting-study-report. This can be hard to overcome.

Yes, stupid, stupid Burt. He actually wants *common people* to be able to fly in space.

Who knows what that might lead to? Once you let people like that get started, there's no stopping them, Dunbar!

It could undermine the whole civil service system!

Posted by Sir Humphrey Appleby at March 13, 2005 06:00 PM

Only then can we assure the attainment of our ultimate goal -- "No Access to Space for Americans."

> I don't _know_ what it's like in the T/SPACE companies but I'd guess they put a premium on do-test vs
> study-meeting-do-test-meeting-study-report. This can be hard to overcome.

Yes, stupid, stupid Burt. He actually wants *common people* to be able to fly in space.

Who knows what that might lead to? Once you let people like that get started, there's no stopping them, Dunbar!

It could undermine the whole civil service system!

Posted by Sir Humphrey Appleby at March 13, 2005 06:01 PM

Sir Humphrey,

"Quite so, Mr. Dunbar. We must convert companies like Scaled Composites, that build and fly hardware, into outfits like Boeing and Lockheed, that spend billions on paperwork. The careers of thousands of bureaucrats depend on it."

I wasn't talking about that, but your sarcasm is appreciated. There is, or should be, a good balance between a place that does as much (but no more) paperwork as needed, and a paperwork mill.

"Yes, stupid, stupid Burt. He actually wants *common people* to be able to fly in space."

Well, yes, much like Liftport wants to do. However, I suspect you have no more insight (or perhaps less) into how Scaled works, or Rutan's goals are, than I do.

Does Scaled do a minimum of paperwork? Sure. Can they escape it? No more than you or I can escape Tax Day.

Posted by Brian Dunbar at March 13, 2005 07:32 PM

Resistance is futile?

Many years ago I spent two consecutive summers as a network administrator at a multinational information company. Between the first summer and the second the company doubled in size and brought in a new CEO who was better liked by the financial markets.

The difference between the two summers at the same company was enormous. The dynamic, ground-breaking atmosphere of the place had been replaced with a more muted run-of-the-mill but professional feel. They were in the process of standardizing all their functions so any idiot could do them and you could feel the extra levels of bureacracy to manage all these idiots kicking in. In short, the company was fossilizing.

In hindsight the fossilizing of the company probably made sense for the investors as the ground-braking products had now been created and they needed boring, relible delivery of those products, which can be done by different and far more abundant kinds of people, freeing the innovators to move on to other things.

If you believe that the CEV requires a run-of-the-mill process that a static organization is already set up for, then I can understand why you see the need for extensive oversight and reports to NASA.

If on the other hand you believe that the CEV requires the skills of many Burt Rutan types, then I can assure you that imposing a bureaucratic harnace designed to reign in idiots will take extinguish their cutting edge as surely as it did for my ex-company.

Does this translate to the aerospace community? Read the reports of the atmosphere in which Elon Musk's organization operates, and then ask yourself what would happen if people were now routinely expected to produce powerpoint presentations, written memos and reports to document every aspect of their work as they go along. Do you really believe SpaceX would achieve the same results in a similar amount of time in that mode of operation? Do you believe that SpaceX would retain their best people?

Posted by Kevin Parkin at March 14, 2005 06:11 AM

"Does this translate to the aerospace community? Read the reports of the atmosphere in which Elon Musk's organization operates, and then ask yourself what would happen if people were now routinely expected to produce powerpoint presentations, written memos and reports to document every aspect of their work as they go along"

I didn't say, nor did I mean to imply, that 'doing paperwork' was the same as 'being buried alive by usless powerpoint slides'. Nor do I want the best and brightest engineers doing anything but being engineers and being creative and smart.

It is possible for a smart organizaton to balance what is needed against what is superflous. This may not be possible on a government contract.

A certain amount of paperwork is going to be needed anywhere you go. This is life. Having really good guys do their stuff is uselss unless they document what they are doing.

Yes, Engineer Abe is tops in his field and should stay that way. But what happens if Engineer Abe has a heart attack and no one has clue one what his latest insight was? The project is halted dead in it's tracks until someone comes up to speed. Spending a few hours per week documenting his genius is an insurance policy, and money well spent.

Posted by Brian Dunbar at March 14, 2005 10:28 AM

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