Slashdot Mirror
Boeing Throws Space Station Parts Away
Bob Plankers writes: "Boeing staff were seen combing a landfill looking for $750,000 worth of space station parts that were inadvertently discarded. You can get the full details on CNN. " Luckily, there were spare parts still around -- but it's a pretty funny story nonetheless.
I also met a guy when I was in the Navy who was making a bundle buying nuclear grade parts by the pound at military auctions, doing a little research back to the manufacturer and either selling it back to the Navy or the manufacturer. Said he one made $40K off one valve alone.
And you wonder why the government spends so much money. (P/S. I work for a Navy Shipbuilder now, imagine losing a set of screws for an aircraft carrier).
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I'd like to think that the largest tech-worker strike in history counts as "news for nerds" (After all, _I_ work there...). Propaganda at http://www.speea.org. Also photos of about 25 undelivered planes sitting out on the line. Good news collection at Yahoo .
-a Boeing Employee
They didn't "loose" the tanks. The tanks were placed in an extreemly low geosyncronous orbit in advance of final component assembly.
First, the hardware is being designed for human use in space, so there are an incredible number of specifications it must meet -- and each specification carries with it at least one test, and probably more. The final hardware must be certified as having been tested to each of these specs, and having passed. So a very large part of what's being paid for is the cost of meeting the required specs, and then maintaining the paperwork trail. (It's a common saying in the aerospace industry that you can't fly something until the paperwork weighs more than the vehicle; this is way too conservative for space stuff, though.)
Second, because it's space hardware, NASA is paying for it to be light weight; with each pound orbited by the Shuttle costing between $5K and $10K (depending on how you do the accounting, but I won't go there), time-consuming design work and lightweight-but-expensive construction is cheaper than orbiting a quickly-designed (and overdesigned), heavy version. Added to this is the complication that it is for space use, and there are design considerations you don't face here on earth (things like the zero-gee environment -- you have to stir liquid gasses, because there's no convection -- safety requirements for both on-orbit use and for transport in the Shuttle's cargo bay, and so on). All these add to the cost, too.
Third, the production run on these parts can be counted on the fingers of one hand, probably -- one set for the station, one or two sets of spares, and two or three more sets for testing here on earth. So there's no cost savings from amortizing the upfront engineering costs over a large production; it's all on the handful that are produced. And note that the cost of the ones used in testing is absorbed into the station set and the spares, too -- so they cost something like double what you might expect just from that alone.
Having said all that in defense of the cost, I do have to confess that it probably doesn't cover the entire price quoted in the article. There is no doubt a pretty fair chunk of the cost that exists solely because it's an aerospace contract for NASA; some of this is because they can get away with it, and some is because they have to put up with NASA being a pain in the ass... (I've worked on a number of contracts for NASA; it's hard to charge enough for PITA, because they are pros at it!). If the parts were spec'd, designed and built in-house, for a Boeing-funded project, I suspect they would cost a fraction of the quoted value -- even for the identical application.
And now that you know, I'm going to bet that it doesn't really make you feel all that much better, does it?
---
---
Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Some information about these tanks from a guy who works in the building they were lost from.
First of all, what were these tanks? The space station uses an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere that approximates sea level composition, without the 1% argon and trace elements. As the crew breathes and uses up oxygen, the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly scavenges the CO2 and dumps it overboard. The oxygen tank provide the replacement O2 to make up what is lost. The space station modules have many cables and pipes that go through the walls of the modules, and the modules are bolted to each other. There is a certain amount of leakage at these points (on the order of a pound a day). Since the station atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, you need to replace that too.
You need to play with the composition of the atmosphere in the airlock to prepare for a spacewalk (reduce dissolved nitrogen in the blood to prevent the bends), and also to refill the spacesuit tanks afterwards. For this reason these tanks are mounted on the outside of the Airlock module, which is still under construction here in Huntsville.
There are up to three tanksets that can be mounted on the airlock at any one time, each tankset consisting of two pressure tanks, the 'doghouse'
that covers them and provides insulation and protection from space debris, and the structural mountings, plumbing, valves, and wiring. It's not clear to me what exactly was lost, but from the size of the box it was likely one tankset, which is about 3x3x4 feet in size. There are something like 8-10 total tanksets in existence, since full ones would be brought up to replace the ones on orbit that were empty, plus spares for 10 years of operation.
Why do they cost $750,000? Boeing and it's subcontractors spend about $45,000 a pound to design airplanes or space stations. Pound for pound they cost the same to develop, because it's the same guys following the same design standards, using the same type of CAD workstations, etc. And the airplanes sell for $600 a pound. So assume the tankset weighs 300 pounds (I haven't looked up the weight, that's an educated guess based on the size). So the total design cost would have been $13.5 million spread over 10 units, or $1.35 million per unit, plus a manufacturing cost of $180,000 per unit. The quoted cost of $750,000 is less than this because the tankset is simpler than average for the station or an airplance as a whole , being mostly structure rather than a mix of structure and active components like computers and life support systems.
How did they get thrown out? Most likely (I have no official information to go on) sloppy inventory tracking and labeling. I'm pretty sure someone didn't walk out with them, since the storage yard outside the building is behind two barbed wire fences, and with crate you are talking about a 500 pound item. Most of the US portion of the Space Station is being assembled in this building, and crates of components are arriving all the time. A trash contractor periodically picks up dumpsters full of packing materials and the empty crates, and I suspect the screwup was something like parking a full crate over by the empty crate pile, and no one bothered to check to see if it was really empty. The overall impact to the program isn't so bad, since you effectively have lost one of your spare units (you have 9 now instead of 10), and they will simply produce a replacement.