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GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman
schwit1 writes In a report as well as at House hearings today the GAO reported that Northrop Grumman has denied them one-on-one access to workers building the James Webb Space Telescope. "The interviews, part of a running series of GAO audits of the NASA flagship observatory, which is billions of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule, were intended to identify potential future trouble spots, according to a GAO official. But Northrop Grumman Aerospace, which along with NASA says the $9 billion project is back on track, cited concerns that the employees, 30 in all, would be intimidated by the process." To give Northrop Grumman the benefit of the doubt, these interviews were a somewhat unusual request. Then again, if all was well why would they resist? Note too that the quote above says the cost of the telescope project is now $9 billion. If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
You can get a whole month of war for that!
n/t
...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't give a fuck if they're doing blow and fucking hookers, I want my god damn Hubble successor.
I know the PP is a bit trolly, but it's important to note that the investigators that were denied access belong to the GAO, not to the Congress. The GAO has a generally good reputation as being non-partisan and being genuinely interested in reducing government waste.
I can understand the reluctance to speak to Congress, or their henchmen.
I don't think you understand how federal programs work.
In order to bid on a government project, you have to comply with *a lot* of rules. If you don't want to, you don't have to big on the project. They're just such an awfully big buyer that a lot of people are willing to comply with the rules.
It's like any other moment in life when you're dealing with an annoying and overly demanding client. If you're very lucky you don't have to--but they do put the food on your table.
Granted, but the Democrats are the other corrupt party, with almost as much baggage, who will gladly do whatever corporations or ALEC instruct them to do, or what legislation to pass. So the Democrats have been the lesser of evils for a very long time now. Voting for the other corporate-controlled, militaristic party doesn't seem like a viable plan for getting out of this mess. But I digress, Northrop Grumman is doing what all defense contractors do, screw up and charge the government more, because they can, but at least in this one case they are not making an unneeded weapon system with huge cost overruns.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
... With the spy chief lying to the Congress, with Northrop Grumman denying GAO's access to their workers, with Obama administration kowtowing to Qatar on the IS issues, ...
All these signs point to one thing --- the beginning of the end of the might of the United States of America
The government of the United States of America doesn't get the respect it used to get, the reputation of USA going down the drain, the piling up of debts (now fast approaching 18 Trillion) ... what kind of future USA gonna have?
if you're not doing anything wrong...fill in here...?
Whenever I hear these two words used together, it *ALWAYS* involves fraud.
Don't worry about cost overruns or inefficiencies, think of all of the valuable science that will come out of this telescope.
Each interview is man-hours not spent working on the project. GTFO GAO.
Victims, aren't we all?
Life is not for the lazy.
If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
Uh gee maybe because it was off track by about $1 billion worth of stuff they forgot to plan for? Ever work on a project before?
Under Bush we helped turn Iraq into democracy
LOL.
How many tens of thousands of lives did that cost? How many billions of dollars? For what? A sandcastle that collapses pretty quickly on its own?
Great deal that one!
Neither Bush did anything for Iraq, unless you count the first one leaving a ruthless dictator in power, and I'm not so sure we should. It certainly didn't end up working too well when his son decided to play nation-builder and failed to get the lasting support of the American People.
Y'know, the ones who really don't want to play around in the Middle East (or anywhere else), regardless of how much noise they make fretting over ISIS, or HAMAS, or whatever. We only got away with occupying Germany and Japan because everybody was scared enough of the communists and the people in those countries didn't really get that upset over it.
Maybe we should just get Herbert Hoover back.
And if we hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place and destabilized it ISIS might not exist at all.
Mod up, I'm out.
I can't think of a better way to get JWST killed than trolling Congress. Between Obama and his end runs around Congress with executive orders, the presumptive (D) nominee withholding her private email system from Congress and the IRS trolling Congress for almost a year for documents they pretended didn't exist Congress is looking to put a round through the skull of something they have power over.
Right or wrong that's the current state of affairs. Now there is an ever bloating space science project with a contractor thumbing their noses at investigators? I'll be surprised if this line item survives.
If the customer (the U.S. government) wants its auditors to be able to question individual employees, that should be clearly stipulated in the contract, and then the contractor should have no qualms about meeting the terms of that stipulation.
Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No stick
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You're right, there is nothing at all complicated about this situation, and intuition will answer all questions, no need for details. /sarcasm
Maybe there aren't any workers. Is the CEO sporting a shiny new $9 billion iWatch by any chance?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Intimidated by the process"? More like intimidated by Northrop Grumman's supervisors being in the room to make sure they don't say anything that might, hmm, jeopardize their future at Northrop Grumman...
They're siphoning money into a secrete e.l.e. asteroid killing rocket and are trying to keep it a secrete until it's on its way.
But the GAO has to make its findings public, or at least put it in congressional review reports. Congress persons are political animals by nature, both parties, and if they can take something out of context or cherry-pick bits and re-package them into a scary-sounding narrative to score political points, they will.
Look how they mangled issues with emails, back-up systems, file formats, servers, hard-drive failure rates, etc. in the Lerner/IRS situation. (Granted, some of the mangling of IT concerns* may have been sheer ignorance instead of intentional political manipulation.)
Transparency is a double-edge sword. I'm not choosing sides here, only saying that they are probably between a rock and a hard-place.
* They probably also mangled non-IT subjects, such as law, but I don't know enough about those topics to readily spot mistaken notions or claims.
Table-ized A.I.
I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth to look at details on the surface. A visit by GAO could have revealed secrets.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth
You'd think that after President Clark did that with the planetary defense grid, any new deployments would have safety interlocks to prevent it from happening again.
A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth to look at details on the surface.
No. For two reasons:
First, it's an IR telescope. The reason they're putting it in space is to get it away from Earth's atmosphere, which is opaque to the IR wavelengths it's designed to detect. Earth would look like a light bulb for all the IR it gives off and there is zero chance of seeing the surface.
Second, even if it could somehow be used to see through the opaque atmosphere, it couldn't make out anything. The James Webb telescope has a claimed resolution of 0.1 arc-seconds. It's going to be put into the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million km from the Earth. At that distance and resolution, each pixel of the image would be ~730 meters square... just under half a mile. Useless for any kind of surveillance.
=Smidge=
Neither Bush did anything for Iraq, unless you count the first one leaving a ruthless dictator in power, and I'm not so sure we should.
To be fair, the Kuwaitis probably did appreciate JB Senior kicking the Iraqis out of their country.
To be fair, they don't say, which track it's back on. I believe they are referring to the gray train track.
Isn't this a NASA project? If so, that's not DoD.
Just another day in Paradise
How far back would you like to go? If Iraq hadn't invaded Kuwait, we wouldn't have ever invaded them either, and ISIS wouldn't exist. But, much more recently, if we had left a stabilizing force, as many recommended, instead of removing everyone for political reasons, the same would be true.
Just another day in Paradise
You probably are the parent, GTFO.
Just another day in Paradise
: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret....
They're too busy "defining the future" to get their current job done right or on time. But they do have one of the best marketing/lobbying team in the business.
> Then again, if all was well why would they resist?
Maybe their time is too valuable to waste it by talking to idiot auditor idiots. Believe it or not, there are people who do actual work instead of having a useless government busyjob.
Fuck auditors. I have yet to meet a single auditor *ever* who is qualified enough to be asking questions of the experts - the engineers - who are working on the project. Almost universally the auditors work from a pre-made playbook that looks for the same thing. They have neither the time nor the intelligence to actually understand why decisions were made the way they were made.
We recently had an quality audit at the manufacturing firm I work for. The auditor noted that several of our part-feeders had parts laying underneath, and broke into a full fledged 'teach moment' about how we could save money and lower scrap by correcting the feeding issues. I bit my tongue.
At the wrap-up meeting with directors present, the auditor pressed the point. I was quiet as long as I could, then I carefully explained that we had a $2,000,000 capacity problem that our engineers were working on, and politely asked my director if he'd like me to pull those engineers off that to work on saving a couple dozen parts a day that cost a fraction of a penny a piece.
Auditting rarely adds anything of value anywhere. If it were that easy to the correct the problems, the competent engineers would have already done it.
Wait, 30 people have cost $9 billion?
Do they eat gold? :)
Then again, if all was well why would they resist?
If you're innocent, why would you resist talking to investigators all by yourself?
Really?
Yes, I realize that this isn't a criminal investigation, but honestly. If I knew there were a chance that any offhand remark or misstatement I made could end up being quoted on C-SPAN by a Senator with an axe to grind...yeah, I'd be pretty damned reluctant to talk. Even if I weren't bright enough to figure that out for myself, I'm pretty sure I can see why my employer would have similar concerns.
~Idarubicin
Uhmm...unless you are Dr Evil ransoming the word for $1 MILLYON DOLLARSS, $9 billion is chump change.
Any time you are approached by any State actor, you have the absolute right not to talk to them about anything. Northrop Grumman is doing the right thing in protecting their employees' from unlawful interrogation by State actors.
As this is government (i.e. taxpayer) money, you stop paying Nothrop Grumman until they grant access to the employees.
Since, as people like to say, the government doesn't create jobs, cutting off funding won't have any effect so there can't be any complaints. In fact, stopping payments on a project which is this far over budget would be good PR: a private company unable to do what they've been paid to do so the government is cutting them off.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sorry but the OP states it's over budget and overdue. Well if you look at the original budget & deadline yes this is correct, however, subsequently the scope of the project has been massively increased which consequently increased the budget and time scale. Its not due to fly until 2018 and has still cost less than the Hubble.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
> If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim,
> then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
The project is back on track to be able to stick around for another fiscal year in order to ask for another budget increase.
See? How difficult was that? Simple actually.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
How far back would you like to go? If Iraq hadn't invaded Kuwait...
Which the US set in motion by putting Saddam in power AND all but gave approval of the invasion by essentially turning a blind eye to it. If the international community didn't raise such a stink over it, it's quite likely the our boy Saddam would still be at the reins.
And we put Saddam in power because the Iranian people decided that they didn't like being oppressed under the rule of a bloody dictator (the Shah) who was, no surprise, also put into power with the help of the US.
Al Quaeda? We bankrolled their entire operation until we found out that they really didn't like us anymore than the Soviets.
We've been screwing over the Middle East region in one form or another for the past 60 years or so. Is it really any surprise that things are they the way they are given the social, economic, and political unrest that our actions (and others) have caused there?
~X~
As an email guy, I am concerned about the coverup happening with Lerner. Email doesn't work like that unless someone in IT is intentionally trying to keep things out of other's hands. Government email systems are required to keep all emails, so how could Lerner's hard drive crashing make any difference at all to the ability of the IRS to provide a record of all the emails? Why would she be setup with POP, IMAP, or PST so that she is storing anything locally, especially in a critical agency like the IRS?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Not to argue too much because I agree with your sentiment, but Obama had nothing to do with solders coming out of Iraq, that was all the Iraqi president who refused to allow US solders to stay in his country. Unless we want to actually act like a colonial power, we should leave a country when told to and not overstay our welcome.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
"Then again, if all was well why would they resist?"
Yeah, because after all, only guilty people have stuff to hide! Honest people should have no problems having their email read, phones tapped, ... um...
IIRC there are already 4 Hubble equivalents up there looking down.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The scary thing is this is an obvious lie. And nobody cares, they operate with impunity now.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Who fuck is working for working for who here?
Get up!
"You say anything to the GAO people we don't like, we'll find out, and you'll never work again".
And I was a contractor for a company that was sold to them... and they proceeded to get rid of those of us who knew the project best, on a variety of excuses.
I read, a few years ago, that the client manager was in legal, or was it criminal, trouble.... (and he was a city government employee).
Do you *really* think NG is all wonderful, and doing everything right (and that it's all the federal gov't fault that the telescope is years late and billions overbudget? If you do, then you've obviously never actually worked for a living....
mark "I recommend Dilbert"
your just a stupdi republikan. U watch fox news?
Watch? Who has the time to watch news. I get my news from web sites run by slashdot, BBC, CNN, and Fox, but I actually design email systems (many servers, not just single server), so I know a bit about it. I can also spell!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Having formerly worked on government acquisition projects, there is no way in hell that I would let my employees talk to the GAO officially. Employees see only the world in front of them, they have petty grudges, they will want to say things like "jimbob at nasa is a fucktard that put us a billion over budget because he wanted the icon to be blue" and Northrop doesn't want that to happen.
I don't believe that was true at the time.
Table-ized A.I.
Not disagreeing with much of anything you stated, but my response is more about the laying of blame...Republican or Democrat, as the parent/grandparent seemed to be doing. Both sides have been guilty, but when you have a long string of events that eventually end up in the toilet, you can't cherry pick which to blame. And normally, if there was an exit-ramp that wasn't taken, it's the most recently missed that should take ownership.
Just another day in Paradise
The laws have been on the books since the 50's so if it wasn't, that is news to the gov. It has always included official records, the update that happened in 2014ish was to specify that E-mail is a record, and always has been.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That can't be true since email didn't really exist in the 1950's. Obviously one was not required to keep every single correspondence to everybody in the paper era forever. Further, paper could be damaged from rain, fire, insects, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
The requirement is to keep Official Records. Those are transferred to the national archives. They are the ones who release items that are no longer classified. The paper records were for years maintained. When scanning became possible, the archives started digitizing everything. When digital methods came around of generating records, digital records were expected to be maintained and transferred just like the old paper ones.
Obviously the old laws didn't cover email specifically, but they covered records, of which email was a record when it started to be used for the purpose.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?