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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.
Funny, when I here government inspectors, I always think incompetence. But maybe I've just been working on telescopes and dealing with th government types who can't spell telescope for too long.
"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...
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
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=
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
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.