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GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman

Posted by samzenpus on from the sorry-you-can't-come-in dept.

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?

10 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! by Black.Shuck · · Score: 3, Funny

    You can get a whole month of war for that!

    1. Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 4, Informative

      It costs about half a billion to launch something that size into a Lagrange point. It costs maybe a billion dollars to make a telescope that big. It costs maybe another billion to make a telescope that big that you can fold up onto a rocket's nose cone and have it unfold into the right shape by itself. Add another half a billion for the cameras and instrumentation. That makes 4 billion, which was the original budget. Add another 50 percent to make it flight qualified and for the various surprises that happen at the coal face and aren't quite as evident when you're writing a grant proposal with all the rigor that I'm putting into writing this comment. That's 6billion. Where does the other 2 billion come from? Easy: when a project this big picks up another 2 billion and congress critters and the gao start to make shutting down noises it makes it hard to retain good people on a projectwithblood in the water, and it goes on with the next notch down in talent but no less stringent requirements. So you now make more mistakes, catch them, and are obligated to go back and redo work, since it's better to go over budget than to deliver a 6 billion dollar turkey that doesn't work as advertised. Bd

    2. Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well then I must have just flubbed my arithmetic. Having zero visibility into the project, I'm just guessing. Hell, even on projects I work on that straddle the line between R&D and procurement I have a hard time putting a number on retention, but I do know that if an individual piece of work takes X months for one competent guy to do, and he quits after having his budget cut, restored, and then cut again, only to be restored the month after he leaves, it'll take ~0.5X months to find a replacement and bring him up to speed. And by definition he's not as good as the guy who left since he's new to the organization and doesn't have as finely resolved of a mental picture of the whole project and where his work fits in as the first guy did. Is that 1.5 times the cost for the same work? Maybe. Sometimes slack gets picked up, sometimes people burn out under the added load. Sometimes a flash of divine inspiration lets you do more with less, and sometimes the whole thing tanks because the guy walked out the door with 50% plus epsilon of the knowhow to get it done and the whole thing needs to be restarted or retendered.

  2. GAO = U.S. Government Accountability Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    n/t

  3. Still not as bad as Perkin-Elmer... by TWX · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.
  4. I'm a hypocrite by Random+Nobody · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't give a fuck if they're doing blow and fucking hookers, I want my god damn Hubble successor.

  5. Re:Congress is a bunch of fucking retards by imidan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. the other way by supernova87a · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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...

  7. Re:Congress is a bunch of fucking retards by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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=

  8. And Northrop is right to do it. by Puls4r · · Score: 3

    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.