Slashdot Mirror
US Air Force Overstepped In SpaceX Certification
Rambo Tribble writes: An internal review commissioned by Air Force Secretary Deborah James has concluded that Air Force personnel tasked with evaluating SpaceX's certification treated it as a design review, going so far as to dictate organizational changes in the company. This was judged contrary to the intention of promoting a competitive environment. The report, prepared by former Air Force Chief of Staff General Larry Welch, concluded, "The result to date has been ... the worst of all worlds, pressing the Falcon 9 commercially oriented approach into a comfortable government mold that eliminates or significantly reduces the expected benefits to the government of the commercial approach. Both teams need to adjust."
Government bureaucracy reviews private corporations, implements government bureaucracy?
LOL .. Congratulations, gentlemen, you're exactly what we've come to expect from years of government training.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Air Force auditors start experiencing mysterious "accidents". Others get it hot water for unexplainable large deposits to their bank accounts.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Goodness, someone is mad that SpaceX is soaking up projects that are taking business away from the traditional pork barrel contractors.
Bureaucrazy is contagious.
should all get a big medal for being the best.
All business get pressed into a comfortable government mold, which is why we're being pressed out of business.
"The result to date has been ... the worst of all worlds, pressing the Falcon 9 commercially oriented approach into a comfortable government mold that eliminates or significantly reduces the expected benefits to the government of the commercial approach."
But this is what Boeing and Lockheed wanted. Keeping in mind Boeing/Lockheed have a space launch vehicle non compete consortium in partnership with the U.S. government. The Air Force has done absolutely whatever it could to prevent them from using Space X - and the very cosy relationship with Lockheed and Boeing probably has something to do with this. Just look at who's profits might be threatened and follow the money.
How will the Colonels and GS-15's justify their existence? They must put their mark on it in multiple places.
There should be 3 lines on the proposal:
I need payload weight and size X, in orbit Y.
Can you do it? Y/N.
How much will it cost?
One of our customers for my company is a medical device company regulated by the FDA. The FDA a few years ago came down hard on them with fines and a consent decree whereby they couldn't sell products due to issues in their quality control systems. We are very familiar with this company and while they did have issues, the FDA has essentially forced a complete reorganization on them, some of which will be good but much of which is utterly pointless.
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of Control Plans, FMEAs and other documents for products we've been making for well over a decade to support this customer. These documents will serve no useful purpose and in all likelihood never get looked at again. I'm also validating test equipment which I assure you at the end of the day will prove nothing. It's necessary to help our customer stay in the good graces of the FDA but really is pretty much a waste of everyone's time since these sort of documents are supposed to be done when the product is being developed, not ten years later without any evidence of an actual problem.
There may be some valid points of the government getting too involved because it was a glitzy new space project. However I would also expect them to have set sensible laws before such potentially dangerous companies are set up, because at the end of the day if they dont get to outer space you've could have a big ass missile plummeting back to earth. Replacing personnel to form your own management team would be too far.
Typical federal agency...muck it up without regard for accountability.
If you are paying millions, and spending years building a satellite, 'oops, the rocket blew up' isn't an acceptable answer, even if you have insurance to cover the cost, you can't get the time back.
So the Air Force does have valid concerns about the reliabilty of SpaceX, but people got overzelous and were dictating solutions rather than identifying problems (and suggesting solutions)
The only difference between the new 'commercial space' guys and Boeing and LM, etc are the rules. How is it fair to the established space industry that was forced to play the government game to lose business because SpaceX doesn't have to.
How will ULA survive if the government doesn't force SpaceX to operate like a traditional defense contractor sucking at the cost plus fixed fee teet. The Airforce has to help them get there because this commercial competition non-sense will mean the loss of plenty of high paying executive jobs and ULA.
If anyone ever wondered why government contracting is so expensive, this is it. The government customers demand customization of commercial products that drive up development costs and complicate manufacturing while the bureaucracy's demand for documentation and "transparency" places a massive overhead burden on contractors to meet the requirements. Add on to it the government's lack of discipline in developing requirements and making changes, and your "cheap" program triples in cost with delivery moving two years to the right. As someone who worked in a business that dealt with both commercial and government clients, the former looks for a product that fits their needs then buys it whereas the latter looks for a product, modifies it, then continuously alters the requirements over and over right up to production.
Sometimes, I think this is also the reason why the government clings to cost-plus contracting: with fixed price, they have to be disciplined about the requirements because once the fixed price contract is in effect, they can't tinker with it any further. Cost-plus, they can keep changing requirements, and the contractor will simply roll it into the bill.
I was curious to read the actual review that was released. But I cannot find it. There are lots of articles that refer to it being released but where is it? If anyone knows where the original report is can they post a link.
The only difference between the new 'commercial space' guys and Boeing and LM, etc are the rules. How is it fair to the established space industry that was forced to play the government game to lose business because SpaceX doesn't have to.
Actually ULA (boeing, lm, etc) gets sweetheart contracts too. For example their launch contracts don't include fixed costs like launch facilities and many other parts of the "infrastructure". ULA gets a separate contract to pay for all the fixed costs. That may be a good idea to make sure this infrastructure is ready and available independently of what the launch schedule may be but the fact remains that SpaceX includes such infrastructure costs into their launch contracts. And SpaceX launch contracts are still far less expensive than ULA.
What they mucked up was how spaceX didn't have the systems in place for accountability as mandated by federal law. This is a problem with acquisitions law, not the bureaucracy the law mandates. I know a few of the people on that team. The only way spaceX could have gotten close without those changes would have been to buy even more politicians to get the law changed even more in their favor.
Yes, as usually, big company got a billion dollars and the taxpayers got screwed. Only good marketing makes you think spaceX is any different.
This is the fundamental flaw with bureaucratic thinking. Define metrics, design criteria but let the contractor build it. This is why government projects are so fucking expensive. Rules, Laws, Legislators and stupidity get in the way of innovation.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If it can't be seized and placed under control of the military during times of war*, its not going into space. Gotta make sure we know the key people and which pieces we'll need to grab should we need to mount weapons on it and send it up.
*That means pretty much any time. As we are always conducting a War Against Something.
Have gnu, will travel.
What if Elon gave the AF the bird and started selling the Falcon 9 to the ESA and India? Would the AF back down then?
Every two years there are new "legislators" added to the mix, and they all suffer from the delusion that their job is "law maker", when actually that's just a sub-function of their primary job of "representative" (which is largely compsed of "oversight"). People who have the power to make laws and think that is their primary function fall into the trap of measuring progress by metrics like number of laws written (as though the ideal number of laws, rules, and reguations is infinite). This is a recipe for piles of laws that contain numerous cases of contradiction and redundancy, the natural remedy of which is executive branch managers going back to the legislature and saying "see THIS here? the past several decades of legislation have created the following list of contradictions and redundancies, could you please clean this up?"
That's part of the normal executive branch/legislative branch interaction which our founders designed into the system but which becomes very difficult when hyper-partisanship and "my way or the highway"/"I have a pen and a phone" attitudes lock in. Of course, hyper-partisanship is the natural result of everything being political, which is itself the natural result of a massive government injecting itself into everything. Our founders had it right: that government is best, which governs least (i.e. government should be as small as possible and be excellent at the few things it does)
The USAF and Boeing and LockMart have been in bed with each other for so long that they have adopted eachother's worst bureucratic habits. Each imposed on the other and each adapted to the other, with all the costs passed-on to the taxpayers and they even all became "used to" the resulting pricetag bloat, schedule drag, and underperformance. They pretend to get mad at eachother occasionally, but the vendors CAN'T stop selling to their customer, and the customer has had nowhere else to turn for these products. When a new upstart actually gets far enough to try to enter the market, the system exposes itself as a corrupt mess. Decades have clearly gone by without anybody in the Govt-Boeing-LockMart marriage asking any basic questions like:
Is all this paperwork REALLY of value? (is there ANY metric that proves it?, has the need for every regulation/requirement been proven?)
Is there some reason it now takes longer to design a new plane or rocket than it took to fight and win WWII? (particularly given that we have far better tools, automation, and a vastly superior knowledge-base than we ever had before)
Are we truly better-off spending billions of dollars and years to prep and launch one satellite, than if we spent far less time and money to build several and launch them with slightly more risk? (can we prove the economics?)
Are rules put in place at one point in time still cost-effective (or even relevant) a decade or more later when the technologies involved are matured or even obsolete/replaced?
The bureaucratic inertia that crony capitalism both feeds upon and re-enforces is dangerous and can only be papered-over for a finite time with tax dollars.
ULA (Boing and LockMart's rocket launching monopoly love-child) never had to endure any of what SpaceX has been subject to. Both Boeing and LockMart were there from the beginning of the American rocket launching industry and they were both lovingly pumped-full of taxpayer dollars for DECADES. They were paid big stinking piles of tax dollars to design and build the Atlas and Delta rockets (and were VERY profitable businesses in-part as a result of this guaranteed stream of funds) and the government paid for all the test launches and research required to satisfy the government that these launch vehicles were good.
All the work to "man-rate" the Atlas so John Glenn could ride one into Earth orbit were paid for by NASA and the USAF (NOT Convair, which was eventually gobbled-up into what became ULA) and NOT ONE of those rockets was required to pass the USAF "requirements" to get "certified" that SpaceX is having to pass with the Falcon. Musk's SpaceX, on the other hand, funded all its development work on its own until it had progressed far enough to win a NASA ISS cargo contract. Oh, and the "big boys" (ULA, Boeing, LockMart, etc) have always played the little game of pretending each new rocket was in some way a member of an earlier family, therefore not needing approval as a "new" launch vehicle. The current generation Atlas and Delta rockets have NOTHING in common with their ancestors: they were designed and built by different people, are structurally different, built from different materials, use different engines, use different avionics, use different software, use different ground support equipment, use different procedures, etc.
Fire-up the popcorn! ULA is having to replace the Atlas (after the US Congress in the Putin-era has become wary of Russian engines being a critical link in US military capability) with an all-new rocket with all-new engines...... and THIS time there is an actual commercial competitor who will keep them from snookering the government into accepting the bogus claim that this is just an evolution of an existing LV that can be rubber-stamped...... so for the first time in its history ULA will have to get certified under the rules they helped write to keep others from entering the market! (look for them to start agreeing with Musk that the rules are out-dated, obsolete, not-beneficial, etc.)
I'm NOT a fanboy for SpaceX - they are not perfect and they have the potential to become every bit as toxic as their predecessors if they become too wed to the government). At this time, SpaceX is finally re-introducing market forces into a stagnant crony faux-market, and THAT is productively disruptive.
ALL "high ground" has in all of human history been "militarized" by your simple-minded thinking; governments ALWAYS have planned to take over whatever could give them an advantage in any war (have you never read ANY history?).
The simple FACT is that ANY rocket that can place a payload into Earth orbit IS BY DEFINITION a ballistic missile and therefore a strategic weapon capable of starting a global war (which makes it the business of a government). All you have to do to make a falcon, and Atlas, a Delta, a Dnepr, a Proton, an Ariane, etc into an instrument of war is to place a bomb into a heat-shielded reentry vehicle (a Dragon casupe would work just fine) on top of it and than run the engines a little less than needed to achieve orbit (therby making it "sub-orbital")and you have an ICBM.
Try not to be gullible/ignorant
On the other hand, might it be a good thing to make them go through the costly process so that they lose the competitive advantage over the companies that did it usefully at the beginning of development?
The documentation I'm referring to has nothing to do with any competitive advantage. If anything, not doing it is a competitive disadvantage in their particular marketplace. The potential liability costs, warranty/service costs, reputation costs, etc easily outweigh the cost of the paperwork and structure. This particular company was badly structured and was actually incurring all sorts of needless costs and problems by not having their house in order. If anything the FDA will make them more competitive in the long run.
Poor leadership on both sides. The Government has become so risk adverse, they require their engineering staff to drill into every detail to minimize liability. On the contractor side, poor engineering, analysis and documentation results in numerous unknowns as to why a design was created. If industry actually worked to AS9100, and required all of their suppliers and subcontractors to also follow it, much of the Government's questions would be easily answered. We can't have industry standards, that the industry conveniently ignores whenever it is difficult or expensive.