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Why NASA Rejected Lockheed Martin's Jupiter For Commercial Resupply Services 2 (fool.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Recently, NASA rejected Lockheed Martin's bid for a contract for the Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) program as being too expensive. CRS-2 is the follow-on to the current CRS program that has SpaceX and Orbital Systems sending supplies to the International Space Station. Motley Fool explained why the aerospace giant was left behind and denied a share of what might be $14 billion between 2018 and 2024. In essence, Lockheed Martin tried to get the space agency to pay for a spacecraft that would do far more than just take cargo to and from the International Space Station.
THE KING'S TOASTER
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob and a lever.
"What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said.
The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"
The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself'. The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface.
When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat, and they all lived happily ever after.
I like the idea of a space tug that can refuel and move satellites in orbit, but this role seems to be at odds with bringing cargo to the ISS which is the goal of the CRS(2) contracts.
From what I understand the plan goes like this: On the first flight Jupiter (the tug) and Exoliner (the cargo vessel) go up together, once they are in orbit Jupiter adjusts the orbit to reach the ISS, after the cargo is offloaded and garbage is loaded Jupiter puts Exoliner on a path to burn up in the atmosphere while it itself stays in orbit to pick up the next Exoliner that's launched alone, as well as other tug duties.
So the problem as I see it is this:
For a tug you'd probably want a much more efficient ion drive to avoid refueling often, fuel boiling off and the like, you probably want the robotic arm that grabs on to wayward satellites.
For supply deliveries you probably want liquid engines because some of the supplies and experiments are perishable and can't afford to wait the weeks or months it would take an ion engine to boost them to ISS orbit.
And the grabby arm is redundant mass because the ISS has its own arm that's quite proficient at berthing other vehicles like the Dragon or Cygnus.
So it looks like a compromise of design that's intended to get NASA to pay with the cargo delivery contract for unrelated functionality.
It's funny how government contract awards go. Losers whine and if the RFP hasn't been properly documented, vetted and scored then bidders can and have overturned decisions. It can even wind up in court based on federal procurement laws. In some cases fraud or collusion is involved while in others despite having an open process, a selected bidder can have an easier path through the process. The latter being the collusion part. For example a department writes an RFP and it goes out to bid for a new computer system that must be natively compatible with IBM's iSeries. Let's count how many bidders there may be.
This is how you get overly priced items built for the government. It drowns in paper and bureaucracy including the annual "spend the budget" fun of summer where government agencies spend unused money on anything and everything because they don't want to risk the upcoming fiscal year budget. Rather than waving or giving the budget back to the treasury they'll spend it on anything they can.
In reading the TFA it sounds like Lockheed did indeed come up with an overpriced system that had features that NASA didn't want. In reasonable cases that'd be it but all of the government contractors, not just aerospace, know how to game the system to the determent of all US taxpayers. It'll be fun to see if this gets dragged out. Fortunately there's two years until the next contract period and if Lockheed ultimately wins, the current contract holders will probably get paid at an escalated rate to deliver resupply missions because it'll be in their contracts as well since it's outside the agreed upon contract duration.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"