There's private entrepreneurs, and then there's the government; no wonder the latter is trying to crush the former
/
Two very long articles by the same author, they’re worth reading in their entirety — I have — but this brief excerpt on NASA’s incompetence and sweetheart deals with its favorite contractors should be sufficient to give you the idea. You can extend this recounting to encompass the government’s defense spending and you won’t go wrong; just multiply the billons by a 100 or so.
Casey Hammer: Four years ago, unable to find a comprehensive summary of the ongoing abject failure known as the NASA SLS (Space Launch System), I wrote one. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, you should read it first.
It is hard to believe four years have gone by, but in all that time, the SLS has launched only once. Time flies when the rocket doesn’t. I don’t often write blogs in a sharply critical tone, so as always, the usual disclaimers apply. I write in my personal capacity as some Guy with an Opinion on the Internet.
In 2019, NASA awarded Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower – a glorified steel truss far simpler than the booster catching towers SpaceX assembles in weeks – by March 2023 for a total cost of $383m.
As of today, the OIG reports that the tower will cost $2.7b and is to be finished by September 2027, but more likely 2029. For reference, the Burj Khalifa is seven times taller, contains paying tenants, hotels, and shops, and was built in five years for just $1.5b.
If you had $2.7b in 27 million $100 notes, and you piled them up, they would be so much taller than Bechtel’s non-existent launch tower that you’d need not one, not two, but 23 separate piles to exhaust the supply. Whoever wrote Bechtel’s side of the contract certainly earned their bonus. Whoever wrote NASA’s side should be made to paint the entire structure with a toothbrush – but I expect they’ve long since been on Bechtel’s payroll in some kind of advisory no-show job.
NASA managers routinely complain of difficulties in hiring and retention – difficulties they never faced 20 years ago, before the SLS and before the private space companies that, unlike NASA, are able to offer some combination of market-rate compensation, a career track that rewards ambition and competence, and a workplace that swiftly departs underperformers.
Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it. Officially, it’s still the most powerful rocket ever built (except for Starship) and our official vehicle to the Moon and Mars! In reality, it’s insanely expensive, dangerous, and underpowered and can barely lift a reasonable payload to LEO.
Four years ago*, I wrote that the best time to cancel the SLS was 20 years before, and the second best time was then. Four years on, the program has consumed another $20b with nothing to show for it. $20b, bringing total development cost to over $100b. This program burns $12m per day!
In the meantime, NASA has abandoned all pretense of caring about or delivering cost control on any major project, with scope, schedule, and budget blowouts affecting practically every major program and forcing the cancellation of many of them. This is symptomatic of an agency who, compromising their technical integrity on their flagship program, subsequently lost the ability to maintain technical integrity anywhere else.
Litany of other canceled and delayed projects
(Here’s just the first of many detailed in the article — if you feel confident the government is handling your money wisely and well, read the full article and be dissuaded)
Mars Perseverance, a supposedly cheaper built-to-print replica of the Curiosity Mars rover from 2012 then required extensive re-engineering costing $2.4b, the same as the previous rover. At least it didn’t cost more! Meanwhile, much of its instrument payload was consumed by a sample handling system for a sample return mission that, at this rate, will never occur.
…. In September 2014, NASA awarded Boeing $4.2b and SpaceX (somewhat grudgingly) $2.6b to develop capsules to transport people to and from the ISS. The Shuttle’s last flight was in 2011, so this process came a bit late and resulted in nearly a decade of dependency on Roscosmos for crew transport.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule first flew in 2019 and in 2020 brought astronauts to and from the space station. As of September 2024, it’s flown thirteen flights (three private) to the ISS, two other private flights including the highest ever Earth orbit and first private space walk, and carried 54 people in space.
In contrast, Boeing’s Starliner only flew two astronauts to the ISS, after two previous launches with a series of failures and near misses. Despite being a much simpler design than Crew Dragon, Starliner has suffered from:
A set of critical software failures during its first flight, in which untested software outsourced to foreign developers both failed to obtain accurate clock information from the launch vehicle, and also incorrectly mapped thruster and inertial coordinate systems, essentially reading the wrong map upside down. As a result, this uncrewed mission burned through all its propellant and was unable to dock with the station. Boeing was compelled to refly the mission.
A set of parachute failures, including both crashes during testing and later, the discovery mere weeks before the first crewed launch that critical clips had not been closed before being obscured behind an uninspectable flap. In other words, had this chance discovery not been made and the mission flown with astronauts, the parachutes would have opened and pulled away from the capsule, which would have then plummeted into the ground killing everyone.
The wiring harnesses were wrapped with flammable tape, requiring a difficult replacement operation.
The thrusters suffered failures on all three flights, due to incorrect thermal environment data being provided to the subcontractor, overheating, helium leaks and seal failures. The subcontractor? Aerojet Rocketdyne. I’m beginning to sense a pattern here…
Unlike SLS and Orion, however, Starliner was developed under a fixed price contract (Boeing’s first and last!) resulting in net losses to Boeing of $1.6b so far – enough to build another whole Burj Khalifa.
Conway’s Law explains that product structure mirrors the organizational structure that built it. The dysfunction of Boeing’s Starliner development program is plain for everyone to see in the achingly embarrassing ongoing failures of the physical hardware. The software failures show that the thruster teams didn’t talk to the structural teams and the GNC teams. The thruster failures show that the systems engineers didn’t talk to the subcontractors and mission designers. The parachute failures showed that process safety engineering was nowhere near close out operations. The wiring harness issue shows that NASA’s requirements oversight team were not functioning as a team and not conducting oversight, and likely never conducted a thorough in person physical inspection of the actual flight hardware.
I mentioned Starliner had flown two astronauts (Butch and Suni) to the space station. Once on station, the recurring thruster faults were so severe that NASA decided, over strident objections from Boeing officials, that it was safer to strand the astronauts there for a few weeks until SpaceX Crew 9 arrived, than to roll the dice and return to Earth as originally planned. In the end Starliner made an uneventful autonomous landing, but the ultimate cause of the thruster faults remains unclear since the Starliner service module burns up on re-entry. Recently, it was reported that NASA’s OIG is taking a closer look at the Commercial Crew Program in the wake of this continuing failure. I, for one, have questions about why NASA signed off on launching people to space in this turkey of a space capsule to begin with.
*That article can be found here. It’s an enlightening, albeit depressing read— Ed)
