8 Years to Copy a 50 Year Old Russian Engine? Really?
Senators vow to reassert America’s rocket power, The Hill
“The United States must now respond decisively and provide our own domestic capacity to launch our crew and cargo into space,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said. “We simply cannot rely on the vicissitudes of foreign suppliers in a foreign nation for our national security.” The full costs of replacing the engine could be much higher than Congress is willing to commit to right now. It is, quite literally, rocket science to fit a new engine into existing rockets. Aside from building the engine itself, engineers will also need to make sure every other component works with the new machinery, kind of like switching out a car’s hybrid engine with a V8. That could take five to eight years and cost up to $2 billion, predicted the Pentagon’s acquisition and technology chief, Alan Estevez.”
Assured Access to Space – Prepared testimony and video, Senate Armed Services Committee
U.S. Launch Enterprise: Acquisition Best Practices Can Benefit Future Efforts, GAO
Keith’s note: We went from having only tiny rockets to the Saturn V (and its massive engines) in 8 years. Here we are in the 21st century and it is going to take us the same amount of time to reverse engineer a 50 year old Russian engine design? Am I missing something?
I think it would be faster and cheaper to design and build a new engine from scratch.
That’s what SpaceX said….and did!
And when they designed Falcon 9, they did so with low cost as the main goal. They did not use bleeding edge staged combustion engines in their design for good reason. A slightly larger launch vehicle, using less efficient engines, resulted in an over all lower cost solution. LOX and kerosene costs for a Falcon 9 launch are less than 1% of the total costs.
The mentality that the smaller size of a launch vehicle is important is what drives engineers to use higher ISP engines like the RD-180. Unfortunately, that mentality isn’t as useful for designing low cost launch vehicles as it is for designing compact missiles.
And are still doing.
Cheers
Or reverse-engineer one of our own… how much work has already been completed on the F-1B?? Oh, wait, ULA isn’t involved with that!
we don’t need to reverse-engineer the RD-180. we already have the blueprints and other assorted technical data for it, also the ULA already has the licenses to build them if they so choose.
the problem is in reverse-engineering the heavy machinery and tooling that would be required to build them.
The license expires in 2022. It probably isn’t wise to spend three or four years to build a production line that could be allowed to build engines for only three or four more years.
a very salient point. replacing the Atlas V 1st stage with a new tank design and a new all-American engine is probably the best and most cost effective solution.
F-1B is over twice as powerful as RD-180. If you want your Atlas 5 to look like a crumpled beer can, that would be a good choice.
OK, apples and oranges, check. However, it really didn’t occur to me to mate an F1-B to an Atlas V tank when posting my last comment.
Which brings up a question: do we have a surplus of Atlas first stages minus engines? Some are acting that the best way to go is to find a direct replacement to the Atlas tank.. that seems a silly idea — if the engine gets changed, it will have to be recertified all over again, correct?
I would think the more logical approach would be to start touting the “Atlas VI”, with a 100% Made in America logo stamp.. that will help the fast-tracking. So far, this name seems to be vaporware in the wind…
I could be wrong, but I think that just changing to a new engine would not only require certification of the engine but also certification of the first stage with the new engine. This assumes that the engine is a new engine to the market.
Hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
This is what you get with a too comfortable US aerospace industry, that wouldn’t lift a finger to do anything without a juicy contract. They are worse than useless. The combination of greed and incompetence is not flattering. They fully deserve what they have coming.
A multi-billion dollar sole-source engine development contract?
The govt blinked. ULA won. It’s all over bar the paperwork.
They haven’t won yet. And such a thing will only be a short term band-aid on the temporary artifact that is ULA.
Yes, Keith, and I think you know what you’re “missing:” the length of time procurement, a ridiculous number of reviews, KDP and otherwise, and the enormous marching army of contractor management and auditors impose on any technical project in the US government. Much, much wiser to simply farm the job out to industry on a prize basis. I suspect SpaceX, Orbital, and the big boys would all like to get in on the action. Just keep the US Congress out of it. And good luck with that.
I believe AerojetRocketdyne stated that they could build a domestic replacement in 4 years. Not sure why they were quoting 5-8 years unless they are including production. Also, this is not a business that SpaceX or Orbital want to get into. The engine is for use on the Atlas V, Elon does not need this engine.
Aerojet Rocketdyne low balled the bid in order to make the project look viable. Business as usual from cost plus defense contractors.
The Pentagon’s analysis supported by the White House contend that Aerojet’s estimates are woefully unrealistic. They believe it will take up to 8 years and cost 2 billion dollars.
If history is any guide, even the Pentagon’s estimates are low, while Aerojet’s are criminally so.
Spending billions for a US RD-180 would be a complete waste of money unless it can be done before Atlas runs out of Russian engines. They’re due to run out in 20 months give or take. After that, Atlas will be gone, with it, any need for this engine.
If Aerojet, SpaceX or Blue Origin believe they can have a compatible engine ready in 20 months for 1 billion dollars, they should speak up. Otherwise, uncle sam should save the money.
The Russians have not actually cut off supplies, so it just depends on whether the US wants to buy it.
Could get worse really fast given the latest development in the Ukraine re: MH17.
Cheers
Actually, the presumed outcome is now that the Russians will cut off supplies, and cut them off for long enough to kill Atlas.
It’s going to hurt, and we need to get prepare for it.
Saying it won’t happen isn’t going to change the Russian’s mind.
I’m not saying it won’t happen, and DOD needs to get Falcon Heavy flying and certified ASAP, which they still haven’t said anything about. But it is unlikely the Russians will actually refuse to sell us the engines, as the market provides them with money and influence.
Is it possible Aerojet-Rocketdyne has dusted off the RS-84 plans from the SLI days and feels they have a good head start toward putting it into production, hence the four years instead of eight?
If RD-180 is cut-off, ULA could possibly stretch the available supply by shifting some payloads to Delta IV.
Moving a few Atlas launches to Delta might delay the reaper by a few months, but at a high cost.
Even that’s not a given. Right now, the Deltas in the pipeline are already spoken for. New Deltas take a long time to build. It will take even longer to expand the production line to a level where Delta can replace all Atlas.
United Launch won’t want to spend on a massive improvements that will never
be used, so they haven’t even started the required massive expansion of
Delta’s production line.
They know as well as anyone that when the Russians cut off engines, Falcon is going to replace Atlas.
If United Launch pushes for the customer to pay for the overages caused by moving to Delta, that could be grounds to terminate contracts.
There are no existing US engines that could function as drop-ins for the RD-180.
And the US taxpayers don’t need the Atlas V with Russian or no engines!
Since NASA doesnt have a whole lot of info on LOX rich staged combustion, Elon would have to develop from scratch, thats not economical.
Keith, I have to agree with you and have been trying to point this out for years. For instance when NASA was spending billions on the X38 I questioned why they couldn’t build a modernized Apollo capsule with a much smaller service module for deorbit. Even if there were no plans you are telling me they couldn’t take one of the existing ones and reverse engineer it?
Apollo was certified for 5 crew members for Skylab rescues. So you could have just had 2 on station and would have been able to have 8-10 astronauts with emergency egress (in addtion to Soyuz). You wouldn’t need a lot of power as all systems could be converted to digital technology so similar to Dragon and Soyuz solar panels would be fine. And this could have been done with the Shuttle as it would have easily fit in the Shuttles cargo bay. Eventually we could have had either the Delta IV or Atlas V man rated for it.
The problem with NASA (as I see it) is that they have brilliant scientists and engineers but the tend to want to design a brand new Maserati or Lamborghini when all they need is a used VW bus to do the job. And I am a supporter of NASA and always have been but I hate it when they waste our taxpayer money.
8 years and billions of dollars is just a military industrial boondoggle.
I was dumbfounded when Lori Garver came out against the 2018 Mars rover mission. She said NASA needed to be doing “new” things! I guess new instruments in a different geological location in preparation for a sample return isn’t “new” enough.
Turns out that even when we THINK we have a NewSpace aficionado at the top of NASA, it’s just more of the same.
How much are we spending on it? What are the alternatives? What about investing first in technology to lower the cost? What about all the other science targets on Earth, in the solar system, and beyond it? I’m all for learning about mars, but it isn’t the only thing out there. Mars 2020 has a raationale too, but I would hardly call it “newspace”.
Garver was making the point that in an era of microscopic and shrinking budgets maybe something else should get the limited funding. She would not disagree with the value of a 2020 rover, only that it may have better alternatives.
“If you’re a Mars scientist, you want to keep having NASA fund your Mars missions and keep redoing, for instance, what we just did with Curiosity is now planned again for 2020, instead of what you could be doing, driving in a new direction on Europa.”…
“I would not redo the Curiosity mission,”
“I would invest that planetary science mission in doing something new like Europa, or going to Mars in a more creative and innovative way where we can again drive technology.”
From my information the astronauts wanted the Apollo mark II but the administrator at the time had grander plans.
If this isnt done in a competitive COTS type program I think we will see several more lawsuites against the USAF. Why don’t they just set requirements and ask for proposals based on Space Act agreements? Or is their goal to take away all hope and make space advocates become so cynical as to loose intrest? I swear, every time I turn around it yet another idiotic FAR program or even worse and sole source non-competed political kickback. It makes it hard to care.
It’s even more disheartening when you realise that Obama’s original request for a new domestic large hydrocarbon engine development program starting in 2010 was killed in Congress and replaced by SLS and halving commercial crew funding.
And hasn’t that turned out well.
And don’t forget the revolving door!
The U.S. engineering culture that built Apollo is dead. The U.S. now has a management culture. If you want even a semblance of stability in your life, don’t go into that piece of engineering that designs, builds, and tests. Go into engineering management where you oversee processes, devise strategies, socialize ideas, and spend 100 dollars to figure out how to save 10 cents – usually by laying off the people that design, build, and test and gutting the facilities where that work gets done. You can coast from meeting to meeting, cancellation to cancellation, and eventually retire well.
The twisted beauty of it is that you don’t need an engineering degree or even a technical background to get a job as an engineering manager. In fact, the less you know, the better you look because you “have people that do that for you” and get points for delegating.
Wow. You really nailed it with this comment, Rich. It would be funny if it was not so sad (and accurate)
At it’s nearer root cause, the situation with Russian engines on a US launcher so vital to the US military is due to the inefficiency of that management culture that has come to dominate the major aerospace players like Lockheed Martin, Rocketdyne, and others. These engines would not have been chosen back in the day when today’s Atlas configuration was chosen, had they been expensive. Rather, these engines were cheap, keeping more revenue in the launcher company and less in a supplier. The selling point about internationalism would only come about because the engines were cheap. That is, internationalism and related justifications would have gotten expensive Russian engines nowhere.
Then going further, why have US made engines gotten so expensive? At first order, the management culture of the largest companies has fostered huge indirect costs. Attack these indirect costs and the billions that are being quoted for an Atlas engine retrofit would drop into the range of the hundreds of millions. The remaining variation would be integration complexity of such a retrofit, with an ideal in the low hundreds of millions for such a retrofit, and a high in the mid-hundreds of millions, if the complexity offers too many surprises. Still, the integration complexity would be second order to the management approach which puts a first order $B or $M in the discussion.
So how to change the industry management culture-probably competition, but now you are now into customer culture, here the Air Force. And that customer is hobbled by an existing, strong monopoly player, ULA, who does not have to cooperate with a series of competitive supplier programs, easily throwing a wrench into any efforts for an inexpensive, competitive US engine alternative.
So back we come full circle to competing the whole rocket end of the equation, to resolve the US supply base issue here with regard to Russian hardware. Lockheed Martin and ULA can go at it with a new rocket, as could any other company, existing or new. At it’s root cause, the Air Force acquisition approach will decide what management culture in industry is fostered, or not, and what costs are affected or improved-at the root cause of the matter.
So true. NASA is now where space programs go to die – an elephant’s graveyard of dreams. Werner von Braun and Willy Ley must be rolling over in their graves.
NASA = Never A Straight Answer
yet another over-bloated government bureaucracy
brought to you by the politically correct:
1.) minority women
2.) “native” americans
3.) the LGBT community
4.) muslims and their “overwhelming” contributions
did I forget anybody??????
Oh YES!
the unrepresented “white” male that can add, subtract, multiply and divide, do differential equations, trigonometry and put up with the daily political BULL!
Most of the morons I work with at NASA that can’t add or subtract or write coherently in their native language are white males. The young ones seem to be stupid, the product of conservative backgrounds where you get to make up your own facts, like creationism.
Finally, the bigots have arrived.
I agree – the U.S. engineering culture that built Apollo is in desperate need of wipe, upgrade, new installation, and a good reboot, one department at a time after starting with education, and meanwhile proceeding from the top down while eliminating bureaucracy (along with lots of shots to the foot).
So here’s something I’ve been pondering…if ULA is forced to
move ahead with a new engine, not only requiring all the paperwork, reviews, audits, etc which was mentioned. As quoted from the article “engineers will also need to make sure every other component works with the new machinery”. Will that in turn put a requirement to perform four demonstrations…or any demo at all? We are not talking
about minor changes to improve one’s vehicle, this is a significant change…again based on the quote.
It is very fortunate that we now have two different engines on two rockets – a version of the SSME on Delta and the RD-180 on Atlas. But for the short term could we not modify a version of the SSME to power the Atlas?
RS-68 is not a version of SSME, they’re very different.
One burns hydrogen, the other kerosene. Not swappable.
Which is why the whole of the first stage would need replacing.
I see NASA has some new nice light weight fuel tanks.
For this sort of time and money replacing the entire first stage may be better.
agreed. given how expensive the EELV rockets have become with all their associated obsolete legacy hardware… no matter how reliable it is, it’s long past time for modern materials, machinery, hardware, and electronics to take over.
Replace the whole rocket!
Why would any body want put a new engine on an old fashion expendable rocket?? This is crazy!
They want to spend all this money and end up with nothing better than ATLES V?
Zero progress?
What the f%&k!
The old drug addicted Space companies are just assuring their death in the near future when their dealer will finally decide they don’t want them around.
Drug addled? Really? Do you think your hyperbole really makes a point?
It seems to me that the old space companies are so hooked on government money that they are making themselves less and less competive everyday.
Instead of competing with the likes of Spacex they just, like a drug addict beg for more easy money.
Well one day the government hand outs will stop. The people will get fed up.
http://www.spacenews.com/ar…
All these indirect costs are legal STEALING.
The cost plus drug will come to and end.
Seems to me Mr. Musk doesn’t want these cost plus contracts. In his interest to make spaceflight cheaper.
I guess Spacex is the cop that will bring this drug dealing to end.
Isnt that what Spacex is all about? Changing the system and doing what NASA/ public Space should be doing.
I wondered if it was smart for him to sue the air force if he wanted to get DOD contracts sooner. Seems he doesn’t care.
Another instance of eight years to develop a “new” engine showed up recently, when NASA said that restarting the RS-25D production line for SLS would take three years, vs eight years for a “new engine”, which is probably the RS-25E.
Another good reason to cancel the SLS.
Well, NASA is stuck between deciding to spend a lot now on RS-25E (expendable SSME) or spending more later by just manufacturing more RS-25D (existing version which is much more expensive.)
It is my understanding is that the problem is metalurgy. Most of the reverse-engineering is to replicate an alloy used in the RD-180 that is not made (or even understood in detail) by any US foundry.
When I was in college 40 years ago my metallurgy prof said that he had to learn Russian because their papers were ahead of ours.
mondalloy is the new magic metal for use in LOX rich environments. It was developed for the RS-84 engine.
Contract it out to SpaceX. They’ll finish it for a tenth of the money in a quarter of the time.
Or at least do a COTS-esque multi-vendor SAA.
You’d end up with three brand new engine families. At least one should do the job. And at a lower price, quicker development, and much lower risk, than an 8 year sole-source FAR contract to copy an old Russian engine.
[It’s funny that we all used to laugh at Russia’s sad efforts at copying Western designs.]
I would let SpaceX finish the Falcon Heavy, perhaps contributing some development money to assure it meets the US Military specs and reduce risks. At the same time, the US should fund an independent replacement engine for the Atlas. Like with the shuttle, you don’t want to be locked into a single vehicle. The problem is, if the launch rate is low then costs go way up.
If FH flies and is certified for DoD payloads then you don’t need the Atlas V.
Cheers
That tells you something about how it’s prioritized. If there really was a time rush, they’d do it faster and expedite the mountains of paperwork involved.
I’m sure SpaceX could do it in half the time
They wouldn’t want to. SpaceX is concerned with reducing launch costs, not setting ISP records by building a US copy of a type of engine never built in the US (oxygen rich staged combustion LOX/kerosene engine).
SpaceX would be far better off finishing development of the Falcon Heavy and finishing development of their reusable first stage (for both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy). In other words, provide an all US solution to the problem that doesn’t involve building what amounts to a new (to the US) engine.
basic problem is that to match the Isp of the russian engine, you have to design for oxygen rich staged combustion, atypical of american designs. Spacex and the other kerosene burners are simple designs, lower Isp. But… Rocketdyne understands the design and function and started design of a similar, but different, RS-84 engine a few years ago until it was canceled. Unfortunately now that they are part of Aerojet, the design will be by committee and suffer.
I suppose if depends on whether you are copying, reverse engineering, or developing a completely new engine. Even if you are copying the Russian engine, you have to test and certify each component. We have the license and plans to copy the engine but we really don’t know the “why” of any of the engineering decisions. Like “Why does this oxidizer line have this funny curve in it”?
By the time you’ve done all this work, you have spent about the same amount of time and money as developing a new engine. That seems to be Esteve’s argument.
According to Wikipedia, the F1 engine was started in 1957 and delivered in 1965. That seems to be about 8 years. Of course, the used the build it, watch it blow up, and figure out what went wrong approach. Now we have computers that help reduce the cycles of that. Back then a test stand explosion was expected now and then. Today you get all sorts of hollering that the program is in deep trouble and the design is fatally flawed even if a test is shut down early.
The forthcoming SpaceX Raptor methane/LOX full-flow staged combustion engine should outperform the RD-180. So I don’t see SpaceX bothering to do a replacement engine for the next version of the Atlas V.
In what stats? Just curious.
The RD-180 have ISP sl of 311s with 3.83 NN of thrust and ISP vac of 338s 4.15 MN The RD-180 have a high engine mass of 5480 kg due to the stress of the ORSC process, got a thrust to weight ratio of 78.44 at liftoff.
The Raptor will be expect to have ISP sl of 321s with 6.9 MN of thrust and ISP vac of 380s with thrust of 8.2 MN. The Raptor’s thrust to weight ratio should be high since the FFSC process is more benign so a less massive engine structure. This first version of the Raptor will be will be upgraded to higher performance later as experience is gain from the early production engines. As with the transition from the Merlin 1C to the Merlin 1D engines
The upper stage version of the Raptor will have a higher ISP and thrust since it will have a bell extension to the engine.
Of course the Raptor performance will have to be verified in actual use. The Raptor is just a bigger engine then the RD-180, it should be compare to the RD-170 instead.
edit: typos and thanks to AM Swallow for pointing them out.
I suspect the ‘mN’ should be ‘MN’.
A mN is a milli-newton, (0.001 N) the sort of force generated by your little finger or a small ion thruster.
A MN is a mega-newton (1,000,000 N) is the sort of force a launch vehicle needs.
Cool, thanks for the info!
But F-1 didn’t fly until late 1967, over ten years.
If my memory serves me correctly, the whole idea behind allowing the Atlas to use the Russian engine was that we have a back-up option with the Delta rocket. So, if the scenario that we might be seeing now were to occur we can still access space with Delta. We still have access to space for our military payloads.
I’m pretty sure that the Delta people would be happy to pick up the slack if our 2-3 year supply of Russian engines is used up. That was supposed to be the plan.
To hear our lawmakers scream about it you would think that the Russians have a strangle hold on our entire launch capability. They don’t. Refusing to sell us engines would hurt them more than it hurts us.
That would be true if Lockheed and Boeing were still competing for EELV launches. The Delta being much more expensive to operate, ULA will use it only if there is no choice. I agree it is extremely unlikely that Russia will cut off the supply, unless we get into a shooting war.
Afraid not. Refusing to sell us engines would hurt the US a lot more than it would hurt Russia.
We’d be looking at a 3 year delay in military launches. They’d be looking at losing less money than Gazprom earns them every 3 hours.
United Launch doesn’t have a 2-3 year supply of Russian engines, they have 15, total. All of them scheduled to be used in the next 18 to 20 months.
Delta? There aren’t enough Delta. Delta is painfully more expensive than Atlas and takes more time to build. Delta can’t be ramped up fast enough to avert that 3 year delay. Being forced to use Delta could vacate their 5 year deal with the USAF.
If Russia exported a lot of goods to the US, the engines might skate by, something else might be held back. The Russian’s predicament is that they don’t have much else to hold back. The Russians suffer a real shortage of US bargaining chips.
These engines are their best play. With this latest cock up, they’re bound to use them.
So if they play that chip, they’re left with not much good left to play for chips?
Mike
Reading these comments
Seems elon is a good chess player too.
Check!!!
Lol
Mr president
We can not launch our spy satellites for two or three years because ULA can’t perform their contract what should we do??
We could break the contract and launch them on Falcons
There would be no delay in military launches. We would just be forced to fly American made Falcons.
this post should get you guys “all riled up”.
1) why did they choose a Russian engine in the first place ? ’cause it was cheaper; free market capitalism at work.
2) why might it take “8 years to copy a 50 year old engine” ?
a) see 1) above
b) someone wants a huge budget to reinvent the wheel ?
c) it won’t (of course), someone just wants a sound-byte.
even if they have the drwgs and the license to reproduce the engines, it still may not be QED … the drwgs probably use Russian materials (ok, there are similar US materials but not 1:1 copies) and use Russian process specs and standards (not 1:1 equivalent US specs available).
mind you with the aforementioned free market at work, I’m sure you could get commerical equivalents built quicker and cheaper than you could with sole source govt suppliers.
Deleted comment
When Elon started up SpaceX, his almost first hire was Tom Mueller, the chief rocket engine designer for TRW and Northrop . Mueller brought a lot of TRW techs with him to Spacex. While at TRW, Mueller had shepharded the TR-106 hydrogen engine , 700,000 lbs thrust , which worked , and the TR-107 kerosene engine, 1.1 millions lbs. thrust, which was nearly to hot fire stage when the Space Launch Initiative was cancelled in 2002 and a huge vaccuum opened in the American space manufacturing business. Coincidentally , or not, SpaceX was gestated at the same time. Mueller going to SpaceX to begin anew with the Merlins was a natural. He’s still there, in charge of propulsion and doing magic. The Super Dracos are his progeny.
Appears to me that Mueller’s old TR-107 is the engine we’re looking for here. The RS-84 from Rocketdyne was pretty close to done when it was cancelled, too, and it was built around that good old Russian tech.
I’ve said it before here. I knew some people on the RS-68 hydrogen engine program at Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne. They all said the Russians had superior metallurgy and fabrication techniques that were well advanced over anything American , then and now. A critical difference as it turns out. Someone smarter than me or with more inside knowledge will have to answer the question of whether any US company can even build an RD-180 even with blueprints and license in hand.
Russian technology is basically different than american technology. LOX rich staged combustion with kerosene is not our bailiwick, but our regular kerosene burners are lower performance. For minimal impact to the vehicle, neither TR-107 or SpaceX engines would not be suitable on that basis. Russian engines use coatings to handle the high pressure LOX, Mondalloy was created by rockedyne to address management edict that coatings were not acceptable. If its a NASA program, NASA engineers would be constantly asking for “neat” or unproven features and interfering in all phases of design at whatever vendor is designing/buidling the engine.Elon developed his grocery delivery vehicle engines with minimal NASA oversight. Keep NASA out of the process and the engine comes sooner at lower cost.
If they can, it would seem they would have developed an advantage in metallurgy and fabrication which would give them a huge competitive advantage, right? That’s good incentive, but maybe more incentive to smaller, less established, and ambitious companies. So somebody get on that!
Some people believe Alien technology has been reverse engineered. If soviet technology can’t be duplicated then forget about UFO’s being “one of ours”.
The military industrial complex has evolved to suck up as much money as possible every chance they get. This is an understandable response to the end of the cold war and the fickle nature of congress…they need the money to stay alive through the lean years. That is why it takes so long and costs so much to replicate the RD-180. Congress will take years to appropriate the funds as they distribute pork amongst as many districts as possible and SpaceX, Orbital and Boeing work to slow down their competitor.
This is not due to a failure of American engineering, but a triumph of American politics.
The US is in a great situation. The can verify that MH-17 was brought down with a Russian made SAM using a spy satellite launched with a rocket powered with Russian engines.
Clancy couldn’t make this stuff up.
These two guys hit the nail on the head:
dbooker said
The problem with NASA is that they have brilliant scientists and engineers but want to design a brand new Maserati or Lamborghini when all they need is a used VW bus….I hate it when they waste our taxpayer money.
Rich_Palermo said
The engineering culture that built Apollo is dead. The U.S. now has a management culture. If you want stability go into engineering management where you oversee processes, devise strategies, socialize ideas, and spend 100 dollars to figure out how to save 10 cents – usually by laying off the people that design, build, and test and gutting the facilities where that work gets done….you don’t need an engineering degree or even a technical background…the less you know, the better you look because you “have people that do that for you” and get points for delegating.
I cannot speak for the propulsion end of the industry but these statements certainly apply in human space flight and they explain why we have no indigenous ability to launch astronauts and why something like “safe, simple, soon” Orion is well on its way to having spent $20 billion and 2 decades with almost nothing to show for it. In fact, much of this system, the SM, is to be designed and built by ESA, and yet NASA wastes just as much, maybe more than if it were done in the US.
Now is the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the public wonders what happened to NASA. This is what happened to NASA.
Great Article on costs of big aerospace:
“In reality all of this is a smoke screen for the real problem — the inefficiencies of Big Aerospace labor systems and high indirect costs piled on top of the bloated labor required due to the massive bureaucratic processes instilled at Big Aerospace over 40 years. These typically comprise 80 percent of the cost of a satellite today, and “touch labor” is a small part of actual costs. The problem is rooted in the nature of federal contracting that has built up since World War II, which makes most government contracting “cost-based.” It is often said: “The cost is … whatever the cost is.” Cost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As we are now, 70 years later, clearly at the end of the post-World War II era, it is time to re-examine this. During World War II, with no time to compete or delay, the cost-based system was codified into a massive set of volumes (now the Federal Acquisition Regulations, or FAR) designed to make sure that costs were “allowable” — not necessarily lowest or reasonable. The result was a system that virtually guarantees that a government contractor cannot lose money, regardless of how inefficient the labor, process or facility. It was a system designed to produce weapons by brute force, and it worked for the times. Production during World War II broke all records, a lot of contractors got rich, and we won the war. Shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser came out of World War II as one of the wealthiest men in America, and the Curtiss-Wright Corp. (piston aircraft engines) was one of America’s largest corporations at the end of 1945.
By the late 1970s, when I was an engineering officer at the U.S. Space and Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO, precursor of today’s Space and Missile Systems Center), this archaic World War II accounting process had led to distortions where Big Aerospace contractors routinely charged indirect space factory overhead costs well over 200 percent of direct labor costs for some operations, with some as high as 300 percent and beyond. And this was before hefty “General & Administrative” and Profit charges were tacked on. This is where the costs for executive compensation, private jet travel and luxury hotel lodging are buried. Completely legal, hovered over by a phalanx of corporate accountants and lawyers, and audited by green eyeshades at the Defense Contract Audit Agency against voluminous FAR rules, these costs are never even seen by general officers and department secretaries.”
http://www.spacenews.com/ar…
How can this be stopped? I would assume McCain knows this. Right? Why doesn’ttea party types go after these far rules
Tea Party in Space, Andrew Gasser .. they are constantly hammering on this … as always though for politiians .. they say one thing on the trail .. and then these jr. reps come in and tow the mark to business as usual. I find it hilarious that they are free market capitialists below the karmen line and socialists in space.
Its a great article
It makes me think about the new space VS old Space discussion Keith had here.
It seems it’s really about good hard working companies against croaked companies that make it their business to steal from you and me Joe Public.
Be neat if Keith used this article to have a discussion about indirect costs
Does Cots in its current form make that kind of stealing impossible?
‘Impossible’ and ‘very difficult’ are different words. COTS style projects can make such swindles very difficult.
Short term contracts (say 2 years) limit the time any rip off can last. A defined finish point forces the company and the agency to concentrate on the major outcome. The milestones force the company to follow an agreed path and allow problems to detected by first the company’s management and later the agency’s middle management. Permitting remedial action. The count of completed milestones every 3 months allows Congress to see that things are proceeding OK in a form suitable for top management.
The difference between SAA and normal contracts is that there are too clauses in normal government contracts (including the FAR documents). Several clauses also say the wrong things.
So why not just change the way the contracts are written?? Is McCain trying to do this?? Are there others trying to change the contract system? Seems to me it would NOT be in Spacex’s long term interest to except a normal cost plus contract, if they want to change things, though they might be tempted.
Kinda like luring Luke Skywalker over to the Dark side.
Are DOD launch contracts much different than development contracts like SLS??
Seems launch contract have little excuse to be anything but a Hard number?
That assured access crap??
status quo aquires it’s own inertia .. “this is how it has always been done” is a mantra you will hear in these debates. As the article pointed out this process has been finely honed over the course of 7 decades. The institutional infrastrucure is all in place to carry on the status quo, aerospace corporations all carrying out operations with this as the standard operating procedures. For most it is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
You are talking about overthrowing a hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracting. You would almost have to overthrow the government … literally.
Needs to be done!!!!
Reading this thread got me to Google some bible verse.
49. And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.
🙂
A mundane example when I worked for the federal govt:
I wanted a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard instead of the standard issue straight keyboard. My managers were fine with this. Normally one could run to Staples and buy one during a coffee break, but not for the govt….
It took 6 weeks to get my keyboard. For this ~$50 purchase, it required signatures from seven different people in the IT and Finance departments. They keyboard came with 25 pages of forms that those seven different people had been required to fill out, certifying everything from compliance with cybersecurity regulations to contracting laws I’d never even heard of. I was not able to actually get the keyboard I wanted, since somewhere in the process it was decided (w/o consulting me) that a different brand would provide the same function at a lower cost. Which is odd, because the cost charged by the GSA-approved vendor was almost 100% more than the exact same keyboard cost on the retail shelf at Staples that day — and more than double the Amazon or Newegg price.
I would have just brought one in myself, btw, but could not for two reasons: 1) security rules for federal offices prohibit use of any IT equipment not purchased and installed by the IT department; 2) regulations also prohibit employees from donating anything to the government.
Either you work for some particularly bureaucratic agency or times have changed. This would be a simple credit card order with no approval needed beyond whoever is paying for it at nasa. If you brought in your own keyboard it might technically be a violation but nobody would care.
Defense Dept
If I brought in my own keyboard, it literally would not work: each peripheral is individually authorized by serial number to one specific USB socket on the computer. If I wanted to move my govt-provided keyboard from one USB port to another, I could not — one of our IT contractors would have to come to my office to do it for me. About the only thing I have rights to is changing my desktop color.
Note that this is an _unclassified_ computer, on an unclassified network, in a building that doesn’t even have any classified networks or in which hardcopy classified material can be present. Nevertheless, the unclassified photocopiers and printers are now ID-card controlled too — every job must be authorized and logged with your personall card and PIN. Just like the old USSR used to do it…
“it is going to take us the same amount of time to reverse engineer a 50 year old Russian engine design? Am I missing something?”
Yes. It’s going to take an incredible amount of graft, corruption and political prostitution to even get this process started. Everybody is going to want a slice of the pie. BIllions of dollars and years’ (decades?) worth of paychecks will have to be shoveled to every Washington constituency. Whether anything actually gets accomplished by a government program is secondary to filling the pockets of everyone involved. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this contract awarded to the same people that ran Solyndra.
Face it, Keith – NASA is no longer capable of finding its butt with both hands. It exists to provide livelihoods to nitwit project managers and idiot relatives of Senators.
The RD-180 replacement project is being handled by USAF, not NASA.
And this is different how exactly?
“Unless, of course, we were idiots.”
Oh come on, that would never happen! It’s not like our launchers or our manned space program depend on Russian engines.
Oh wait….
It doesn’t
We have falcons
You are missing politics, greed, avarice and ULA which treats the U.S. Gov as a revenue stream to be milked incessantly and the treasure of the U.S. regularly transferred to ULA, because, they are the only game in town …errr … were
http://m.csmonitor.com/Scie…
“Pressed by U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who chairs the science and space subcommittee, Estevez conceded that it would be substantially cheaper to certify a new launch provider than pay for designing, building and testing a new rocket engine for the Atlas 5.
“Development of new engine and integration costs are obviously much more expensive than the cost to us to certify a new entrant,” Estevez said.
SpaceX declined to say whether it intended to bid for the National Reconnaissance Office satellite launch.””
If Atlas runs out of engines in less than two years and ULA can’t make deltas fast enough to fill the gap.
In order for USAF to provide assured access to Space, may I suggest that USAF turn the atlas launch pads over to Spacex TODAY, avoiding environmental impact studies for new sites, And allowing Spacex time to remodel pads in order to keep our military flights on schedule.
Assured access is USAFs primary concern, Right?
They pay ULA extra for that right?
DOD should provide Spacex the the money for the Pad remodels too.
I believe SpaceX intends to modify its existing facilities at CX-40 and LC-39A to accommodate DOD payload integration.
Back then we had a purpose, that and 5% of the federal budget. Now our only purpose is to funnel billions of dollars to large defense contractors. If we had 5% of the budget today, that would be $185 billion per year. Even the grossly inept NASA of today could succeed with that kind of money.
Is it presumptive that the NASA of today is “grossly inept,” and that the one of yesteryear, with nearly blank checks flowing from the hill, was not? One could argue it’s harder to achieve any level of success with limited budgets, especially in an era dominated by the politics of ten “healthy” centers.
NASA is delivering a lot of great information, especially with the telescopes and robotic missions. It’s at least as good a bang/$ as in the Apollo days. I see a lot of PC silliness here and some over conservatism but I’ve seen very few grossly inept people here, and one of those was actually fired. People need to understand NASAs budget costs ~$58/pop/yr. Compare that with the cost of the Bush war follies (~$322/pop/yr) or the Obama money printing (~$1075/pop/yr) and everyone whining on here about NASA wasting money just seems out of touch with reality to me.
Leadership maximizes gains; Management merely minimizes losses.
We kept hearing about “NASA Management” since Challenger…