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SLS and Orion

NASA Continues to Ignore GAO On SLS And Orion

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 19, 2017
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NASA Continues to Ignore GAO On SLS And Orion

NASA Human Space Exploration: Integration Approach Presents Challenges to Oversight and Independence, GAO
“The approach that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is using to integrate its three human spaceflight programs into one system ready for launch offers some benefits, but it also introduces oversight challenges. To manage and integrate the three programs–the Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle; the Orion crew capsule; and supporting ground systems (EGS)– NASA’s Exploration Systems Development (ESD) organization is using a more streamlined approach than has been used with other programs, and officials GAO spoke with believe that this approach provides cost savings and greater efficiency. However, GAO found two key challenges to the approach:
– The approach makes it difficult to assess progress against cost and schedule baselines. SLS and EGS are baselined only to the first test flight. In May 2014, GAO recommended that NASA baseline the programs’ cost and schedule beyond the first test flight. NASA has not implemented these recommendations nor does it plan to; hence, it is contractually obligating billions of dollars for capabilities for the second flight and beyond without establishing baselines necessary to measure program performance.
– The approach has dual-hatted positions, with individuals in two programmatic engineering and safety roles also performing oversight of those areas. These dual roles subject the technical authorities to cost and schedule pressures that potentially impair their independence. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found in 2003 that this type of tenuous balance between programmatic and technical pressures was a contributing factor to that Space Shuttle accident.”

Previous SLS posts
Keith’s note: At the end of this report is a response from NASA HEOMD AA Bill Gerstenmaier. If you want to understand why NASA is clueless as to what SLS/Orion costs, just read this. Small wonder NASA has no idea what things actually cost. The’d rather just mix everything together to make it harder to understand those costs – and they do so deliberately. Tick Tock
“NASA regularly balances available funding with the flight manifest within the context of the Agency’s overall exploration objectives. NASA’s programmatic decisions are based on optimizing acquisition stratedes and resource allocations (material, people, funding) across multiple missions to ensure efficient implementation of deep space exploration objectives that take several flights to accomplish. NASA believes it has the processes in place to provide stakeholders insight to cost, schedule, and risks that accord with ESD’s nature as a multimission space transportation infrastructure. Cost estimates and expenditures are available for future missions; however, these costs must be derived from the data and are not directly available. This was done by design to lower NASA’s expenditures. NASA docs not think that structuring acquisition and implementation to ease accounting on a mission-by-mission basis is prudent as it would result in higher overall program costs and is not in keeping with the nature of the program.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “NASA Continues to Ignore GAO On SLS And Orion”

  1. Eric Ralph says:
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    Yep 😀 Contractors effectively took the Augustine Committee’s report, examined how Constellation wound up cancelled, and then made [deleted] sure that it would literally not be possible for price targets to be known or met.

    It’s masterful legal obfuscation for the sake of hiding and perfecting cost-plus style contracts, and I’m sure all of their shareholders are as proud as can be ._______.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      Yes, it is what the Swamp does well, separate taxpayers from their money by providing “valuable” technological advances 🙂

  2. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I think Gerstenmaier owes his long tenure to the masterful way in which he manages dollars. But I think the dismal, lost in space, situation in which NASA now and for the last nearly 10 years finds itself, including the nonsense about Mission To Mars and The Gateway, and even the oversized Orion, the hiatus after Shuttle that caused Ares and the SLS to go out of control programmatically, the lack of science on ISS, the lack of education in The Year of Education, are all results of his poor programmatic management. He is most definitely the most powerful man in human space flight in the US but US human spaceflight has ceased t be a powerful force under his leadership.

  3. Michael Spencer says:
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    Is there some sort of graduate program in Government Obfuscation Speech? Where do people learn to write like this?

    I’m guessing OJT.

    “Mission design is determined by exploration priorities. Some of those priorities require multiple flights. Tracking costs, especially across multiple missions, is expensive, so we don’t do it.”

  4. fcrary says:
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    Obfuscated budgets are one thing, but I’m more worried about the bit about overlapping job responsibilities:

    “The approach has dual-hatted positions, with individuals in two programmatic engineering and safety roles also performing oversight of those areas. These dual roles subject the technical authorities to cost and schedule pressures that potentially impair their independence. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board…”

    That means the person who does the job is also the person who certifies the job was done properly. The CAIB report was very critical of this, since it means there is no independent oversight. Of course, the CAIB report also contained a comment by Dr. Ride, to the effect of “we told you so in the Rogers report.” That was in a different context, but when an official investigation points out problems with organization and institutional culture, it seems to fall on deaf ears.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      I just don’t believe there is any evidence that separating safety and operational responsibility provides any assurance of mission safety. If the people actually doing the job are highly motivated and know what they are doing, which is usually the case, the job gets done right. QC personnel and inspectors tend to focus on whether the steps in the procedure were followed, which is no guarantee they were done correctly, or that following the written steps assures safety.

      That said, the above statement on budget seems confused to say the least, and even if that were not the case, no degree of budget oversight will eliminate waste if the basic design is wrong.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        There’s a parallel here with the distrust folks have of government in general.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        I’ve witnessed the conflict of interest first hand. Safety Management should be held responsible in their performance reviews for safety results. Production Management should be held responsible in their performance reviews for productivity and employee efficiency. The give and take power struggle between those separate management teams, and the joint agreements between them, is what produces the best balance between the two. In my experience, good safety is a layered model that tends to get stripped down when the frequently contrasting objectives of safety and production reside in a single person. Mixing safety and quality might be possible, in a well implemented and audited quality system where safety includes the health of the production equipment, but even that is balancing on the edge of a dime IMO.
        My fear is that First Launch protocols will mask a problem during un-crewed launches that will only show up when (if) SLS launches become routine and we have people on the rocket and undedicated safety responsibility results in warnings of equipment run condition specification limits being ignored in favor of launch cadence. That would result in a repeat of the Challenger accident in some form.

      • fcrary says:
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        In a sense, that’s my concern. I’m not a big fan of formal reviews, procedures and certifications for risk reduction. At least not in taking it too far. But if someone (the project manager or someone higher up) thinks they necessary, they ought to be done right. Having the same person responsible for both jobs, especially if there is schedule pressure, removes much of the intended value. We can argue about how much or little value that is, but if it isn’t done right, your paying all the associated costs without getting the benefits. Worse, you’re creating the illusion that you are getting that level of risk reduction.

  5. Richard Brezinski says:
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    As far as the different projects being integrated together into a single budget, I think this happens. Gerstenmier’s budget include Orion and SLS, and ISS…..He is the defacto program manager. Everyone else is simply doing what he directs. As far as a program and meeting programmatic requirements or milestones, the closest thing to a program is Mission to Mars, or is it the Moon, or maybe an Asteroid or maybe an asteroid retrieval or maybe its a cislunar gateway? Congress and NASA management have decided to build the hardware. Where it will go or what it will be used for is not a concern for now. The Orion design constrains the program to a lunar or cislunar distance. Mars and deep space asteroid fly-bys; not with the current design.

    Daniel Woodard says that If the people doing the job are highly motivated and know what they are doing, which is usually the case, the job gets done right.

    I am less convinced that human space people know what they are doing. The Apollo generation responsible for Apollo and Shuttle development and construction are long gone. Those involved in ISS development have mostly left; that was 30 years ago. Provide some examples of high level NASA managers and provide their background and experience details; let us know what projects or systems they successfully designed and developed. Operational responsibility? We do not enter the operational phase for Orion or SLS for several years. These are one-off new non-reusable vehicles. They are not Shuttles built long ago and mainly certified for maintenance turnaround, and they are not Shuttle SRBs and ETs being built 4 or 6 or 10 or more a year on an assembly line. Even once they begin to fly, the experience base will be thin.

  6. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    As someone else said a few days ago

    ” NASA doesn’t spend money to build rockets, it builds rockets to spend money”

    This report just illustrates the fact that HQ and the managers are just burning through cash with no regard for making any real progress or exploration but keeping the workforce fed and congressional districts happy. Not sure how they sleep at night knowing they have shipwrecked the agency on the shallow Waters of LEO for the foreseeable future. Maybe Pace, bridenstine and the president council can take the rudder of the ship and get us going back up the gravity well consistently and with purpose to explore.