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Commercialization

NASA's Management Of Space Parts For Its Flight Projects

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 5, 2017
Filed under
NASA's Management Of Space Parts For Its Flight Projects

NASA OIG: NASA’s Management Of Space Parts For Its Flight Projects, OIG
“While NASA Centers are required to use SMS to track their supply and material inventory, we found that five of nine are instead using stand-alone inventory control systems or other NASA systems to manage their flight inventory, including spare parts. These non-SMS systems contain over $252 million worth of flight inventory. As a result, Headquarters’ Logistics Management Division’s visibility into flight assets across the Agency and its ability to accurately account for flight inventory Agency-wide is limited and inconsistent.”

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8 responses to “NASA's Management Of Space Parts For Its Flight Projects”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    That is a lot of spare parts, folks. Are we talking about ISS parts? what else could be “flight hardware”?

    • Paul451 says:
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      Every part ever produced for any mission, probe, rover, lander, sounding-rocket, aerial test, etc etc. Every instrument & every vehicle.

      It should probably be much higher amount, given the tendency to produce several spares for every component that actually launches, but I assume most of those spares are with the contractors, not NASA centres.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        I am not sure what Headquarters would do with the information. They control all the funding; what don’t they know? It’s not like one program could use inventory from another. A bigger problem is that research funding isn’t received until 3 moths into the fiscal hear and has to be spent before the final three months, so there can be months with no money. In spite of the fact that the grant handbook recommends no-cost one-year extensions be allowed routinely, which would alleviate the problem.

        • fcrary says:
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          Actually, one program can use the parts from another. In some cases, those are big parts. The Cassini imager’s optics (mirrors) were Voyager spares.

          But some of these parts can be as small as a microchip. I can think of two occasions (a high voltage electro-optical coupler and a fast pre-amp) where people had been using the part in flight instruments for over a decade, the the manufacturer introduced a new and improved next generation part. In one case, it really was higher performance but it was less radiation hard. In the other, it would be an improvement for terrestrial applications but prone to complete, total and permanent failure in space (this was discovered in thermal testing.)

          In both cases, people were calling around other centers, labs and companies and asking things like, “Do you have any spare X left over from a previous project?” And some people were holding on to their spares, in case they needed them on a yet-unfunded future project, rather than giving them away to a project in active development. That’s something headquarters might reasonable want to know about.

    • jimlux says:
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      No station parts – “In this audit, we evaluated spare parts from NASA’s launched, completed, or cancelled science and space missions. We did not evaluate spare parts for ground or operational missions, such as rocket propulsion test stands, wind tunnels, or the International Space Station.”

  2. hikingmike says:
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    This seems important. You have to use the system for the system to live up to its potential usefulness.

  3. jimlux says:
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    reading the OIG summary, I think that they’re potentially being unrealistic. Some problems crop up:
    1) flight parts are often ordered to a specific drawing number which calls out test requirements specific to the mission – particularly these days with the use of “upscreened COTS” parts – it’s not like a commodity 2N2222 transistor (or even the JAN/TX slash sheet) – so your inventory will show “2 each drawing 12345678” which happens to be a COTS 2N2222 that’s been screened for leakage current at 100C or something.

    2) The cost to acquire and keep this metadata (and for the potential user to look up the drawing, in whatever archive it is) might be more than the part is worth. If you have the end of a reel of 100 ohm resistors with 150 resistors on the reel, that cost 0.15 each, it will cost *way* more than $25 to inventory those. The inspection going in and out of flight stores might cost more than just procuring from scratch (and paying ONE inspection, coming in from the vendor, for a sealed package)

    These two reasons are probably why there’s significant “informal flight parts sparing” – the engineer down the hall just “knows” that those are 2N2222s, or that you’ve got 100 ohm resistors. It is true that the engineer in the next building might have a box full, and i won’t find them, but if I, and the engineer down the hall, are working in the same organizational unit, on the same kinds of designs, it’s likely we’ll use the same kinds of parts with the same general requirements.