Northrop Grumman CEO's Evasive Webb Space Telescope Testimony
House Science Committee Demands Answers on James Webb Space Telescope Delays
“In questioning, Smith asked whether Northrop Grumman had taken responsibility for the problems listed in the IRB report. “In Mr. Young’s report there were several instances of preventable human error that were pinpointed that led to millions of dollars in cost overruns. I’m wondering if those employees are still employed by Northrop Grumman,” Smith asked. Bush could not confirm that anyone had been fired as a result of the human errors that have delayed JWST. Smith asked if Northrop Grumman was planning to pay the $800 million in above-cap expenses, and the answer was also no. “I wish that Northrop Grumman would take responsibility and show a little bit more good faith both for the taxpayer and for the cost overruns,” Smith said.”
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I guess he didn’t know that Northrup-Grumman posted their financial information on their website.
https://www.northropgrumman…
Wait, he is suppose to know, since under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 the CEO is held personally responsible for those numbers.
BTW the answer was $3,049,000,000 for 2017 so there is plenty to pay for the JWST over runs if Congress does not approve raising the spending cap on it 🙂
Wes Bush knew what their profits are- he didn’t want to say it on video for all to hear. He thinks the $9.6 6 billion is 1% of NASA budget?
Most telling, he thinks paying for the unplanned expenses would impede the relationship with NASA. He didn’t even offer up paying for the overrun due to using the wrong solvent. Wish Congressman Lamar Smith would have asked if any of the engineers were promoted for making the solven mistake since it brought in an additional $100 million.
JWST was clearly being treated like a cash cow. The taxpayers were milked for every drop.
The solvent problem is a good example of how placing blame can be so messy. We don’t have all the details, but it could have been any one of many people’s fault. Did the technician fail to follow the written procedure for the cleaning? Did the people who wrote the procedure forget to mention that a specific solvent was required? Did the people reviewing the procedure document fail to notice that? Did the contractor providing the parts fail to specify that certain solvents should not be used? Someone definitely needs to be held accountable for mistakes, but going down to the guy cleaning parts in the high bay may not be a good idea. Perhaps we should blame a higher level manager who was reasonable for making sure all those details worked right?
Experience tells me that the guy in the field using the material probably knew more than all of the aforementioned reviewers.
It depends on what the guy in the field was told. There might have been something unusual about the parts, which he wouldn’t automatically know without someone passing on the information.
But I’m also a firm believe in involving the users. It’s one thing to have a very lengthy process of writing and reviewing requirements and designs. But if none of the people involved have ever, personally used whatever it is, the results are going to have problems. If you want to know what sort of tools you’ll need to fix a motor, ask a mechanic not a mechanical engineer.
The other problem with blaming and punishing individuals is that after a while you are left with an organization full of people who not any less prone to making errors, but who are adept at avoiding blame. This does not make for a good team environment.
Northrup Grumman could just walk away. Than we don’t have to worry about JWST anymore.
But the Congressional critters will not face the prospect of spending close to $10B with nothing to show.
Yes, the old fallacy of sunk cost. What Congress should do is pull the plug on further funding of the JWST and then ban N-G from any NASA contracts for 10 years, unless N-G is willing to pay for the rest of the JWST. It would be interesting to see what N-G does. My bet is they would finish it and end up spending a lot less than the projected over run.
How easy would it be to ban NG from future NASA contracts? I believe that would take some significant changes to the federal acquisition regulations, and how it would work if a NASA contractor subcontracted to NG isn’t clear. That sounds like a major bill in Congress, not the usual NASA funding bills which few congressmen pay much attention to.
Don’t forget that NG is also (rumored to be) responsible for the loss of a billion-dollar top-secret satellite recently. At some point, past performance has to color your expectations of future results. Is there not a method in government contracting procedures to take this into account?
As far as I know, there isn’t anything in the formal review and selection process. That is, no one looks up how often or how badly a company has missed deadlines or overrun budgets, and puts it on the page with things like the technical merits or planned budget for the current proposal. But there is room for judgement in the selection process; a senior manager at NASA ultimately makes a choice between two, similarly rated proposals, and past performance may be in the back of his head. And the people rating and reviewing the proposals may be more skeptical about claims made by someone with a bad track record. But subjective things like that aren’t reliable and can go in any direction. The manager may have a bias in favor of a particular company in the back of his head.
Something formal and on the record would be better, if you ask me. There is a concern with a small number of qualified contractors. If all but one disqualify themselves due cost or schedule overruns, you can’t have a competitive selection. And any official rule is subject to gaming. If the rule is to consider the percentage of deadlines a company meets, a company could write in a million, trivially achieved deadlines into every contract. Then they could claim 99% success, even though the 1% they missed were the really important deadlines. So nothing is perfect.
True, it would probably be difficult under current laws, but if it could be done it would send a strong message. The alternative might be to try fixed price contracts similar to those used for COTS, but I see problems there as well. But this is a pattern that needs to be broken somehow.
These companies only do this because they get away with it. NASA let’s them get away with it. Congress, if they don’t take a stand, are complicit. Companies thing at worst they just have to put up with congressional hearings.
Back in the 1980s we had a contractor flat out refuse to do a contracted effort – just arrogantly refusing and keeping the funds. Other contractors were doing it too. I as an young idealist principled captain in the Air Force pushed the issue all the way up the chain to very high levels. It struck a nerve within the usaf who were fed up too. This particular aerospace company was issued a letter by the usaf stating that all of its gov contracts would stop work world wide until this little effort they were refusing to do was completed and the final report issued. They were given a reasonable deadline. The company scrambled and delivered right on the deadline date. Even though my issue was a very small issue- it had caused the company to back off of not delivering on some bigger contracts too. Other companies heard about it too. This particular company never ever tried that again with me or our organization.
Re: the 11:02 tweet. If NASA changed requirements after confirmation because of more ambitious scientific objectives, it’s a fair explanation for part of the cost growth. NG should have to account for what fraction of the overrun that represents. Otherwise, it’s the usual “blame-it-on-someone-who-isn’t-in-the-room” tactic.
We need to be careful about cost growth and cost overruns. The requirements and required work did change over the course of the project. That’s typical in phase A and B. NASA accepts the new requirements and funds the next phase accordingly. So that’s cost growth but not an overrun. Overruns are when the project (and contractors) say the can do the job for $X and then come back and say that same job is actually going to take quite a bit more than $X. JWST has seen plenty of cost growth _and_ overruns.
A distinction quite frankly without a difference to anyone outside of the program and project management biz. Try explaining the difference to your neighbors.
nah, it’s easy. Say you’re getting your house renovated. Cost overruns are when the contractor says to you “it cost more than I expected”. Cost growth is when you say to the contractor “oh, btw, I want a second storey”
But it is a little more complicated, since the project management isn’t paying out of their own pockets. Congress (representing the public) is paying. Let’s stretch your analogy, and say you promised to have your son’s house renovated as a wedding present. Then _he_ tells the contractor to add a second story. You would probably be upset when you got the bill, but it means you should yell at your kid, not the contractor. Sometimes placing the blame is a pointless exercise, but sometimes it’s necessary to identify and solve the problem.
And why exactly should the complexity of governmental financing- or governmental anything, be explainable to the uneducated, uninterested, and uninformed?
That is the kind of nonsense that elected the current administration with its propensity for simple-seeming answers for very complex issues.
At some level, even something like government spending should make sense at a basic level. If you can’t explain it to a non-expert, at least in a general way, there may be a problem with your own reasoning. On the other hand, or not, this reminds me of my favorite story about Richard Feynman (a man who generated many good stories.)
He once told a fellow professor at CalTech that if you can’t explain physics in a way a reasonably smart undergraduate could understand the basic idea, then you didn’t really understand it yourself. The other professor replied, “Ok, Dick, so what’s this whole spin one-half quantum state about? What’s the intuitive meaning I can explain to a student?” Feynman didn’t have a good answer, and asked for a week to think it over. A week later, he had to admit to his colleague that, actually, he didn’t really understand the angular momentum of electrons.
There are several examples form the world of astrophysics, cosmology, and high energy physics:
• Inflation is incomprehensible
• Multi-universe is a struggle (though Brian Greene’s recent book is helpful)
• String Theory- I don’t know where to start
• Baryons vs. the observed Universe
I can go on, and on.
Explaining government in general and governmental spending in particular suffers from two fundamental problems, in my view: one is American egalitarianism, the notion that, in some sense, at least, anyone can served ably and well in Congress or White House (related to the 19th century Noble Savage I suppose); and the again American fundamental belief that Business is Good and should therefore serve as a model for just about everything.
This explains the current administration and congress, though.
As strange as it sounds, calling JWST 1% of NASA’s budget isn’t too far off. We’re talking about a very long project. It was initiated in 1996 and (on the current schedule) the end of prime mission will be in 2026. That’s 30 years. $9.6 billion over 30 years is $320 million per year. The annual budget hasn’t been flat, and $320 million per year is a hair over 2% of NASA’s budget. But a Congressman calling that 1% isn’t as far off as it sounds. But it would be more interesting to see what fraction of the astrophysics budget that is.
Northrop CEO offers to link JWST profit to mission success
“WASHINGTON — The chief executive of Northrop Grumman said July 26 he is willing to make the profit his company earns on the James Webb Space Telescope contingent on the overall success of the mission.”
https://spacenews.com/north…
Somehow, I’m unimpressed. A large fraction of the cost overruns (and the added profits implied) are all about trying to assure overall mission success. That makes this offer a very safe proposition. If assuring success means more overruns, it also means simultaneously more proft and a lower risk of forfeiting that proft.
Not if it has the same fate as Zuma.
What do you mean? From the point of view of aerospace industry management, Zuma was nearly a perfect project. They got paid to build it, the customer can’t publicly complain about anything (since the customer won’t even publicly admit to existing) and no one can be held accountable if the spacecraft wasn’t as good as it was supposed to be. What could be better? Well, if it had been a clear case of a launch failure, where all the fault could be dumped on someone else, that would be better. But Zuma was close to ideal from a profit and non-responsibility perspective.
I’d like to know more about Zuma’s failure to separate, and how costs were apportioned.
Not sure how costs were apportioned, but SpaceX was not considered liable. Because of the supposed sensitivity of the satellite to shock (some say a large active radar antenna was involved) NG declined use of hte stock SpaceX payload separation mechanism and designed thier own. Unfortunately it did not releasewhen commanded when the second stage reached orbit, and although it eventuall released the satellite, by that time the second stage had autonomously fired its debit burn and the satellite was already re-entering the atmosphere.
I’m afraid that’s going on a long list of things which won’t happen. Northrop Grumman can’t even say which government agency was involved. While I would be interested in the project’s budget and how much was spent on what, I doubt we’ll every find out. I’m putting that on the same list as what Simon de Laplace actually said to Napoleon.