NASA's Actions On Boeing's Lunar Landing Bid Under Increased Scrutiny
U.S. prosecutors probe ex-NASA official, Boeing over space contract: sources, Reuters
“The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into whether NASA’s former head of human spaceflight gave Boeing Co improper guidance during a lucrative lunar-lander contract competition, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The Justice Department has sent subpoenas to NASA, Boeing and Doug Loverro, who led the space agency’s marquee space travel program until he resigned in May, as part of a grand-jury investigation into the possible violation of federal procurement laws, the sources said. In the probe, opened in June, prosecutors are focusing on communication between Loverro and Boeing space executive Jim Chilton in late January, during a blackout period for the Human Landing System competition, one of the sources said. Representatives for Boeing and Loverro declined to comment. NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”
Keith’s note: These NASA procurement activities aren’t just a few people in a room working late on Friday afternoons. Hundreds are involved – for weeks – including lawyers, FAR experts etc. Lots of spreadsheets and PowerPoint. Something is missing from this story – either that or a whole lotta people at NASA and Boeing screwed up collectively.
“Something is missing from this story – either that or a whole lotta people at NASA and Boeing screwed up collectively.”: Please elaborate. I thought it was NASA procurement who alerted OIG about Boeing’s irregular behavior in the first place.
If it was a procurement person then they only acted after the fact. If this was going on during the procurement process then they should’ve informed the IG when it was happening.
How would they have known until they received the proposal?
My understanding is that Doug Loverro personally and directly contacted Jim Chilton during the procurement process. Lawyers who would have told them not to talk to each other weren’t consulted or were ignored. A few other management types might have known what Loverro was trying, but the Boeing people actually revising the proposal wouldn’t know why it was being revised, and the NASA people reviewing proposals wouldn’t know anything until they they actually received the revised proposal, which they apparently immediately refused and reported.
“My understanding” .. “might have” … “wouldn’t know” … “Apparently”. None of us – including you – know that any of this happened.. You are just stringing this together with caveats and hunches from one story by a reporter prone to make nbig mistakes – and the jury can now deliberate?
Er, you’re the one implying that hundreds of people were involved.
Yea. That’s how NASA procurements work. Seen it with my own eyes.
We definite do not have all the facts, so something is missing. But that natural. The case has been sent to a grand jury, and the (not the public) get to see the details. It’s only after the grand jury issues charges and those charges end in court, that we’ll have a chance of hearing about the details.
But this does not necessarily imply a large number of people were involved. As Keith notes, a very large number of people would have been involved in the selection process. But one person on the NASA side could have seen the initial reviews and told one person on the Boeing side something like, “Your proposal got a really poor review because of X, if you want the contract, you’d better submit a revised proposal which addresses X.” That could implicate only one person on the NASA side, out of the hundreds involved in the review and selection process. And on the Boeing side, the hundreds of people involved might only have been told to put together a revised proposal which addressed X. That would still be quite illegal, but the number of people who actually did something illegal could be small.
Doug’s help aided Boeing in losing the contract ?
It seems that Boeing, even with illegal help, was not competent enough to win the contract. It reminds me of an election in Eastern Europe in 1989, where the communist party did everything it could to rig the election and still lost by a landslide. If Boeing can’t even win by cheating, it does not make me feel confident that they can accomplish much of anything.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
How so? My premise is that Boeing illegally received information, that after receiving that information they submitted a revised proposal, and that, even so, they were the worst rated proposal of the five NASA received. There is no evidence that their competitors had access to similar inside information. Since those are publicly available facts, I don’t think there is a problem with my premises. Despite having illegal inside information, Boeing could not produce a selectable proposal. I think that’s also a clearly and publicly known fact. Boeing was not capable of producing a selectable proposal _despite_ having inside information their competitors lacked. I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that Boeing couldn’t even win the contract even by cheating. If you see a gap in that logic, please point it out rather than simply saying it’s wrong.
You are right on target. Corruption creates incompetence, as doing hard work and being innovative is replaced by complacency and blind spots. The teacher here leaned over and told Junior to rethink the answer to question #3, and he filled the oval for “b”, the wrong answer, again, just pressing the pencil harder.
Notable since the end of the Shuttle program, but found too in how Shuttle spent monies on upgrades that mostly never upgraded anything, Constellation began by setting the bar low. Those same traditional players believe they are a given to this day, this whole little episode with Loverro and the lander, merely symptomatic of the real sickness.
I don’t think that’s what happened. From what I have read: When Boeing tried to turn in their revised bid, it alarmed the NASA procurement personal, because the changes they made are very specific, so procurement called OIG. Also the revision is turned in after the deadline, so I don’t think Boeing’s revised proposal got evaluated at all. (This is why I’m confused that our host is blaming the procurement department, seems to me they’re the heroes.)
Here’s the article I read: https://www.chron.com/busin…
Large aerospace companies just don’t mail in a proposal to a couple of people at NASA. They all got through a procurement process at NASA with a large number of people going through them. There is simply no way that a revised proposal could just get dropped on someone’s desk at the last minute – especially after a deadline. The procurement process went ahead and Steve Jurczyk signed off on the contracts. Despite the people – intensive procurement process this issue only arose AFTER the awards were made. Got that: AFTER.
It was most likely just a few people. Boeing did the something on Ares I upper stage and IU. A NASA manager gave a Boeing manager the bid amount NASA was looking for. They won. Then the cost doubled.
Nothing will come from it.
Free NASA (from Boeing)!
How do you know it was a few people?
Just said most likely, not a sure thing.
We don’t. But all the hard work of hundreds of people at NASA and Boeing could have been tainted by the action of as few as one person at each outfit. Until an indictment is handed down (or not), and the IG’s report is public, we can’t know.
Although hundreds of NASA workers may be involved in the procurement, most of these people would be in the dark about the investigation. This is a Grand Jury investigation, so everything is secret. Likely, documents have been produced by NASA and Boeing, people have been interviewed, and maybe people have already testified. From a DOJ perspective, it would be a BIG deal given amount of money involved and the seniority levels on both sides. At worst, criminal charges and a debarment for Boeing and criminal charges for Loverro. At best, the information was not sole source and maybe just best guess by Loverro, so nothing happens. But black eyes for all. The speed of the investigation is interesting – it started with the NASA IG (who has put their investigation on hold according to the WSJ) and quickly referred to DOJ, who likely brought in its FBI investigators. If Boeing gets debarred, it does not mean that it will be kicked out of SLS or Starliner, but it adds a headache for any new work/options on SLS and Starliner. The stupidity of this situation is beyond belief.
“This is a Grand Jury investigation, so everything is secret. ” Exactly. So none of us really know anything. Not you. Not me.
What we do know is what has been reported (e.g. WSJ). So, we do know something. The secrecy part is the government’s burden but people outside of prosecutors and GJ (& few other limited people) can talk, which is probably how info is being spilled.
Well, we do more something. We know that one person, working with a large group of people, can leak information without his colleagues being aware of it. The history of espionage (political as well as industrial) is full of examples of that. I think it’s safe to say we do know that this event _could_ have involved a small number of people and that the much larger number of other people involved in the proposals did not know about it. We don’t know if that’s true, but we do know it could be true.
Personally, anything involving a large number of people keeping a secret strikes me as implausible. Anything involving an effort to get a large number of people to keep a secret strikes me as so difficult that the conspirators would do everything they could to keep the number of people involved as small as possible. So a small conspiracy, which tried to keep the larger group in the dark, seems more plausible.
The NASA OIG investigation was announced months ago.
Speculation may be fun, but in cases like this it is best to wait until the full story comes out before forming any opinions. All there is at the moment are random leaks of information about what happened that may or may not be accurate.