Just Remember: Pence Said "By Any Means Necessary"
Boeing tried to amend bid after guidance from NASA official, raising concerns it received inside information, Washington Post
“A person with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation said: “I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that no laws were broken. What we are talking about are conversations that occurred outside the normal dictated channels but didn’t violate the sanctity of the procurement process.” … But the probe is also focusing on Boeing, officials said. “This certainly goes both ways. It’s one thing to have a mistake that violated the Integrity in Procurement Act,” the aide said. “It’s another if the company took that information and acted on it.”
Remarks by Vice President Pence at the Fifth Meeting of the National Space Council Huntsville, AL (2019), earlier post
“But to accomplish this, we must redouble our efforts here in Huntsville and throughout this program. We must accelerate the SLS program to meet this objective. But know this: The President has directed NASA and Administrator Jim Bridenstine to accomplish this goal by any means necessary. … But to be clear, we’re not committed to any one contractor. If our current contractors can’t meet this objective, then we’ll find ones that will. If American industry can provide critical commercial services without government development, then we’ll buy them. And if commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the Moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets it will be. Urgency must be our watchword. Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the Moon in the next five years is not an option.”
Keith’s note: VIce President Pence super duper turbocharged the whole Artemis program to land humans on the Moon by 2024. No one denies the political significance of this date i.e. before the end of a theoretical second term. This was a Herculean task to say the least and the White House certainly delivered with a massive budget request increase. That said, NASA clearly had to think outside of the box, bend some rules, and dial up procurement. And Pence certainly gave them the firm ground rule “to accomplish this goal by any means necessary“. Them’s fightin’ words. So guess what: NASA and its contractors took up the challenge. And this happened. We won’t know much more until the OIG issues its report. But it is important to remember that when the White House uses words such as Pence used then the White House needs to anticipate that people will feel that a fire has been lit under them and that they will respond accordingly. I am not offering an excuse – but rather, an explanation.
Did all of the offerors act illegally, or just one?
Has anyone been indicted? So far the sources quoted all say that no laws were broken.
Perhaps accurate, Keith, but a bit disingenuous; we have been witnessing, over and over, the diminution of institutional norms that have protected the country in many ways. Protected, indeed, in ways that haven’t been clear until they are abrogated.
That Pence quote brought tears to my eyes. The POTUS administration has definitely been hiring better speech writers since election 2016.
Are you kidding?!?
Except the words are all hollow since they serve only to work in the moment and they get confused when people try and implement them.
I guess the Vice-President should have included “legal” in his statement but you would think that was a given. It says something about today’s NASA if anyone thought it meant bending the rules. It also says something about its bureaucracy that rules had to be bent.
For me, “by any means” sounded more like dumping the Old Space approach of doing things and being willing to expand the comfort zone a bit by using New Space to do it, but that shouldn’t require breaking any procurement rules except maybe the unwritten one to keep the Congressional pork flows going.
That’s how I interpreted it also.
Or maybe it meant “Make a deal with space aliens if you have to.” 😉
With the current administration, it is hardly a given.
That said, I’d be willing to give the VP the benefit of the doubt, except that such statements are echoes of England’s King Henry II moaning, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
Sadly, NASA has a long history of taking short cuts and skipping testing. Language like that enforces schedule pressure that has caused us to lose three crews (and have many close calls). When the organization is working under schedule pressure like that, mistakes are made.
It’s true that one can cite examples of ‘short cuts’, and dreadful consequences; but “a long history of taking short cuts” is a charge a bit over the top.
No it is NOT. If you read up on Shuttle flights you read about numerous close calls, numerous places where work was signed off (often by multiple people) and was never done. The same happened on Apollo. The bad news is that NASA takes short cuts – I have the Columbia accident investigation report in my hands and the Columbia “Crew Survival Investigation Report” (they should have chosen a different name) and they list many close calls. Close calls are almost always caused by skipping required testing or checks.
Big organizations rationalize skipping tests, etc too often – they are all bad about that. Read “Darker Shade Of Blue” for how it affects the Air Force.
It is a very good example of what happens when you have a quality control system with an excessive number of checks and inspections. Individual inspectors get lax because they assume someone else will catch their mistake. But when that becomes a common behavior mistakes slip through the system causing accidents.
But I fail to see how this is related as shortcuts are not how you speed up a process or improve it’s quality. Sadly that is part of a bureaucratic mindset. You speed up a process by analyzing it to find how it could be improved by applying technology and/or improved procedures.
A good example was the first tourist submarine the Auguste Piccard. To speed up the time between dives they replaced having crew members checking if hatches were shut with a circuit that would only show a green light if all hatches were locked. If the circuit didn’t show green another circuit made it impossible to flood the ballast tanks on it. They carried 33,000 passengers in it at Expo64 with zero accidents.
Shortcuts are not how many organizations have tried to speed up a process? The Apollo 13 incident was caused by many many things but a major inflection point was when the oxygen tank used the heaters (of course this is a huge summary) to boil off excess oxygen after a test at KSC. The right way to do this would have been to use existing procedures to remove the oxygen – but that would have taken more time. So the ground crew took a shortcut that “saved lots of time” and resulted in the explosion later. Few organizations are foolish enough to insert “short cuts” into procedures to speed them up, here short cuts mean using non-validated procedures.
But when people like pence say to use “any means necessary” to make the landing in 2024 – lots of people are going to take chances. They have many times before.
The Challenger accident was caused (in part) by deviating from established limits – that was a form of a shortcut. They launched when the temperature was below standards. That decision was due to schedule pressure – like we have now.
Exactly, you need to develop an organization culture that avoids that temptation. Of course when an organization thinks it’s the best of the best it makes it harder to do so. It’s called hubris…
*No* human organization lacks agency costs.
The checklists, started up after the crash of Boeing’s first B-17 prototype in 1935, were an elegantly simple solution to operators or maintenance not being thorough enough. Yet, when the burden of the checklist feels too heavy, even that gets ignored. Are they abused? Almost certainly, sometimes.
The checklist *only* works as long as your design has not pushed the checklist beyond what humans are willing to put up with. It is excellent, but has its limits. Checklists *cannot* carry all the problems of complex design, even when you put them on a tablet or other electronic medium.
We *will* have to design things that do not need checklists so long that even dedicated professionals “fudge it” as often as they apparently do.
“an excessive number of checks and inspections”
Would you normally expect the number of inspections to decrease as an operational project gained more and more experience?
I’m not sure if I’d expect the number of checks to go up or down. With experience, you ought to discover that some potential problems you were worried about are non-issues. So checks for them can and should be eliminated. But you would probably also find some problems you didn’t think of originally, and that would require adding new checks.
What I would expect with experience is finding more efficient ways to make the necessary checks. There is a learning curve for that sort of thing, and it ought to be incorporated into new versions of the processes and check lists. It’s also frustrating when the old, no longer necessary relevant checks stick around, because many people have a negative reaction to removing a safety check. The psychological burden of proof just seems to be against that.
Boeing is a very long time government contractor, likely having submitted thousands of proposals over the decades. With this kind of experience, surely steps would be taken to reduce risk before taking the kind of action described? (If they did).
Why would a provider with this level of experience make any effort to find and open a back door without having seen similar governmental behavior in the past?
Or, perhaps, having received assurances that all eyes would be otherwise focused?
What in the world is going on in Washington?
I am going to try to word this message in a way that will not cause Keith to delete it.
The government — contractor — Congress mutual back scratching club has always been a sesspool of corruption…but it has always been hidden. Elon Musk kicked in the door of the U.S. Airforce with a Federal lawsuit that would have resulted in potentially embarrassing evidence discovery…so instead it resulted in a settlement that gave him what he wanted.
I don’t know whether this is related to that.
Excuse me but how does a SpaceX/USAF issue years ago have anything to do with this? What doors were kicked down? Do you know something we don’t? If so post it – with sources.
If a late revision of their proposal was even something NASA would consider (which isn’t true of all NASA proposals), they would have had requirements about why and how the proposal could be revised. Maybe someone at Boeing thought they could check off all those boxes to justify a revision with innocent statements. and no one would look beyond that. Maybe the people at Boeing who put in the request for a revision didn’t know someone else had been talking to Mr. Loverro. Maybe something else. In any case, it was very poor judgement by a company who should have known better. But in the last year or two, Boeing’s done two or three other, stupid things when they should have known better.
“should have known better”
That’s the essence of my question. Why would Boeing take on the exposure accompanying irregular activity – unless there are either assurances, or history, that any exposure would be limited, or non-existent?
Or, perhaps, seeing a generalized atmosphere in Washington in which displeasing the President has consequences so extreme that the risk is worthwhile?
With the long experience, could it be the case that Boeing has seen this sort of thing in the past – and seen no consequences?
I’m generally ‘Pro-Boeing’, or at least ‘Neutral’, in this sense: that despite recent stumbles, Boeing represents some of the finest and forward thinking engineers and designers in the country, a position held for many decades. That’s a statement better made with qualification, but still.
It’s a question deserving a better answer than my uninformed speculation.