If SpaceX is providing fixed pricing to the Air Force rather than cost plus pricing, their internal processes and methods are basically irrelevant. The only time that matters is when doing cost plus where management efficiency might have some kind of an impact on the price.
The Air Force took a pretty silly position on the whole thing IMO.
I would tend to think that the officers in charge took the safe route, as in followed the established bureaucracy in place so as not to appear to be rocking the boat. Leaving established protocol is always a risk not worth taking unless you have been instructed to do so.
Having been in the service I now see similar traits at my work and in the words of others as their place of work. For many the job is to get the task done and do so only through the established framework
I would normally agree with you, having also been in the Air Force, but as OP pointed out, these types of reviews are inappropriate for this contracting structure. The Air Force isn't supposed to care how it's done, just that it is done to listed specifications. I think more likely explanation is some officer dusted off a review for ULA and just said "eh, this is how we perform these reviews in the past, I'll just do the same thing for SpaceX."
They have to care how it's done, because they have to evaluate the risk of the launch failing and destroying the satellite. That's not just a money issue - a launch failure means the capability you thought you would have won't be available until some later date. Maybe years later.
You know, I wish I could believe that in the context of "aerospace" or "Defense Department". After working in aerospace in the mid-80s, I came to believe that certification was more about barrier-to-entry than anything else. Ever notice how the seat-belt buckles on passenger transport planes look like a 1948 design? They're certified, and it costs way too much to certify a new design or process. Sorry to be cynical, but I just don't believe the public justifications of "certified" any more.
> I came to believe that certification was more about barrier-to-entry than anything else
Still the case with most government procurement processes.
If you manage to jump through all the "certification" hoops, you can mark up your product to an insane rate and then lobby for certification to be expanded.
Then the government has a list of "approved" vendors who are basically in the "certification" club and sometimes you can only find a product of a particular type only by a particular company and when you ask them for the price, your jaw drops (especially if there is a 20x cheaper COTS one on the market at the same time).
You can add Medical to that list. Need a USB thumb drive for a Medical Device? That'll be 10x the cost of the exact same one you can buy on Amazon. OK, so maybe the vendor guarantees traceability. So now you just paid 10x the price to be safe in the knowledge that you and Amazon are buying from the same guy in a basement in Shenzen.
First, I was correcting the putative point of the audit which the grandparent erroneously claimed was a cost audit.
Second, I'm sure big corporations take advantage of certification process to keep smaller players out but certification is extremely important, suppliers would not follow many of the safety requirements otherwise.
> They're certified, and it costs way too much to certify a new design or process
That buckle is a standard UI across every commercial aircraft in the World. That is very important in emergency situations. Billions of people know pull-to-release.
There is really no advantage to changing the design unless we also change to three-point harnesses as in cars. But that won't happen for cost reasons ( ' safety is our number one priority, profit is our zeroth' ).
> where internal processes and methods are paramount
I don't buy that. Process is CYA first and foremost. If something happens, you get to say, "We adhere to the strictest processes and best practices... blah, blah, blah."
Was there a lack of process in the space shuttle disasters? The flight 9525 crash? The Titanic?
You want safety? Get a third party (insurer, certification body, etc.) to assume responsibility (financial, legal, political, etc.) if anything goes wrong, regardless of the root cause. You might not get perfect safety, but you'll get responsibility, which is the next best thing.
Rigid processes are about diffusing responsibility, not taking it.
wasn't it management meddling? process called for redesigning the challenger oring, as corrosion was triple than expected, and process called for inspecting the columbia tiles. you can find all of these details in the reports, and you can find the name of the managers overriding engineering processes in both instances.
Those were _great_ links. "A Management Decision Overrides a Recommendation Not to Launch" was just infuriating, especially when all of the presented options lead to "there's basically nothing you can do". I can't even begin to imagine what the engineers felt when Challenger exploded. It's bad enough when there's some accident, but it's a whole new level of tragedy when the accident's preventable... if only people would listen to their advisers.
Well, as mgmt said, there was no evidence the O-rings were unsafe outside their operating limitations - because they'd never been tested at those temperatures before. I know, it's Twilight Zone material, but they found a hole in the launch rules (process) and ran with it. Previous O-ring failures had been within specs, so as far as they were concerned, it wasn't a temp issue, it was a known design flaw to be lived with.
> columbia
As for that article, pictures really didn't matter at that point so it wasn't "one decision." Rescue would have been a foolhardy venture more likely to kill both crews.
Columbia wasn't about mgmt, it was about engineering folks being placated by decades of success and making wrong assumptions about debris. There wasn't any workable solution anyway, it was a design flaw of the launch stack. The only solution was to never fly, and engineers weren't lined up to kill their own program.
The only reason the previous O-ring failures were within specs is because they changed the specs so that they could launch despite the previous failures.
Exactly but I don't think he read the links. Engineering designed system with triple tolerance. o rings had triple the corrosion, but management said it's still within tolerane, right? Triple corrosion but we have triple tolerance, so we're even right?
Engineering knew pretty well that wasn't the case, and that is not how tolerance works.
Feynman in his reports goes a long way to list all the overrides management did and how much the whole shuttle program was built on wishful thinking.
Well, you're ignoring blind adherence to process. E.g. it doesn't matter how good an idea is in a 'traditional' Japanese company, if the person presenting it doesn't have seniority, it will be ignored.
It's also about cost, in the form of reliability, since the payloads commonly cost > 1 billion USD each. Not to mention, if you botch the orbit they might have to throw missiles at it so it doesn't injure peopl^W^Wfall into the wrong hands[1]
Maybe the Air Force doesn't want to provide the insurer with sufficient information about the payload to make a reasonable underwriting decision?
Insurance also doesn't come free. The US government can also take on more risk than any particular insurer, so by purchasing those contracts would be in effect wasting taxpayer money.
The consequences of something like a failed launch can be hard to quantify economically. There is clearly opportunity cost for missed intelligence not having the satellite in orbit when it is needed. What happens if the satellite crashes in an unfriendly place, losing the exclusivity to a bit of technology could be very damaging as well. I think you would find it hard to place a particular insurable value on those; but minimizing that risk obviously costs money.
How much that risk minimization is worth is a question that I can't answer.
The F-22 (not the F-35) was the aircraft that was having pilot consciousness issues, and it has not been proven that the issue was actually oxygen being cut off from the pilot. Some have also posited that the problems were actually due to the high Gs at low pressure (as the F-22 is the most manueverable aircraft ever made at high altitude), which is also possible.
The difference between a space launch and an intercontinental ballistic missile is basically intent. Internal processes and methods are definitely a factor here.
ICBMs (and SLBMs) are allowed to fail more often than spysat launchers or human rated rockets. For important targets, you can afford to launch 2 missiles, but NSA can't afford 2 $4B birds, and can't afford the lead time for a replacement if one is lost during launch.
1 year on ISS is launching on Soyuz in 40 minutes!
"Welch faulted SpaceX for assuming its experience launching other Falcon 9 rockets would suffice to be certified, and not expecting to have to resolve any issues at all."
That sounds unbelievable to me, like one of those findings of issues that come out of a review that is given to parties that have done very little actually wrong --but something is needed as a sop so the other guy doesn't feel picked on. I cannot imagine that SpaceX went into a review expecting no issues or feedback, I can easily imagine them hitting the roof when a list of 400 issues came back.
Especially since SpaceX knows these payloads need additional security, including cleared employees it can only hire if it's got a contract (clearances at this level are associated with a job, although it's of course a lot easier to get a new clearance for someone who's been recently employed with one).
Felt the same way, I think we've all been in meetings like this, or at least I have. The other team starts defending their turf, and you're given a list of 400 issues of things that they do a particular way, that you don't do a particular way.
Sounds like the Administration/ Pentagon wants some sort of "SpaceX is good" certification, which is pretty much counter to everything military procurement is designed to do. The process is designed to be resistant to outside political pressure. In this case it is bad, as SpaceX most likely has the technological ability to compete with incumbents. But I think we could all easily imagine opposite cases where caving to political pressure is bad.
Of course the system isn't perfect, and politics still plays a major in role in program funding. But it could be worse.
In EVERY instance of a company needing to get some sort of certification from the government for a job I've seen it's been so far from perfect that saying "system isn't perfect" isn't even a funny joke. It's HORRIBLY broken and results in incumbent companies getting contracts that they don't meet deadlines or budgets on yet continue to get new contracts because they are certified. Government procurement is total shit IMHO and needs to change badly. I don't even think "Well it take a long time (procurement processes) but it's safer/needed", from what I've seen it's not. It's a massive waste of time for everyone involved and does nothing to filter out the bad apples. It needs a massive overhaul so that we quit shoveling money into shit companies and start giving it to people who CAN do the job and do it well.
But when you see, for example, huge arguments over the fact that SpaceX doesn't do vertical integration and hence shouldn't be considered for certification, it does make you wonder.
Unfortunately vertical integration makes things hugely easier for the organization doing the certifying, and avoids the issue of two contractors blaming each other (and the gov't) when the integrated solution fails.
It's a difficult problem that only gets made more so as visibility and pressure on the project increase.
I think that you are using a the more general meaning of vertical integration, but in this context it means putting the payload on the rocket while the rocket is standing upright and not on its side.
SpaceX is dramatically more vertically integrated as a company than the ULA (their competitor for government launches).
>The Pentagon is eager to certify SpaceX as a second launch provider, given mounting concerns in Congress about ULA's use of a Russian-built engine to power its Atlas 5 rocket.
What's this about? Is there any substance to it? Or is it congress members upset the engines weren't bought from one of their buddies?
Not really -- the engines that USAF is using for launching spysats are new-build (RD-180, not the rebuilt NK-33s on Antares), and their supply was a political issue for months before the Antares launch failure. The politics got tense here when the US put trade sanctions on Russia in response to the trouble in Ukraine.
In any endeavor when you rely on a single supplier that supplier has power over you. In the case of a nation it can exert political pressure on another nation.
Perhaps SpaceX should just work with other militaries and organisations around the world who have more realistic ways of working - I mean, after all, this is a capitalist society, right?
While NASA used to be almost all of their business, SpaceX now has quite a few commercial customers. In fact, it's been a long time since any US launcher was cost-competitive in the global market.
>dictating changes in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and even the company's organizational structure.
Why should the Air Force have any say in a company's organizational structure?
The Falcon 9 is already good enough for NASA cargo missions.
The air force has been dragging their feet through this whole process and their regulations seem to be created to be so narrow that only ULA (United Launch Alliance) is able to achieve certification.
Security can require that. Various SpaceX employees are going to have to have or get clearances, and I'm sure there's rules about who can manage them and how.
> He urged the Air Force's Space and Missiles Systems Center to "embrace SpaceX innovation and practices," while SpaceX needed to understand the Air Force's need to mitigate risks, and be more open to benefiting from the government's experience.
I found this to be the most important point in the entire article because I'm sure the USAF is very "old guard" with a mentality of "if it isn't broken don't fix it" while on the other hand, SpaceX is the new kid on the block with the newest and coolest tech
This video about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle may shed some light on why the Air Force ended up with a report with far more requested changes than SpaceX had anticipated:
Funny funny funny, are we seeing Russian trolls on hacker news?
Yesterdays article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760 got me thinking, there were several newly registered users voicing doubts in American Democracy and showing support for Russsa (c_los, M8, ibi7) and now borgia is chipping in for Russian rocket engines.
You're looking for Russian trolls now, instead of considering the obvious, that Russian rocket engines have been the main way to send stuff into space for decades.
"...and now borgia is chipping in for Russian rocket engines."
You personally linked the discussion of Russian rocket usage to Russian sock puppet accounts, instead of realizing that Americans have used russian rockets for a long time.
If you have nothing against RUSSIAN rocket engines (interesting that you called them "Soviet" engines when the USSR ended over 20 years ago) then why are over-eager to attribute discussion to them to Russian trolls and to describe them as "Soviet" (invoking Cold War era ideas) erroneously?
borgia doesn't look like a troll to me. TeMPOraL replied to the thread that the Russia banned the US from using its engines in military applications. borgia thanked TeMPOraL for the additional information on the topic. Seems like a legit and civilized conversation to me.
There are propagandist on all corners of the internet. Many people on HN are blind and willfully ignorant that our community is infected to some degree.
The Air Force took a pretty silly position on the whole thing IMO.