I worked for a team building electronics for the Artemis Program for a year and a half. This thing is a boondoggle. NASA isn’t what it was during the Apollo Program. There’s a number of places you can lay the blame for that, I tend to focus on decades of defence lobbyists setting NASA up to get looted by big aerospace companies and decades of congress cutting NASA’s budget while simultaneously bloating it’s bureaucracy.
Things that were going on in my little corner of the program:
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Managers managing managers managing managers managing managers managing engineers. I checked my math on this one 3 times to make sure I got the full hierarchy right. Not because we WANTED to do things that way, but because NASA basically MADE us.
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NASA not having the budget to accomplish their goals, but not being able to flex on those goals.
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Different departments at NASA not talking to each other, and so passing conflicting requests and requirements down to us.
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Our customer (a big aerospace contractor) not letting us talk directly to NASA, thus confusing the issue and slowing down the conversation (I fully believe on purpose, to milk more money out of NASA).
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We weren’t told ANYTHING solid about the systems out tech was supposed to integrate with. Everything’s all secret, with all the different companies and subcontractors working on the project fiercely protecting their petty IP. I would talk to my friend who works at SpaceX about this and he would laugh 'till he cried and say “How the fuck are you supposed to build ANYTHING like that??”
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We would learn later that some of the other tech being built for the mission could do parts of the job of our tech. SO… those parts COULD have been cut out to save money. I mean, I understand wanting lots of redundancy on a dangerous space mission, but you have to be willing to pay for it or you can’t have it.
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We also learned that several other contractors working on the project were going through similar shit. One of them had passed up on building what we were building saying “NASA’s not willing to pay enough to have that… how the fuck are you guys doing it?”
We were a small start up subcontracting on the project. This literally happened several times:
1: The big contractor would say “Money people at NASA say you guys are too expensive.”
2: We would say “OK, let’s go through the requirements list from NASA and figure out what to take off so that we can build the thing cheaper.”
3: The big contractor would say “OK, we’ll pass this back up the chain. In the meantime, you guys keep working, we’ll keep paying you, we have a contract with NASA that says they have to pay for it.”
4: Months would go by. We would keep getting paid.
5: The big contractor would say “The requirements people at NASA say you can’t cut those things. STOP WORKING.”
6: Weeks would go by. The big contractor would say “We told the engineering people at NASA no one but you can build this for cheaper than you guys bid. They said they really need this and you need to get back to work ASAP. So go back to work. The engineering people signed off on it, so go back to work and put all the requirements back in. The engineering people say they need all of those. We have a contract with NASA that says they have to pay for it.”
7: Months would go by. The big contractor would say “The money people who WERE in charge of this part of the project at NASA aren’t in charge there anymore. Stop working, because the new money people have to review and approve everything.”
8: Weeks or months would go by. Then the big contractor would say “The new money people at NASA say you guys are too expensive. But the engineering people say you need to get back to work ASAP!”
At the end, literally millions of dollars and a year and a half later on this project, NASA said “Never mind, this piece of equipment is just too expensive and progress has been too slow (I wonder why THAT could be??), we’re gonna have to figure out how to fly the mission without it.”
This is… Absurd? It seems like as time has gone on, NASA has progressively shifted towards an outsourcing model for more and more of its programs.
This model obviously explodes costs, which don’t help NASA’s shoestring budget. But even in that context, this sounds absurd.
It felt absurd living through it. Part of the absurdity of our situation was that we were a small startup building something NONE of the more established players would touch. That’s how we got the deal in the first place. None of the more established players would touch it because NASA just plain hadn’t budgeted enough to do it right. I’ve been vague about what it was because we signed some VERY strict NDAs and I don’t want my big mouth to come back and bite me. But we (being a small, eager startup) jumped in saying “We’ll do whatever it takes!” when we got into the meat of it it, what they were demanding simply wasn’t possible for what they were willing / able to pay. (Thus the bouncing back and forth between cutting things out and then putting them back in)
And like I implied, I believed our actual customer (the big aerospace company) KNEW that going in and manipulated the situation so they could grab some of that money before NASA pulled their head out of their ass and realized what they were asking for was impossible. This dovetails really nicely with the video @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca posted, where Destin says “We need to tell the truth!” “No one’s talking about this!” There are entrenched players who benefit from that and in that video he’s calling them out to their faces.
And honestly, we COULD have done it for about half of NASA’s budget, if they had just let us build it and gotten out of our way and stopped flowing down micromanagey requirements to us via our customer. That’s something that the ISS Commercial Resupply missions kind of got forced to do by a random sensible moment in between congress and NASA leadership. It was pretty successful, but the big contractors didn’t like it and their lobbyists jumped in to derail it being applied to future deals.
(As I understand it… the wheeling and dealing part of it is NOT my area of expertise… the above opinion is based more on space industry office gossip)
I can echo almost all of this, to the point that I was wondering if we used to work at the same company.
(I fully believe on purpose, to milk more money out of NASA)
I remember a pretty absurd situation along these lines. We ended up delivering faulty hardware to the prime contractor, who said there wasn’t a specific requirement for this failure mode, so they wanted to ship it, get paid, then have NASA fail it, write a new requirement, and buy another. The world of contract modifications and requirement lawyering always left a bad taste in my mouth. There are a handful of companies that I really want to see get banned from NASA contracting.
lol… if you actually got to the point of delivering hardware, it’s not the same. But… I get you, you are my people.
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