The Best Way to Make a Profit as an Aerospace Company is to Fail (https://qz.com/1784335/the-space-military-industrial-complex...), a compelling piece about how massive corporations like Northrop Grumman have little incentive to hit their contract budgets and are arguably incentivized not to. “Northrop Grumman […] won the James Webb Space Telescope contract in 1996 with a promise that the project would cost $500 million and be flight-ready in 2007. The telescope is now likely to launch in 2021 and is expected to cost nearly $10 billion. [...] [W]ith every delay and snafu, Northrop Grumman rakes in more money as missed deadlines extend the timeline and require more funding from the government. One delay in 2018 brought Northrop Grumman close to a billion dollars alone—twice the price the firm originally quoted to the government for the entire project.” According to this document (pdf) released on Jan. 28 by the Government Accountability Office, the JWST has only a 12% chance of launching in March 2021. The massive overruns by Boeing on SLS are a similar example.
*but oddly some major aerospace contractors had their fingers in the pie anyway.
11.5 hour days, 7 days a week for a year?
> I almost burned out
No kidding. Seems like a recipe for much worse than burn out.
I know this well, this seems to be common in large software companies.
Take the Joint Strike Fighter / F-35 for example: 4 bids. Lockheed won the contract but subcontracts major parts to another JSF bidder (Northrop) and Boeing/MD ending up merging. The whole thing is so incestuous.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/shodd...
> In a vibration test of the telescope earlier this year in California by prime contractor Northrop Grumman, dozens of loose fasteners — some 70 pieces in all — came off. A few pieces are still missing and could well be inside the observatory. The locknuts were not tightened properly before the test, according to a report by the board.
This sort of thing (IIRC, this individual issue cost $150M) should come directly out of the contractor's profits.
Companies with no competition and a guaranteed contract will never deliver the goods.
The reality is any such corruption is dwarfed by the corruption that goes on in the award of US govt contracts.
This is all an inevitable consequence of the US being one of the few countries on earth were bribery (by another name) is legal. So long as these corporations keep bribing the politicians, their contracts will continue to get extended.
Can't wait to hear how the Raider program takes forever haha. The US military is already way overpowered anyway, so the way I see it, I'm just getting the money I put in taxes back here plus a little from all the guys who don't play the game. And if you complain I can just seed something on Twitter about it being outsourced engineers who made the mistake. Then you'll rage for a few minutes and give me money.
Thanks, my dudes. Index funds are for losers.
Directly from the financial report from Boeing:
> Fourth-quarter operating margin decreased to 0.5 percent due to a $410 million pre-tax Commercial Crew charge primarily to provision for an additional uncrewed mission for the Commercial Crew program, performance and mix. NASA is evaluating the data received during the December 2019 mission to determine if another uncrewed mission is required.
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2020-01-29-Boeing-Reports-Fourt...
Similar wording can also be used with respect to debt that will never be collected.
I don't understand why (as far a I know) the weak points of the space shuttle weren't addressed, like the heat tiles which were supposedly fragile. Instead, they aborted the entire program.
The argument for Commercial Crew seems clear. The argument for two companies doing it is redundancy, in case one company goes bankrupt or hikes prices or has a huge mishap requiring months/years of investigation and remediation.
That's a valid question since we don't need manned space flight.
