Rocket Scientist

I truly believe that human spaceflight is a worthwhile endeavor.  But I’m worried about how we’re going about it.  And I have a number of reasons why.

Let me remind you that these are my personal opinions and not those of NASA or those of my company.

Another of the reasons I’m concerned is the upper hand contractors have in this business.    In the real world, of non-government regular people, one picks a vendor/contractor/product based on one’s honest judgement and the quality of the work, reputation, etc.  In general, the same thing happens here.

But that’s where the similarities end.  In the real world, if you have someone build you a gazebo and it takes longer and costs more and the quality isn’t what you’d hoped for, you could sue, perhaps get your money back.  Here, if something costs more than projected, if it doesn’t work right and must be reworked, if it doesn’t meet requirements, if it takes longer than expected, the contractor still gets paid.  What’s more, the contractor gets paid for the extra time it takes, for the cost overruns, often gets paid more to fix the things that weren’t the way they should have been.

Think that’s crazy?  Me too.

There are a few reasons for this.  Aerospace is specialized work, that’s part of it.  Human spaceflight is not like commercial aircraft or military; we aren’t buying in bulk.  It’s specific, it’s unique, and much of it can’t be effectively marketed anywhere but with NASA.  Also, NASA has (for excellent reasons) very stringent requirements on quality control, materials, etc.  In order to meet them, a contractor must do a lot of extra work, have their processes reviewed, be willing to be overseen and/or hire their own overseers.  So, where someone might have 20 or so contractors around to build his gazebo, NASA doesn’t have a huge pool of potential contractors that have the skills, the know-how, the resources to do what they need.  That’s a bad bargaining position and it’s not likely to change much.  There will always be specialized needs and a limited number of companies capable and willing to fill those needs.

Big contractors, of course, have other cards to play.  One is politics.  They know how to schmooze and they know how to tell a story that sounds great.  They know where to make the most of lobbyists and campaign contributions, how to remind the right politicians of the production facilities in so-and-so’s district that certainly don’t want a big lay-off.  Often civil servants leave gov’t pay to join big contractors, and many have considerable civil servant and political contacts.  It’s big business and I think it would be naive not to think that some high level design decisions or top level requirements are devised with a particular contractor in mind.

Are contractors evil?  No and there are a wealth of hard-working dedicated people in contracts associated with NASA.  No doubt about it.  But it’s an environment that all but begs for corruption.

If you do the job well, you get paid what you were promised and probably a happy bonus.  You keep your folks working X years and your reputation shines.
Do the job barely, meeting the bare minimum or only slightly less and take twice as long, you get paid more and your people work for twice as long, fixing, revising, updating, correcting problems.  You may lose your happy bonus (though probably not all of it), but you’ve just doubled what you were paid.  And your reputation suffers little.  Contracts practically cry out to be underbid - there’s no penalty.

It isn’t amazing that companies take advantage of this.  It’s amazing so much good work still gets done (and it does).  But there’s a catch.  Without an incentive to be efficient, we aren’t.  No sense doing more than you have to - you’ll get paid the same.  Again, that doesn’t apply to every employee, but it does flavor how some companies and, even by extension, how government begins to work.  When faced with an non-emergency, there’s no incentive to have a single person or a tight team figure out a remediation, go to one or two boards for approval and then get the work done.  By doubling or tripling the size of the teams, decisions are instead made by committee (who are all paid) so it takes ages longer and will probably go to review multiple times, have meetings for weeks and months, wait to go to reviews, go back and rework it, contact experts and wait on their answers (getting paid for all of this) and then fix it.    Can’t blame the contractor - business is all about getting the most money you can from the customer.

In an emergency, everyone works their butts off, but many an emergency was a non-emergency that didn’t get the attention it needed earlier.  That’s working harder, not smarter.  And problems found in the field, in flight, are always more cost effective to correct early in the process, not later.  But working lots of people lots of time to correct emergencies (on the fly) gets a lot of good attention and makes more money.  It’s sort of a counterincentive to having nothing go wrong.

I am disappointed in how our contracts are written that doing something right the first time turns out to be bad business.  I can feel bad that building a product on time and on budget, delivering the kind of quality that doesn’t need 18 kagillion fixes over time, or that has to complicate mission operations or add to the busy on-orbit schedules of our crewmembers is not good business for our contractors.  Folks, there’s something seriously wrong with that.

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