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NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

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Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#201

Post by panta »

edmundsauto wrote: post #178
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we were to have made these workers government employees The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)

What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.

Corporate culture changed radically in the 70s adopting Milton Friedman views that ethics and responsibility towards society have no place in the private sector, and as a consequence started maximizing profits in spite of everything else.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#202

Post by zo1 »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #95
BobbyJo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Who's to say Bob knows what he's talking about?

Yeah, for all you know Bob could be one of those "weld quickly and break things" people.

But right now we know neither (Bob or Steve being bad), and we hide that behind some objective metric that gets diluted at every level. We hide it in Steve's reviews, in Bob's reviews, in the post-weld reports, in the weld-quality audit report, the inspection. Heck even NASA oversight inspectors are probably downplaying some of the severity when stating it in their findings report (saying it's partially due to, or the welds "contributed" to the quality, etc.) instead of just saying "these guys got an amateur to weld the exterior". So this "Steve is Bad" property gets spread out across all those various things, when we could just as easily have fired Steve because Bob evaluated him. Or maybe Bob didn't state it, maybe the NASA inspector told him "Bob, whoever you got to weld this thing is an amateur. Fire him before you get someone killed."

And sure, does that mean Bob might get it wrong? Of course, he might even be a petty little tyrant with an ego or he just might not like Steve because he made a funny comment about Bob's tie on his first day. I don't think some things can scale and be optimized away like we're all a bunch of cogs in a machine with our own individual little tasks and performance metrics that get aggregated into the larger whole.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#203

Post by preisschild »

cco wrote: post #194
School-Cotton wrote: post #23

Does anyone actually seriously believe the U.S. will land a person on the moon in 2025? This is the country that takes decades to open a new subway station.

There is a very interesting video from Smarter Every Day that suggests everyone knows that the SLS is physically incapable of landing on the moon as designed but nobody seems to be mentioning it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

HLS is for landing, but nobody seems to have any plan on how many resources it will take to get Starship HLS there with a full enough tank

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#204

Post by preisschild »

pharos92 wrote: post #112

And SpaceX are sitting there with all the capability, resource and a good chunk of the technology ready to go. The legacy defence contractors have been watered with a hoover dams worth of taxpayer money for far too long and have little to show for it.

Maybe SpaceX should finish the HLS that they have saying should have landed on the Moon by now.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#205

Post by lifeisstillgood »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #186
ipaddr wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A welder making double outside of the government would take a chance the more experience they have. Similiar to how many people here would rather get a job at Amazon vs the government. Chances are you are out in a year or two compared to a government job where you can survive longer for half of the pay. Remember we are talking about experienced aircraft welders. They are not available for 20 an hour when industry is…

Collins Aerospace is offering $19/hr for third shift welding work on aircraft. It was referred to me by someone in the labor community, and I spoke with HR under the guise of a prospective candidate to confirm. They do $26B/year in revenue.

This should be a top level comment - it kind of reinforces the point of the whole article. I understand that 15/hr is the (planned) US minimum wage?

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#206

Post by JumpCrisscross »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #179
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we were to have made these workers government employees The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)

While SpaceX has been successful and innovative, it certainly doesn’t keep folks around. Average tenure is ~3.6 years. Those folks are smart, and can always find work elsewhere. Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades? A tale as old as time.

> While SpaceX has been successful and innovative, it certainly doesn’t keep folks around. Average tenure is ~3.6 years

What was it for the Apollo programme?(The entire programme was 11 years [1].)

> Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades?

I’m not arguing against having more people at NASA. Simply against the claim that this is the evidenced issue. Unless the entire American space programme is a failure, private operators are not the root problem.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#207

Post by grecy »

darth_avocado wrote: post #64
vlark wrote: post #58

What killed American expertise? Middle management.

More than middle management, it was extreme financialization.

With no universal healthcare, no free higher education, very little social safety net and a raft of other holes in society to fall through, America is the poster child of “F$$k everyone else, I got mine”

People have to behave this way just to survive.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#208

Post by GVRV »

dandellion wrote: post #49
emchammer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have seen how beautiful the welds are on the Rocketdyne F-1 joints. Whoever made those put pride in their work.

If anyone else is curious this article has close-up photos of the joints: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

Can someone please explain why this is a high quality welding job? In India, welders are not paid handsomely and are rarely rigorously trained but I'm unable to distinguish between a welding job done by them compared to these photos.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#209

Post by [deleted] »

Mistletoe wrote: post #144
sgnelson wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the OIG report, it states: "Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."

New Orleans is one of the greatest cities in the world and definitely has access to experienced welders, this argument makes no sense to me.

[deleted]

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#210

Post by carlmr »

whatshisface wrote: post #84
mr90210 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NNT wrote Skin in the Game, which discusses such types of managers who cause similar damages. He argues that there should be clawbacks to managers that harm a company to the degree Boeing’s current management has. He invokes The Code of Hammurabi to illustrate how ancient civilization used to deal with such class of professionals.

The Soviet Union would actually send managers to GULAG for "wrecking," or other labor crimes, and it didn't really help. In fact, "accountability" was the only thing the USSR did not have a short supply of. Extraordinary punishments don't help if the system for figuring out who's doing a good job, and who isn't, is not working in the first place.

If only there was some middle ground between a golden parachute and gulags.
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