Saturday, February 21, 2009

Plumping the Turkey

Viceroy Hanley has another bill come his way soon. The reconciliation, churn, and delays in failing to set a configuration baseline for Orion keep adding up. Despite the multi-billion dollar plus-up that has already been confessed to, another quarter billion or so is needed to keep the contractors from stopping work soon.

And, oh, you wanted a launch abort system with that? Better keep the checks flowing there, too. If new money doesn't flow soon, the same company that really lost CRS, but was moved to the head of the class with divine help, will have to stop its efforts as well. That's what happens when the resources have to go to education instead of being applied directly to development. Oh, yes, good luck with that CRS thing, too.

No wonder the free models of the stick and its gumdrop payload get so much attention at the weekly staff meetings. If you had problems like these you would not want to talk about them either, now would you?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

CRS is that the Commercial Resupply Service
contract?

Anonymous said...

Yep.

Anonymous said...

Read 'em and weep...

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/local.ssf?/base/news/123555701098190.xml&coll=1

Anonymous said...

Talk about plumping the turkey - It has become blindingly obvious that the NASA directed procurement for Ares 1 is really getting the gobbler off its' diet. Bidders are being told to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ancillary engineering functions such as system, subcontract, risk and such! Not one bit of that work will deliver the product any faster or ensure that a better part is produced.

The sad part is that the product may only cost a few thousand dollars but they must provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in no-value-added labor or be judged non compliant.

So the new criteria must be that we will be ready to launch when the weight of the money wasted is equal to the weight of the rocket?