Sole-Source SLS, What Else Do People Expect?
MSFC had a big business meeting yesterday to kick off contracting for the SLS.
Here’s a preview by The Huntsville Times…
Blogs are already on about open competition for the big ticket items, but I haven’t seen anyone writing about what we knew all along, and that is this is going to be a big Boeing project. What else did you expect? The language in the NASA bill that approved SLS talked about using CxP contracts as much as practical to speed things up. We should not expect any big surprises on propulsion either.
If we want to see this project get half-done and cancelled in our lifetimes, NASA needs to streamline the process. This isn’t and wasn’t going to be a revolution.
At least critics have something else to write about besides Sen. Shelby and MSFC jobs. The truth here is MSFC is glad to get the SLS initial design work, but it is still letting people go, even today. The balance of work that MSFC will do on SLS is tiny compared to what was happening on Ares 1. MSFC was staffed up to design the Ares 1 Upper Stage and release designs for Boeing to manufacture. Those designers are gone. This time Boeing will do that part, and MSFC does “insight and oversight.” It’s hardly a make-work program for MSFC. It’s a “we still have too many people” program.
Read “NASA’s SLS Procurement: So Far, Sole Source Only” on Nasawatch…
From Spacepolitics…
NASA’s plan to sole-source most elements of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket has led one member of Congress to complain to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “I have serious concerns with NASA’s attempt to avoid holding a full and open competition to acquire the SLS,” Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) wrote in a September 22 letter to the GAO, provided by the advocacy group Tea Party in Space (TPIS).
McClintock wrote that he believed NASA’s plans to procure key elements of the SLS through modifying existing contracts made them “de facto sole source awards” that could be in violation of the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act, which allows sole source awards only when there is a “single responsible source” to meet government needs…
Nice try Tom, but a waste of time.
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What I heard is that MSFC will be responsible for vehicle integration which is a critical step in SLS design. They will also be responsible for the payload adaptor design. They will also be responsible for aerothermal induced and natural environments on the vehicle. They will be responsible for a lot of the aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics of the vehicle. However, you are right the primes will be responsible for the individual components such as SSME, SRB, stages, etc. I do know that some of the MSFC employees will also concurrently be providing analyses to the primes. This is only what I heard and I think there will be a lot more work for MSFC in the future. With the MSFC labor down, I think MSFC will have enough work for the next six years.
Just my two cents….
For your sake, I hope you’re right, but I’m inclined to be doubtful.
There’s an underlying dispute. On the one hand, NASA is THE very pinnacle of American aerospace excellence. NASA hires the best of engineering graduates, provides them the best possible facilities to work with, does the cutting edge research on which an expanding industry depends…. yadda yadda yadda. NASA is the natural home of expertise and authority; it determines its project goals and methods free of outside interference; it spells out its requirements to suppliers, does supporting R&D as necessary during procurement, and provides all necessary oversight to obtain successful flight vehicles and satisfy national objectives.
I kind of gather Mike Griffin had such a notion of what NASA might be. But there is an other hand, in which that authority and expertise is seen just as naturally in the business firms which actually do the heavy lifting in the aerospace world. From this view point, NASA is simply a cog in federal government’s machinery. Congress and the White House and OMB make the decisions about space policy; NASA does some supporting analysis as needed and developes requirements for procurement; industry provides vehicles and material as requested, develops new technology, and provides personnel to accomplish national objectives; NASA may have some use to the nation afterwards as an operating agency, but its connections with industry are simply to make requests, sign contracts, and hand over checks — thinking is not required at any stage.
Which sounds a bit ugly, but you’ll notice it matches the rhetoric of libertarian space enthusiasts elsewhere on the internet; it apparently mirrors the thinking in many corporate offices — there are a lot of aerospace executives with memories of being pushed around by heavy handed NASA types over the past decades — and my understanding is it matches the management philosopjy Admiral Seidel was preparing to implement when Mike Griffin took over as Administrator.
The difference is stark, perhaps too stark for the actual world. And we can imagine a happier better world with ever expanding possibilities and accomplishments in which both NASA and industry and working flat out with all their capabilities to perform marvelous things across the solar system. But we don’t live in that world. We’ve got a poorer, less happy one in which there is more expertise and capability in NASA and DOD and aerospace firms than the people who run the American government wish to employ. Until that changes, there will be reductions in manpower at NASA and is subcontractors. The logic here is that such reductions will be aimed PRECISELY at competing sources of knowledge and expertise — at highly trained personnel, in other words — and it doesn’t suggest good times are ahead for NASA’s people
Sorry about that.