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Government Space The Almighty Buck United States

GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman 133

schwit1 writes In a report as well as at House hearings today the GAO reported that Northrop Grumman has denied them one-on-one access to workers building the James Webb Space Telescope. "The interviews, part of a running series of GAO audits of the NASA flagship observatory, which is billions of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule, were intended to identify potential future trouble spots, according to a GAO official. But Northrop Grumman Aerospace, which along with NASA says the $9 billion project is back on track, cited concerns that the employees, 30 in all, would be intimidated by the process." To give Northrop Grumman the benefit of the doubt, these interviews were a somewhat unusual request. Then again, if all was well why would they resist? Note too that the quote above says the cost of the telescope project is now $9 billion. If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
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GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman

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  • by Black.Shuck ( 704538 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @06:52PM (#49350675)

    You can get a whole month of war for that!

    • Maybe 5 weeks, if you don't run into cost overruns.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26, 2015 @06:52PM (#49350683)

    n/t

    • Thank you AC for remembering there are non-Americans on Slashdot.
      • Who performs governmental oversight in your country.
        Please don't say "BDO".

      • Another important note is that the GAO is probably the most trustworthy and reliable portion of the U.S. Federal government from the public's point of view. They are sort of like Cassandra; they constantly give dire warnings about where the Feds are failing, they're almost always right, and nobody pays attention to them.

        • by sjbe ( 173966 )

          Another important note is that the GAO is probably the most trustworthy and reliable portion of the U.S. Federal government from the public's point of view.

          I agree that they are certainly up there with regard to trustworthiness. However they are hardly the only ones. I know it's super fashionable to claim that government is nothing but a bunch of crooks and that they can't do anything right but it's demonstrably not true. Government can be and often is a powerful force for good in society and while there is no denying that power often breeds/attracts corruption, for a government to be effective it cannot be universally incompetent and/or corrupt.

          Other gener

  • by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @06:55PM (#49350687)
    ...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...
    • I'll bet the other 10 or so they made worked fine, but they were deigned to point down!

      • No, the other ten probably had the same problem. Just no one in government could tell the difference.
        • Rumour is that a Hubble-type error had happened on at least one nadir-directed telescope, and that opticians who were aware of those problems had watched the public design of the Hubble with increasing unease then downright horror as they saw the error become increasingly likely.

          But because they were on classified work, they couldn't say a thing.

    • First time I heard of this. Care to elaborate for us stupid retarded ignorant plebians?

      • by TWX ( 665546 )
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org] It was the biggest space-science story of 1990...
        • by jbrandv ( 96371 )

          I worked for Ball Aerospace during this time frame. Before the final packaging for putting the telescope on the rocket, there was supposed to be a final laser alignment test to check the all the components and to make sure everything was alligned properly. (This test would have cost about $50000) But the government told Ball to skip the test as they knew everything was correct. This was done to save money. The Ball team objected but was overruled. The final alignment test was never done and we know the

          • by TWX ( 665546 )
            Yep.

            What really saddens me is that Perkin-Elmer still exists. If there was ever a justifiable reason to revoke a corporation's charter, something this monumental to mankind is it.
    • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      Remember this one?
      http://articles.latimes.com/19... [latimes.com]
      Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error

      • by TWX ( 665546 )
        Oh yeah. I get that most Americans, myself included, are accustomed to working in fractional units, but there are times when one should simply bite the bullet and work in SI units. Hell, I'm no mechanical engineer but I have nearly as many metric tools as fractional tools, and I can work in millimeters and newtons and cubic centimeters when necessary.

        It blows my mind that aerospace engineers haven't converted to using SI for design and implementation on projects that are global in scope.
    • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      ...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...

      Also not true. Nasa could have checked the mirror on the ground. I understand it would have cost about 30K to do that. Since they were sure it was right, and nobody noticed the cone divit was reversed, why bother? I know one of the guys that found the problem and fixed it. He explained in detail, way more than I wanted to know.

  • by Random Nobody ( 3857591 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @06:55PM (#49350689)
    I don't give a fuck if they're doing blow and fucking hookers, I want my god damn Hubble successor.
    • Well, yeah, but you won't get it if the folks who are paying for it think they're getting ripped off. Here's the thing, science or no...

      People who are paying for your project have a right to audit. Period. You want to sue them after the fact for the reason that their audit fucked things up and you should still get paid, fine. But fucking play by the rules.

      Frankly, half of the trouble around today is a bunch of rich folks/company that run around screaming "We don't have to obey the rules if we don't like th

  • if you're not doing anything wrong...fill in here...?
    • You're right, there is nothing at all complicated about this situation, and intuition will answer all questions, no need for details. /sarcasm

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Each interview is man-hours not spent working on the project. GTFO GAO.

    • You're worrying about a couple hundred dollars in man-hours for accountability on a $9,000,000,000 project?

  • If the customer (the U.S. government) wants its auditors to be able to question individual employees, that should be clearly stipulated in the contract, and then the contractor should have no qualms about meeting the terms of that stipulation.

    Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

    • Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

      Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.

    • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.

      That's a two way street, son. The contractor is hat in hand looking for more funds beyond the terms of the current contract. All of the contract terms are on the table, as they should be, when a contractor fails to perform.

  • No stick

  • Maybe there aren't any workers. Is the CEO sporting a shiny new $9 billion iWatch by any chance?
  • the other way (Score:4, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1.hotmail@com> on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:35PM (#49351519)
    "Intimidated by the process"? More like intimidated by Northrop Grumman's supervisors being in the room to make sure they don't say anything that might, hmm, jeopardize their future at Northrop Grumman...
  • : First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret....

  • by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Friday March 27, 2015 @06:56AM (#49353091)
    Fuck auditors. I have yet to meet a single auditor *ever* who is qualified enough to be asking questions of the experts - the engineers - who are working on the project. Almost universally the auditors work from a pre-made playbook that looks for the same thing. They have neither the time nor the intelligence to actually understand why decisions were made the way they were made.

    We recently had an quality audit at the manufacturing firm I work for. The auditor noted that several of our part-feeders had parts laying underneath, and broke into a full fledged 'teach moment' about how we could save money and lower scrap by correcting the feeding issues. I bit my tongue.

    At the wrap-up meeting with directors present, the auditor pressed the point. I was quiet as long as I could, then I carefully explained that we had a $2,000,000 capacity problem that our engineers were working on, and politely asked my director if he'd like me to pull those engineers off that to work on saving a couple dozen parts a day that cost a fraction of a penny a piece.

    Auditting rarely adds anything of value anywhere. If it were that easy to the correct the problems, the competent engineers would have already done it.
    • by Mirar ( 264502 )

      I suspect auditors is behind a process I noted at a large American company I worked at for a bit:

      In the engineering office, the engineers were using laptops. The laptops were managed by a third party, which bought new parts from a fourth party through a fifith party.

      If one engineering laptop broke, it could take 2-3 weeks to get it repaired.

      In the meantime the engineer can't work, and just costs money. This happened, in my office, to a consultant - costing about a laptop a day.

      But in some budget somewhere I

    • They have neither the time nor the intelligence to actually understand why decisions were made the way they were made.

      I've worked with auditors, both clueful and clueless, just like I've worked with similar people in many domains. The fact that you've only encountered poor auditors is more a reflection of the firm(s) your company is(are) hiring to do your auditing. The fact that you see no value in the process does not mean that others do not see value. Frankly, there are a lot of people (besides complianc

      • by Puls4r ( 724907 )
        Really? Show Northrop Grumman the law that says they have to comply.
        Auditing is a self-perpetuating (see how smart we are?) parasite that has come about mainly because someone wanted to make some money and was good at blowing smoke up other people's asses.
        Punish companies that break the law equal with how badly they broke it. After they break it. ANY company that wants to hide thing from auditors knows just how much of a cakewalk it is. After all, the only way a company can incriminate itself to aud
    • "Auditting rarely adds anything of value anywhere."

      Says someone who has never seen a manager cover-up problems that proper oversight would have caught, and cost more money in the long run. You had bad auditors focused on the wrong goals. GOOD auditors are a valuable part of enterprise risk management, who are an independent means for testing assertions made by management, and who can help add value to a business or process.

      If a production-and-P&L oriented process manager is telling the president t

    • by RyoShin ( 610051 )

      Perhaps part of the issue is that auditors (appear to) only ever look for negatives. If they had to look for positives as well, and apply weights to the two sides, it would work out better for everyone.

  • by Mirar ( 264502 )

    Wait, 30 people have cost $9 billion?

    Do they eat gold? :)

  • Then again, if all was well why would they resist?

    If you're innocent, why would you resist talking to investigators all by yourself?

    Really?

    Yes, I realize that this isn't a criminal investigation, but honestly. If I knew there were a chance that any offhand remark or misstatement I made could end up being quoted on C-SPAN by a Senator with an axe to grind...yeah, I'd be pretty damned reluctant to talk. Even if I weren't bright enough to figure that out for myself, I'm pretty sure I can see why my employer would have similar concerns.

  • Any time you are approached by any State actor, you have the absolute right not to talk to them about anything. Northrop Grumman is doing the right thing in protecting their employees' from unlawful interrogation by State actors.

    • In this case the State is paying all the bills -- those people's salaries, the inflated salaries of the Northrop Grumman executives, and the inflated profits which Northrop Grumman is getting from the project. Don't want to talk to the State actors? -- fine, then don't accept a paycheck from them either. The State needs to cut off the money spigot until there is more cooperation from the contractor.

      • That's not at all how Rights work, at least not in the USA. You do not give up your rights just because your paycheck comes from the government.

  • As this is government (i.e. taxpayer) money, you stop paying Nothrop Grumman until they grant access to the employees.

    Since, as people like to say, the government doesn't create jobs, cutting off funding won't have any effect so there can't be any complaints. In fact, stopping payments on a project which is this far over budget would be good PR: a private company unable to do what they've been paid to do so the government is cutting them off.

  • Sorry but the OP states it's over budget and overdue. Well if you look at the original budget & deadline yes this is correct, however, subsequently the scope of the project has been massively increased which consequently increased the budget and time scale. Its not due to fly until 2018 and has still cost less than the Hubble.
    • by khallow ( 566160 )

      Sorry but the OP states it's over budget and overdue. Well if you look at the original budget & deadline yes this is correct, however, subsequently the scope of the project has been massively increased which consequently increased the budget and time scale. Its not due to fly until 2018 and has still cost less than the Hubble.

      There are several things to note here. First, the cost of Hubble included six Space Shuttle launches and 24 years of operation. Second, The JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is eight years behind schedule. Third, massive increase in scope of a federal project is a common ploy for siphoning more funds. Maybe nothing untoward happened with the changing of JWST's scope, but it's an easy thing for a bribe to arrange. And the project went on for five more years as a result of this changing of scope.

      • Massive increase in the scope nearly doubled the size of the thing however its still being launched by the same vehicle (Saturn V)
        • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          Massive increase in the scope nearly doubled the size of the thing however its still being launched by the same vehicle (Saturn V)

          If they're having to restart Saturn V production just to launch the thing, no wonder the cost is so high!

  • > If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim,
    > then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?

    The project is back on track to be able to stick around for another fiscal year in order to ask for another budget increase.

    See? How difficult was that? Simple actually.
  • Who fuck is working for working for who here?

  • "You say anything to the GAO people we don't like, we'll find out, and you'll never work again".

    And I was a contractor for a company that was sold to them... and they proceeded to get rid of those of us who knew the project best, on a variety of excuses.

    I read, a few years ago, that the client manager was in legal, or was it criminal, trouble.... (and he was a city government employee).

    Do you *really* think NG is all wonderful, and doing everything right (and that it's all the federal gov't fault that the t

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