Washington Post: A Top NASA Official Improperly Contacted Boeing (washingtonpost.com) 34
The Washington Post reports:
After a top NASA official improperly contacted a senior Boeing executive about a bid to win a contract potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the company attempted to amend its proposal past the deadline for doing so, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That raised alarm bells inside the space agency, where officials were concerned that Boeing was attempting to take advantage of inside information. Ultimately, the matter was referred to NASA's inspector general office, and NASA's leadership last month forced Doug Loverro to resign from his position as the associate administrator of NASA's human spaceflight directorate.
Boeing did not win one of the lucrative contracts to build a system capable of landing astronauts on the moon. But the inspector general investigation could be another headache for a company under fire for having an unusually cozy relationship with federal regulators, especially if it identifies wrongdoing on the part of Boeing senior executives... "It's one thing to have a mistake that violated the Integrity in Procurement Act," according to a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter. "It's another if the company took that information and acted on it."
Boeing did not win one of the lucrative contracts to build a system capable of landing astronauts on the moon. But the inspector general investigation could be another headache for a company under fire for having an unusually cozy relationship with federal regulators, especially if it identifies wrongdoing on the part of Boeing senior executives... "It's one thing to have a mistake that violated the Integrity in Procurement Act," according to a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter. "It's another if the company took that information and acted on it."
why! (Score:1)
Re:why! (Score:4, Insightful)
When you've gotten away with it for decades, you tend to get a little complacent and lazy.
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But this isn't news, right? This was the new guy in charge of manned spaceflight who left a few weeks back?
He was playing the game the way it used to be played. The contractors with the largest campaign contributions get the bid, even if that means a few phone calls. Problem is, Boeing is toxic now. The 737 MAX issues destroyed public trust, and the Starliner capsule was, if anything, a worse design (fortunately, that one didn't kill anyone). Plus there was a disastrous Air Force contract that didn't g
There are two kinds of greed. (Score:2)
Smart greed, and stupid greed. Anybody want to bet which one Boeing has chosen?
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Insider trading on Wall Street becomes lost in the crowd. There aren't one thousand aerospace contractors so Boeing stuck-out and got noticed. The "stupid" in this greed was more than contempt for rules, it was thinking the government wouldn't care. The US government is designed to not look at rich 'persons' in-detail but Boeing's greed caused them to metaphorically, run into the only cop in town.
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Smart greed, and stupid greed. Anybody want to bet which one Boeing has chosen?
The same thing that your congressman usually chooses, profit over ethics... Only in this case it's not considered illegal... If you get elected to congress, you are generally exempt from the normal rules that apply to us surfs... Insider trading after talking to your CEO friend? No problem. Using your "inside information" on what the government is going to do to profit you and yours? No problem. As long as you don't catch the attention of the ethics committee, you are golden, and they don't every look t
Re:Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
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You mean the one with Google pays 3.66 mil a year in rent?
LOL.. Yea folks just refuse to understand that many of these perks are paid for dearly. It's all about appearances, to heck with all the facts, just cite the ones that illustrate your point and ignore the inconvenient facts.
Back in my day, presenting half of the truth in order to mislead was the same as lying, today? It's how everything seems to work.... Especially political campaigns. I think we've lost something here. My policy is to go out of my way to not mislead anybody by omitting facts they might
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So someone wants to bitch about this while NASA gives Google carte blanche access to Moffett Field in Mountain View.
NASA had been directed by the Reagan administration (and every other administration since) to allow their facilities to be leased to private enterprise. This is "good for business".
So, blame Ronald.
(....and, you do know that Google is paying them, right? They're not "giving" anything away. You might argue that they're not being paid enough, but they are being paid.)
Doug Loverro (Score:2)
This is about Doug Loverro, who resigned as director for human spaceflight a few weeks ago when this came out. The new news today is the inspector general is making a report. Basically because Mike Pence is pushing so hard for the 2024 moon landing, Doug gave Boeing advice (back in January or so) when they made a not-so-great proposal for the lunar lander, on how to meet the needs better. Whether they did anything with that advice or not, their final proposal was received so poorly it didn't even make the t
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As I've said before, every executive should be force to fly themselves and their family on the 737 MAX. Fuck Boeing!
I worked at a Navy Depot a long time ago. We did depo level maintenance to the Navy's aircraft, and we where doing a bunch of C130's, basically rebuilding them. The policy was that all the department heads involved in each aircraft's rework had to be on the first test flight. I'm not sure it was a good idea or not, but I wasn't a department head so I found it amusing.
The 737 MAX isn't any more dangerous than any other modern aircraft of the same general age and size, certainly not now everybody is focuse
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Re: Doug Loverro (Score:2)
No redundancy, no failover, no fault tolerance, no testing.
The single sensor problem is the one that downed an Air France aircraft. Faults don't go away by forgetting about them.
The lack of documentation is not a trivial thing. Don't assume that if you can get away with it when writing a grep replacement, you can get away with it with aviation software.
The specific faults show the software did not comply with aeronautic software standards.
I see nothing to indicate it met DO-178C standards.
Had that software
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Oh please..
I've made a bit of a study of this and the 737 MAX wasn't the first aircraft to use this MCAS system. Yes, mistakes were made and it's tempting with the benefit of hindsight to be critical of individual engineers and Boeing's process for having this design flaw slip through, but when you are designing a system as complex as a modern aircraft within the constraints that Boeing placed on this project (the sharing of type certificates) it is not a question of willful negligence, but plain old huma
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In this industry, we do formal design and formal documentation to eliminate "human mistakes".
This is considered Mission Critical because there's no room for such errors.
You can study all you like, but that's not worth a damn. DO-178C isn't an optional extra you bolt on to get the feng shui right. Formal methods aren't used on every third line of code. ISO 900x and successor documentation was treated as something of a joke at LaRC -- generally by people whose code was crap, as I recall. Shortcuts are willful
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So smug with the benefit of hindsight...
One has to consider the process that got us to this point and the reasons the design decisions were made within the context of the program AT THE TIME. Where I agree this was a mistake, my point was and is that it was more of a process issue, where multiple independent design decisions unexpectedly converged in this one scenario to cause a problem.
Redundancy can and does include "turn it off". The MCAS system is NOT required for safe flight at all, it's only there
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Well, that sounds nice, but there is no way to differentiate between the outright immoral, unethical, and illegal kind of corruption and this "innocent" kind of faux pas, if the vendor who fails to provide what is asked for were to somehow end up making the cut past someone who does offer what was asked for. As a taxpayer, I guess we can say it was not a terrible problem here because Boeing failed. From internal NASA perspective, it looks like a huge problem in the process where the bullet was dodged.
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This looks like it was indeed a failure of ethics, not morals: he screwed up by telling Boeing what NASA wanted and why their proposal didn't provide it, but his intent was apparently to try to get better value for NASA, not an intent to get value from corruption.
I agree also, however, that in doing so (for whatever reason) he crossed clear ethical boundaries that were set up for a good reason; he should not have done so and it was appropriate that
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Morally I don't think anyone has a problem with Doug telling Boeing that their proposal wasn't going to make the cut and what they needed to fix it
Uh, you do realize that if they'd successfully amended their bid that means one of their competitors would have been left with nothing right? This is not a victimless crime. It's massively tilting the board in favor of one company, unless you'd also tell the others how to beat Boeing's proposal.
given the context was that none of the suppliers were going to provide what NASA actually needed, but the other three were going to provide NASA with what NASA had asked for
Or in an alternative reading, you make a sham competiton then pick the company you favor to win. There are processes to amend/restart procurements giving everyone equal standing, sidestepping the whole process to aw
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It's a shame, but if I owned a company where Doug's skills were relevant, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at hiring him.
That's probably what Doug had in mind himself when he contacted Boeing to give them this info. You don't happen to own a large aerospace company headquartered in Seattle, do you?
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It worked for Darleen Druyun. Well, for a little while, at least . . .
https://nlpc.org/2010/03/10/no... [nlpc.org]
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It was right in TFS, they tried to amend their bid after the conversation, but it was too late.
Whatever happened to real engineering? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not really about corruption, if I understand the background story. It's more about a NASA official (OK, probably improperly) telling Boeing that their proposal sucked, and that they should fix it.
In earlier times, there was no shame in Govt. blatantly propping up Boeing's R think commercial 707s based on military tankers.
But times have changed, and these days, well, SpaceX is showing the way, and poor Boeing seems lost.
As others here have pointed out here before, the merger with McD was the beginning of the end; the finance guys took over from the engineers.
Don't know if it's a big deal ... (Score:1)
The NASA guy just told Boeing that the capsule name Starliner MAX wasn't going over well ...
William Boeing would NOT be happy! (Score:1)
Some reason I don't get it (Score:2)
I've read articles, opinions.... ok I guess some contractual laws were broken. But really, more serious abuses and laws broken by top men before and some of those didn't get this kind of scrutiny. I dunno maybe I've never had to deal with millions of dollars (damn, at times I struggle to get a $1000 item approved for purchase). Seems to me Boeing has enough of space contracts as it is. Lots of discussion on NASAWatch about this, I get lost in the comments.
This case may give the moon program some attention
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Perhaps it would be best if Artemis and SLS were to fade into the obscurity of historical space trivia, like OTRAG, but unfortunately the taxpayers are likely going to be soaked for this for quite some time longer.
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Guess who gets hired next by Boeing? (Score:2)
NASA cozies with Boeing (Score:2)
A lot of system security issues at NASA, when I worked there, had to do with Boeing software.
A lot of the data files were Boeing.
A lot of the contracts were Boeing.
And, guess what, the Congress-cancelled BWB airliner NASA was working on was with Boeing.
Back then, alternatives were thin on the ground, so you can't be too angry about that.
It does not surprise, merely saddens, me that NASA never grew past that. Aerospace in America isn't the Big Two plus NASA any more.