I swore off reading most news as one of my new year’s resolutions, so I’m a little behind on this item. Now I understand the sudden sense of urgency regarding proposals I’ve been busy with this past week.
Pence calls for human return to the moon by 2024
“At the direction of the President of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years,” Pence said. “To be clear: the first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets from American soil.”
So much for the usual kumbayaa globalism. Heh.
Pence offered a warning that appeared to be directed at Boeing, the prime contractor for the SLS core stage. “We’re committed to Marshall [Space Flight Center],” he said. “But to be clear, we’re not committed to any one contractor. If our current contractors can’t meet this objective, then we’ll find ones who will.”
“If commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets it will be,” Pence added. “Urgency must be our watchword.”
From what I’m seeing, what’s behind the sense of urgency is the perception that HQ will not hesitate when faced with delays or overruns to change contractors or cancel troubled programs outright. (Excluding SLS, of course…)
Having worked on a program (on the receiving side) that was taken away from one contractor and given intact to another due to poor performance, I hope that specific type of contractor change doesn’t happen too often. Shifting a existing program to an entirely new team may (or may not) fix the management and design competency issues, but it takes a lot of time for the new team to get up to speed. More importantly, it’s difficult if not impossible to fix all of the engineering problems simply due to the inertia of completed engineering – the new team may not be allowed to start from scratch, or to implement significant changes and improvements, simply because of the time and budget required to do so.