Internal Memos from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin

NASA E-mail via SpaceRef.com ^ | Monday, December 12, 2005 | NASA Administrator Michael Griffin

[69ConvertibleFirebird]

The difference is that the paperwork keeps increasing...

Make-work jobs. NASA can build it's little empires by having to hire people to read all of the new paperwork now required of the people who used to spend most of their time doing real work. UGH!!!!

How can any decent manager justify all of this B.S.?

[FreedomPoster]

>>The lesson is that space development needs to shift to the private sector as well, in order to not only survive, but excel.

Jerry Pournelle has been advocating exactly that for years. The engineer:manager ratio went below 1:1 at NASA long ago. This is not a good thing.

[RadioAstronomer]

One of our engineers joked about getting out the power drill and "fixing" the problem...

Hehe!

[MikeD]

How can any decent manager justify all of this B.S.?

I don't know. I know we're fighting every step of the way because we don't want to have to hire new people just to handle paperwork. One of the reasons we're able to keep costs down is because we keep team continuity from project to project. If team members have to spend more time with paperwork, that's less work being done...

[MikeD]

That's the great thing about sounding rocket programs -- you can drill holes, tape stuff down, no one cares. You're just launching out of White Sands, after all...

[burzum]

This is because NASA, the aviation industry, and the nuclear industry have basically merged their QA and safety standards. There are some very good reasons why this has occurred (such as TMI, Challenger, etc) but they do not always differentiate very well between items important to safety and equipment that does not affect safety. I could easily imagine an engineer asking what would occur if the laptop came free in flight. Then it would have to be certified to be compatible with a normal flight mount or it would have to have an engineering review determine the probability of different causalities. I can understand the frustration of your boss but I also understand the fear that management has of any type of failure. Deaths have occurred due to failures in QA and engineering analyzes to catch items. NASA failed to perform the appropriate engineering analysis on o-rings and foam losing two orbiters. The nuclear industry has destroyed several reactors due to failure of QA and engineering analyzes (among other reasons). No manager wants to be the one who has to answer why he or she didn't perform the analysis even though they knew a problem could occur.

[RadioAstronomer]

Did you ever hear the story about the time they blew up a graveyard in Mexico from a launch that went awry from White Sands?

"The Peenemuende Germans joked 'We were the first German unit to not only infiltrate the United States, but to attack Mexico from US soil" LMAO!

[MikeD]

Yeah, I heard about that one. I never knew it hit a graveyard in Juarez, but I knew it went over the border. Of course, in those days they didn't even bother closing down US 70. Now, they close off US 70 at the pass into White Sands an hour before a launch.

[anymouse]

I prob have close to 100 docs here

That's all? Slacker. :)

I've had to review that (space shuttle P/L integration docs) plus 15 years of different incarnations of space station various levels documents and the Russian Mir, Soyuz, etc., and various DoD and commercial program over my career in and out of NASA.

[RoadTest]

Let private enterprise do the job. It's already making a name for itself in near space.

[KevinDavis]

[SunkenCiv]

re: Len Fisk

Bio:
http://www.michiganaero.com/employees/lfisk.shtml

Observations support new model of sun's magnetic field developed by U-M space scientist
By Nancy Ross-Flanigan
News and Information Services
The University Record, November 12, 1997
http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9798/Nov12_97/sun.htm

"Evidence is mounting that the sun's magnetic field looks more like a wild cyclone than a tidy lawn sprinkler-the image scientists had accepted for almost 40 years. The cyclone-like shape comes from a mathematical model first proposed last year by U-M space scientist Len Fisk."