NASA finds Supplier Lied

[Hans Tucker]

https://www.americaspace.com/2019/04/30/nasa-finds-supplier-lied-used-faulty-materials-in-700-million-loss-of-two-missions/?fbclid=IwAR00YiMw-F2r0qFOJvimn94Gw9M_VXr64fRm4p6H9var wgrxtqKtJJ-Brd4

[Stardrifter_WA]

That doesn't surprise me Hans. I am reminded by the John Glenn quote:

‘I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.’

It seems nothing has changed :sadeyes:

[LewisM]

I think Boeing and Lockheed Martin will find similar issues all too soon...(or already have)

[brian nordstrom]

:mad2: And all running for cover while looking for a ' Patsy ' .

Brian.

ps. just today Virgin dropped their order of 32 down to 23ish .

[Gary47]

Seems NASA doesn't learn from experience or want to.
Recall the Challenger? The supplier said "Don't Launch". NASA managers said"We can't afford not to launch".
We know what happened next. At the enquiry NASA managers desperately tried to hide the truth and blame the supplier.
Then Columbia. Similar scenario.
In this case the supplier has had to pay only a small fraction of the losses incurred despite pleading guilty, does that provoke any curiosity?

[billdan]

The same can be said for the Hubble Space Telescope, Perkin Elmer ground/polished the Primary Mirror to the wrong shape and this introduced spherical aberration.

In the subsequent enquiry, P.E was criticised for using the wrong Null testing instruments, NASA was also criticised for not doing any Q.A or testing of the mirror before launch.

The original quote from P.E was $400 Million (that won them the tender over the price Kodak quoted), this blew out to $4.7 Billion by launch time.

[Sunfish]

Reading Simon Winchester in the book ‘Exactly’ he describes how that happened. Seems , from the operator who entered the wrong data in the polishing to company heads, no one was brave enough to admit that the mirror was flawed, so they sent it anyway. Maybe they thought no one would notice until they had their money.