NASA and the Private Sector - Page 199

The U.S. Federal Court of Claims on Wednesday released a redacted version of the lawsuit by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin against NASA over the lucrative lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this year.

“Historically a staunch advocate for prioritizing safety, NASA inexplicably disregarded key flight safety requirements for only SpaceX, in order to select and make award to a SpaceX proposal that assessed as tremendously high risk and immensely complex, even before the waiver of safety requirements,” Blue Origin said in the lawsuit filed in August.

Blue Origin’s complaint came after the U.S. Government Accountability Office denied the company’s protest, upholding NASA’s decision.

The congressional watchdog’s ruling backed the space agency’s surprise announcement in April that NASA awarded SpaceX with a lunar lander contract worth about $2.9 billion. SpaceX was competing with Blue Origin and Dynetics for what was expected to be two contracts, before NASA awarded only a single contract due to a lower-than-expected allocation for the program from Congress.

On September 23 2021 01:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

You'll have to explain to me the blatant political move. I don't understand. And that music when the cupola opened. Legendary.

Several days after Boeing discovered the latest problem with its Starliner spacecraft, it removed the capsule from the rocket and returned it to the factory where engineers have been playing detective, trying to figure out what went wrong.

But now, some two months after it first discovered an issue with some of the valves in the spacecraft’s service module, the company still doesn’t know with 100 percent certainty what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open, the latest embarrassment for a program that has suffered a series of blunders. And it’s unclear when the company may attempt to launch it again.

Kathy Lueders, who runs one of NASA’s human exploration mission directorates, said this week that the company might even have to swap out the spacecraft’s service module for a new one, which would mark a significant change. As for whether Boeing would be able to attempt another launch this year, she said, “My gut is it would probably more likely be next year.”

Boeing has said little publicly about the spacecraft since it was removed from the rocket. It would not make executives available to The Washington Post for this story and responded to several questions with an emailed statement. That statement said the company “continues to work several troubleshooting efforts in parallel” and that “progress is being made to eliminate potential causes.” The testing “is taking place both on the vehicle and in offline labs.”

It also noted that Boeing would set a new launch date after its investigation was complete, saying “root cause analysis and corrective action plan help us define the appropriate path back to the launchpad.”

But an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the company is nearing some final decision points in the probe and hopes to have a path forward soon.

The issue came up as an issue of concern at NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting on Thursday.

“We got very close to launch without having identified the valve problem,” said George Nield, a panel member who previously oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration’s office of commercial space transportation. “Are there any changes to hardware inspection, testing, vehicle processing or checkout that would minimize the chances of that happening in the future?”

He also said there “were some rather significant differences in how several safety issues were assessed between NASA and Boeing” during the flight readiness reviews.

NASA, which in 2014 awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to develop the capsule under the “commercial crew program,” continues to stand by Boeing. Lueders said “the team is making great progress on further troubleshooting. And I absolutely know we’re going to fix this problem before we fly.”

Boeing’s woes are compounded by the fact that the scrubbed launch was its second attempt to send the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, without any astronauts on board, in a test flight designed to prove to NASA it could fly safely. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the other company in NASA’s commercial crew program, has flown three human spaceflight missions for NASA since last year and has another scheduled for next month. It bid less for the work and was awarded a contract worth $2.6 billion.

Last week, it also completed the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4, where a crew of four spent three days in space. That flight was not part of the commercial crew program and did not involve NASA personnel.

Boeing’s first flight attempt, in December 2019, suffered a series of problems due to software and communications issues that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station and forcing controllers to shoot software fixes to the capsule in midflight. On that mission, the capsule’s software thought it was 11 hours later in the mission than it was. Another issue, solved on the fly, could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule upon separation. Boeing decided to redo the test flight before attempting a launch with astronauts on board, a decision that cost the company $410 million.

It took Boeing some 18 months to fix those problems and get the capsule back on the launchpad. Leading up to the launch, John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president, said this summer that he knew how high the stakes were this time. “It is of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,” he said.

It didn’t.

Instead of launching on Aug. 3, the company wrestled with the stuck valves, at first expressing hope its engineers, working around-the-clock, could fix them on the launchpad and proceed with the launch. “Cautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,” Vollmer said three days after engineers discovered the issue.

After days of trying, Boeing could not fix the problem on the pad and decided to “destack” the vehicle, by taking the capsule off the rocket and rolling it back to the factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

At the time, Vollmer said, “We’re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window. The launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety,” he said.

Boeing and NASA had been exploring whether the humid Florida air, or a rainstorm just before the first launch date attempt may have mixed water with the propellant’s oxidizer. The interaction may have caused nitric acid to form, corroding the valves and causing them to stick.

“So that is primarily what we’re looking at now as the most likely cause of the issue,” Vollmer said in August.

The company has not put out any more updates on the cause of the problem since then.

Jeff Bezos has called Blue Origin his life’s most important work – and the hours he is devoting to the space company are growing accordingly.

Historically, Bezos had dedicated Wednesday afternoons to either updates and discussions at Blue Origin, people familiar with the situation told CNBC – meetings which were in person before the Covid pandemic, and have been by phone since. However, within the past month he added Tuesday afternoons as well, those people said.

While Bezos’ increased engagement with the company has been previously reported, just how much he’s involved with Blue Origin has not. As one of the richest people in the world, and still involved at Amazon as the company’s executive chairman, demands on Bezos’ time are high, so spending twice as much time with his space company represents a significant added commitment.

Blue Origin and Bezos did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

His doubled effort comes at a critical moment in Blue Origin’s history: The company is locked in a fierce court battle over NASA’s award of a multi-billion dollar lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a key customer of its BE-4 rocket engines is becoming increasingly vocal after years of delay, Blue Origin’s first orbital rocket is similarly years behind schedule, and its suborbital space research and tourism business is now underway in earnest.

Blue Origin’s technology development is also facing a new obstacle in the form of departing top talent, as CNBC reported in August. Disagreements with decisions made by Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith was the most common reason for why senior leaders and engineers are leaving, people familiar told CNBC. Smith is a former Honeywell executive, who Bezos hired to run the company in 2017.

The added time at Blue Origin partially represents a renewed focus for Bezos. For example, one person told CNBC that he used to hold an annual, company-wide question and answer session with employees – but didn’t in 2020, and has yet to this year.

It’s unclear whether Bezos’ is also investing more heavily in Blue Origin. In 2017, he said he was selling $1 billion a year of his Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin’s development, but recently Bezos has increased those stake sales without indicating whether all of those funds are going to the space company.

Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in July, is also paying attention to how the two companies he founded might interact. Blue Origin senior leadership has held regular meetings about winning the contracts to launch Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet satellites, people familiar told CNBC. But, after United Launch Alliance – the rocket-building joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin – won the first Amazon launch deal earlier this year, Bezos has begun sitting in on Blue Origin’s Kuiper meetings, those people said.

Amazon, when it announced the ULA nine-launch contract in April, emphasized that multiple launch partners will be required to launch the 3,235 Kuiper satellites. That leaves the door open for Blue Origin to grab the next one – this time, perhaps, with the help of the man who knows Amazon better than anyone else on the planet.

Backed by the world’s richest man, Blue Origin indicated in its protest that the $5.9 billion price — nearly double SpaceX’s proposal — was partially based on an assumption that NASA would have more than enough money from Congress to pay for the proposal, even as Congress had been indicating a month before Blue Origin submitted its proposal last December that it wouldn’t give NASA all the funding it said it needed. In NASA’s response, the attorneys said companies were instructed to submit their best proposal first. They pointed to seven instances where NASA told bidders its award decision, and whether to pick one or two companies was based on how much funding it’d end up getting from Congress.

But Blue Origin argued that NASA should’ve canceled or changed the terms of the program when Congress voted to give the agency only a quarter of what it requested. Blue Origin has also argued that it was unfair of NASA to only invite SpaceX to tweak parts of its proposal after selecting it for a potential award, one of many claims that NASA attacked over hundreds of pages of legal rebuttals.

Overall, NASA effectively called BS on that argument, saying “Blue Origin made a bet and it lost.”

Blue Origin “made an assumption about the Agency’s HLS budget, built its proposal with this figure in mind, and also separately made a calculated bet that if NASA could not afford Blue Origin’s initially-proposed price, the Agency would select Blue Origin for award and engage in post-selection negotiations to allow Blue Origin to lower its price. All of these assumptions were incorrect,” the four NASA attorneys wrote in the so-called Agency Report, dated May 26th. “Realizing now that it gambled and lost, Blue Origin seeks to use GAO’s procurement oversight function to improperly compel NASA to suffer the consequences of Blue Origin’s ill-conceived choices.”

The company disagrees with NASA’s assessment. “I wouldn’t say that we didn’t offer our best offer when we put in our proposal ... I think we did give a great offer,” Megan Mitchell, Blue Origin’s vice president of government relations, told The Verge in an interview. “I’m not going to comment on NASA characterizing it as gambling — we disagree with that.”

The lunar lander program is the centerpiece of NASA’s efforts to get humans on the Moon under a speedy 2024 timeline, set two years ago by the Trump administration. SpaceX, the sole awardee of the Moonshot phase of the program, will carry out two core missions: a demonstration mission to the Moon’s surface without any astronauts and a subsequent mission with astronauts. Blue Origin’s National Team and defense contractor Dynetics were the two bidders with lunar lander proposals that lost to SpaceX.

Blue Origin executives may have thought that the negotiation tactic would work because it had in the past. In April 2020, a year before SpaceX’s $2.9 billion award was made, all three bidders were awarded some NASA development funding in an initial phase of the program intended to help the companies build up their respective lunar landers. SpaceX got $135 million, Dynetics got $253 million, and Blue Origin’s National Team got $579 million.

Blue Origin had initially proposed roughly $879 million for those development contracts when proposals for the award were due in November 2019, NASA filings indicate. Blue Origin offered a roughly $300 million discount and dropped the price by about 35 percent, to $579 million, after NASA requested meetings to negotiate. The agency attorneys said the outcome of these discussions, where Blue Origin ended up winning the biggest chunk of funding, inspired Blue Origin’s “gamble” with the subsequent competition, where it pitched its Blue Moon lander for $5.9 billion. “But NASA had no obligation to make this request” for a negotiation that time around, they wrote.

“This time, the bet simply did not work out in Blue Origin’s favor.”

Sherwood’s declaration from April was one of several attempts to show that NASA was prejudiced in favor of SpaceX and acted unfairly against Blue Origin. But NASA said “a vague commitment to a sizeable, non-specific discount is not enough to demonstrate prejudice.” Months later, and just four days before the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled on Blue Origin’s protest, Bezos himself stepped in and got specific in an unusual open letter to NASA administrator Bill Nelson. Bezos said he would give the agency a $2 billion discount on Blue Origin’s proposal.

But it wasn’t enough to change minds at NASA. The GAO ultimately sided with the agency, saying that showing examples of prejudice “is an essential element of any viable protest,” and that Blue Origin failed to do so. As for Blue Origin’s argument that NASA’s discussions with SpaceX were unfair, since Blue Origin didn’t get the same chance to talk, the GAO brushed it off, saying agency officials have “broad discretion” to meet when and with whom they please under the type of contracting rules involved. “An agency’s decision not to initiate discussions is a matter we generally will not review,” GAO attorney Thomas Armstrong said in a ruling.

Virgin Galactic today announced that it is cleared to fly FAA-licenced spaceflights following the conclusion of an FAA inquiry that focused on air traffic control clearance and real-time mission notification related to the Unity 22 flight in July.

The FAA today advised Virgin Galactic that the corrective actions proposed by the Company have been accepted and conclude the FAA inquiry, which began August 11, 2021. They include:

• Updated calculations to expand the protected airspace for future flights. Designating a larger area will ensure that Virgin Galactic has ample protected airspace for a variety of possible flight trajectories during spaceflight missions.
  
  
• Additional steps into the Company’s flight procedures to ensure real-time mission notifications to FAA Air Traffic Control.
  

Michael Colglazier, Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Galactic, said: “Our entire approach to spaceflight is guided by a fundamental commitment to safety at every level, including our spaceflight system and our test flight program. We appreciate the FAA’s thorough review of this inquiry. Our test flight program is specifically designed to continually improve our processes and procedures. The updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience.”

Virgin Galactic continues to focus on its pre-flight readiness for Unity 23. For the latest updates regarding flight timing, please view the Company’s statement on September 10, 2021.

We are a group of 21 former and current employees of Blue Origin. Many of us have spent our careers dreaming of helping to launch a crewed rocket into space and seeing it safely touch back down on Earth. But when Jeff Bezos flew to space this July, we did not share his elation. Instead, many of us watched with an overwhelming sense of unease. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch at all.

Blue Origin’s mission statement features prominently on its website, and it’s a lofty one: “enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth.” All of us joined Blue Origin eager to innovate and to open access to space for the benefit of humanity. We believe exploring the possibilities for human civilization beyond Earth is a necessity. But if this company’s culture and work environment are a template for the future Jeff Bezos envisions, we are headed in a direction that reflects the worst of the world we live in now, and sorely needs to change.

Blue Origin currently has more than 3,600 employees spanning six states and several countries. However, in the company Bezos has created, the workforce dedicated to establishing this future “for all” is mostly male and overwhelmingly white. One-hundred percent of the senior technical and program leaders are men.

Workforce gender gaps are common in the space industry, but at Blue Origin they also manifest in a particular brand of sexism. Numerous senior leaders have been known to be consistently inappropriate with women. One senior executive in CEO Bob Smith’s loyal inner circle was reported multiple times to Human Resources for sexual harassment. Even so, Smith personally made him a member of the hiring committee for filling a senior HR role in 2019.

Another former executive frequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them “baby girl,” “baby doll,” or “sweetheart” and inquiring about their dating lives. His inappropriate behavior was so well known that some women at the company took to warning new female hires to stay away from him, all while he was in charge of recruiting employees. It appeared to many of us that he was protected by his close personal relationship with Bezos—it took him physically groping a female subordinate for him to finally be let go.

Additionally, a former NASA astronaut and Blue Origin senior leader once instructed a group of women with whom he was collaborating: “You should ask my opinion because I am a man.” We found many company leaders to be unapproachable and showing clear bias against women. Concerns related to flying New Shepard were consistently shut down, and women were demeaned for raising them. When one man was let go for poor performance, he was allowed to leave with dignity, even a going-away party. Yet when a woman leader who had significantly improved her department’s performance was let go, she was ordered to leave immediately, with security hovering until she exited the building five minutes later.

What are the blind spots of an organization whose stated mission is to enable humanity’s better future, yet is rife with sexism? Blue Origin's flaws extend further, unfortunately. The company proclaims it will build a better world because we’re well on our way to ruining this one, yet none of us has seen Blue Origin establish any concrete plans to become carbon neutral or significantly reduce its large environmental footprint.

Jeff Bezos has made splashy announcements and donations to climate justice groups, but “benefiting Earth” starts in one’s own backyard. In our experience, environmental concerns have never been a priority at Blue Origin. Time and again we saw new capabilities added to the Kent factory, but not until the machinery showed up did the company begin to consider the environmental impact, including whether a permit was needed to manage the waste products.

For years employees have raised environmental concerns at company town halls, but these have been largely left unaddressed. The company headquarters that opened in 2020 is not a LEED-certified building and was built on wetlands that were drained for construction. Eventually the surrounding roads had to be elevated to mitigate the severe flooding that ensued. We did not see sustainability, climate change, or climate justice influencing Blue Origin’s decision-making process or company culture.

Safety concerns are another key piece of the essay, which alleges that “some of the engineers who ensure the very safety of the rockets” were either forced out or paid off after internally voicing criticisms.

The essay said that last year, Blue Origin leadership showed “increasing impatience” with the low flight rate of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, saying the company’s team needed to jump from “a few flights per year … to more than 40.”

“When Jeff Bezos flew to space this July, we did not share his elation. Instead, many of us watched with an overwhelming sense of unease. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch at all,” the essay said. “Competing with other billionaires—and ‘making progress for Jeff’— seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.”

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement to CNBC on Thursday that it is reviewing the safety concerns raised within the essay.

“The FAA takes every safety allegation seriously,” the regulator said in a statement.

The essay contends that environmental concerns were an afterthought at the company, with impacts on local ecology and required permits considered after “the machinery showed up” at Blue Origin’s factory in Kent, Washington.

Additionally, Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent – which opened last year – is not a LEED-certified building, according to the essay, claiming that it “was built on wetlands that were drained for construction.”

The statement to CNBC from Blue Origin’s Mills did not respond to these other issues.