Day 4,870 on Mars, and Opportunity is still rolling....

[Racer X]

Many of the companies that were suppliers and subcontractors to NASA back in the day no longer have the expertise or talent to build those parts to the original specs. Tooling scrapped, talent retired, EPA preventing those processes, etc. And I know of a number of instances where the supplier said they refused to work on a NASA project again.

Lots of times it is a $150 part and 5 grand for the paperwork. Many no longer want to deal with the assinine process.

The mars probe that landed in '97 was launched with a thruster built in the early '70s. It was sitting unused in a cardboard box, under the workbench in an engineer's garage. They brought it in to work, cleaned it off, and it worked fine. Same for a '70s prototype pulsed plasma thruster, and an ion thruster.

Private industry doesn't make money on this one off crap. Those that participated did it for the publicity.

[sekker]

Racer X wrote:
Many of the companies that were suppliers and subcontractors to NASA back in the day no longer have the expertise or talent to build those parts to the original specs. Tooling scrapped, talent retired, EPA preventing those processes, etc. And I know of a number of instances where the supplier said they refused to work on a NASA project again.

Lots of times it is a $150 part and 5 grand for the paperwork. Many no longer want to deal with the assinine process.

The mars probe that landed in '97 was launched with a thruster built in the early '70s. It was sitting unused in a cardboard box, under the workbench in an engineer's garage. They brought it in to work, cleaned it off, and it worked fine. Same for a '70s prototype pulsed plasma thruster, and an ion thruster.

Private industry doesn't make money on this one off crap. Those that participated did it for the publicity.

Very cool stories.

[p8712]

Racer X wrote:
Many of the companies that were suppliers and subcontractors to NASA back in the day no longer have the expertise or talent to build those parts to the original specs. Tooling scrapped, talent retired, EPA preventing those processes, etc. And I know of a number of instances where the supplier said they refused to work on a NASA project again.

Lots of times it is a $150 part and 5 grand for the paperwork. Many no longer want to deal with the assinine process.

The mars probe that landed in '97 was launched with a thruster built in the early '70s. It was sitting unused in a cardboard box, under the workbench in an engineer's garage. They brought it in to work, cleaned it off, and it worked fine. Same for a '70s prototype pulsed plasma thruster, and an ion thruster.

Private industry doesn't make money on this one off crap. Those that participated did it for the publicity.

Wow, interesting. I wish we had a small army of probes canvassing the solar system. Isn't there money in high volume?

[Paul F.]

Not when NASA requires a paperwork stack taller than the launch vehicle thats going to launch the probe... no, it's not worth it.
RacerX's stories aren't the only ones I've read like that.
Take a common bolt. The manufacturing print for a typical bolt would have a material callout, a heat treating callout, and maybe 10 dimensions for the various surfaces, angles, etc.
On a NASA print, there would be five pages of material specs, five pages of heat treating specs, and five pages of dimensions.
AND EVERY SINGLE SPEC, AND DIMENSION would require at least ten pages of documentation, in detail, signed and certified in every way, with test data from independant labs, and the certifications OF those labs, that the dimension was met.
A simple bolt could take several hundred pages of documentation. Hundreds of hours in testing, getting certification papers for every supplier, for every test, every calibration of every tool used...
And in the end, the exact same bolt could have been purchased off the shelf for $5.

By the end of the process, the bolt manufacturer iften says, "I am NEVER doing this again!"

[cbelt3]

I'll agree with Racer X. The paperwork is insane.

I worked on a satellite system for the SDI project. We delivered a space qualified optical component that could be lifted by four reasonably fit people. The paperwork that had to ACCOMPANY the delivery weighed 3,000 lbs.

[Racer X]

And those tiny bolts all get delivered in their own little baggy, with individual, unique numbers referencing the paperwork file that certifies each little bolt. I kid you not. Utter insanity.

If the craft carries humans? Orders of magnitude worse.

[DP]

I can understand making sure even a simple bolt will do the job it's meant to do when you have the rigors of space travel to account for, and especially when you're transporting humans in said spacecraft. That said, since when, in recent history, has any department of government ever operated within it's budget? Paperwork is a large part of it.

[sekker]

SpaceX believes that its main advantage is avoiding this kind of massive paperwork.

[max]

That is pretty much it.
We have done work that went to NASA and we have done work that went to the military.
But we will not do any work directly for the government. We are happy to produce items that are supplied to it by someone else.....

[Racer X]

We ended up with a 55 gallon barrel of flechettes at work with the wrong paperwork. They told us to scrap them, and the supplier sent a new barrel with the right paperwork. I got to bring home a 5 gallon bucket of them. Now I have a LOT of really wicked shotgun shells.