OT - Yet another Bush Boondoggle
- From: theBZA <dewey3kNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 11 Nov 2007 12:59:59 GMT
And for David and Unlucky, yes, these are "actual facts."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/washington/11satellite.html
November 11, 2007
Failure to Launch
In Death of Spy Satellite Program, Lofty Plans and Unrealistic Bids
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
By May 2002, the government?s effort to build a technologically
audacious new generation of spy satellites was foundering.
The contractor building the satellites, Boeing, was still giving
Washington reassuring progress reports. But the program was threatening
to outstrip its $5 billion budget, and pivotal parts of the design
seemed increasingly unworkable. Peter B. Teets, the new head of the
nation?s spy satellite agency, appointed a panel of experts to examine
the secret project, telling them, according to one member, ?Find out
what?s going on, find the terrible truth I suspect is out there.?
The panel reported that the project, called Future Imagery Architecture,
was far behind schedule and would most likely cost $2 billion to $3
billion more than planned, according to records from the satellite
agency, the National Reconnaissance Office.
Even so, the experts recommended pressing on. Just months after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and with the new satellites promising
improved, more frequent images of foreign threats like terrorist
training camps, nuclear weapons plants and enemy military maneuvers,
they advised Mr. Teets to seek an infusion of $700 million.
It took two more years, several more review panels and billions more
dollars before the government finally killed the project ? perhaps the
most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of
American spy satellite projects. The story behind that failure has
remained largely hidden, like much of the workings of the nation?s
intelligence establishment.
But an investigation by The New York Times found that the collapse of
the project, at a loss of at least $4 billion, was all but inevitable ?
the result of a troubled partnership between a government seeking to
maintain the supremacy of its intelligence technology, but on a
constrained budget, and a contractor all too willing to make promises it
ultimately could not keep.
?The train wreck was predetermined on Day 1,? said A. Thomas Young, a
former aerospace executive who led a panel that examined the project.
The Future Imagery project is one of several satellite programs to break
down in recent years, leaving the United States with outdated imaging
technology. But perhaps more striking is that the multiple failures that
led to the program?s demise reveal weaknesses in the government?s
ability to manage complex contracts at a time when military and
intelligence contracting is soaring.
The Times?s examination found that the satellite agency put the Future
Imagery contract out for bid in 1998 despite an internal assessment that
questioned whether its lofty technological goals were attainable given
the tight budget and schedule.
Boeing had never built the kind of spy satellites the government was
seeking. Yet when Boeing said it could live within the stringent
spending caps imposed by Congress and the satellite agency, the
government accepted the company?s optimistic projections, a Panglossian
compact that set the stage for many of the travails that followed.
Despite its relative inexperience, Boeing was given responsibility for
monitoring its own work, under a new government policy of shifting
control of big military projects to contractors. At the same time, the
satellite agency, hobbled by budget cuts and the loss of seasoned staff
members, lacked the expertise to make sound engineering evaluations of
its own.
The satellites were loaded with intelligence collection requirements, as
numerous intelligence and military services competed to influence their
design. Boeing?s initial design for the optical system that was the
heart of one of the two new satellite systems was so elaborate that
optical engineers working on the project said it could not be built.
Engineers constructing a radar-imaging unit at the core of the other
satellite could not initially produce the unusually strong radar signal
that was planned.
A torrent of defective parts, like gyroscopes and electric cables,
repeatedly stalled work. Even an elementary rule of spacecraft
construction ? never use tin because it deforms in space and can short-
circuit electronic components ? was violated by parts suppliers.
By the time the project, known by its initials, F.I.A., was killed in
September 2005 ? a year after the first satellite was originally to have
been delivered ? cost estimates ran as high as $18 billion.
?The F.I.A. contract was technically flawed and unexecutable the day it
was signed,? said Robert J. Hermann, who ran the National Reconnaissance
Office from 1979 to 1981 and in 1996 led the panel that first
recommended creation of a new satellite system. ?Some top official
should have thrown his badge on the table and screamed, ?We can?t do
this system at this price.? No one did.?
Boeing?s point man on the job was Ed Nowinski, an engineer who had
become a top government spy satellite expert during 28 years at the
Central Intelligence Agency. ?It was a perfect storm,? Mr. Nowinski said
ruefully. But he acknowledged that Boeing frequently provided the
government with positive reports on the troubled project.
?Look, we did report problems,? Mr. Nowinski said, ?but it was certainly
in my best interests to be very optimistic about what we could do.?
Boeing, which fired Mr. Nowinski as the project fell apart, declined to
comment. A spokeswoman, Diana Ball, said Boeing could not discuss
classified programs.
The Times?s examination was based on interviews with more than 30
government and industry officials involved with the project, many
discussing it publicly for the first time. Some agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that they not be identified because many aspects of the
project remained classified. They said they were willing to talk because
they hoped an airing of its history would help prevent similar
misadventures in the future.
Asked about the recent problems with F.I.A. and other satellite
programs, Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri and vice
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said, ?It?s fair to say we have
lost double-digit billions on satellite programs that weren?t
effectively managed by the government.?
This year, a stealth satellite program was killed by Mike McConnell, the
director of national intelligence. Also, a new generation of infrared
satellites for detecting missile launches has barely survived cost
overruns and technical setbacks.
Taken together, these episodes represent a stark reversal for a
satellite program born in the most perilous years of the cold war, when
American technology answered the call of national defense by taking
spying into space.
Today, space technology has lost its luster for young engineers, who are
drawn increasingly to companies like Google and Apple. Defense experts
say the entire acquisition system for space-based imagery technologies
is in danger of breaking down. And the nation, at least for now, has
been left without advanced new systems to replace a dwindling number of
reconnaissance satellites first designed in the 1970s and updated in the
1990s.
Even though reconnaissance satellites are less useful in spying on
terrorist groups than on more traditional threats like foreign military
forces, they remain integral to intelligence and military operations,
including monitoring nuclear and missile installations in Iran and North
Korea. They are also critical to Pentagon mapmaking and the targeting of
precision-guided weapons like cruise missiles.
?There is not a gap in the coverage we are providing, but our
constellation is fragile,? said Alden V. Munson Jr., deputy director of
national intelligence for acquisition.
Since the F.I.A. debacle, the National Reconnaissance Office has banned
Boeing from bidding on new spy satellite contracts. But all the news was
not bad for Boeing. The company received a $430 million kill fee for the
optical satellite system. And, despite the ban, the radar-imaging
satellite remained in Boeing?s hands.
Response to Soviet Threat
The first generation of photo reconnaissance satellites was developed in
the waning months of the Eisenhower administration, in a frantic effort
to measure the Soviet threat.
The satellite system, code-named Corona, was the product of an inspired
partnership of government, science and industry. The Central
Intelligence Agency set broad goals and then let the Lockheed
Corporation, with help from the Air Force, figure out how to build the
satellites, get them into orbit and return the film canisters to earth
without burning up as they plunged through the atmosphere.
In the mid-1970s, the same partnership developed systems that
electronically captured and transmitted pictures moments after they were
recorded. These electro-optical satellites were among the first devices
to use the technology now common in digital cameras.
They were followed in the 1980s by radar-imaging satellites, which can
see though clouds and operate in darkness, bouncing radar signals off
the earth to plot terrain and paint images of objects on the ground.
By the 1990s, though, the threats to national security ? and the world
of satellite intelligence ? were undergoing convulsive change.
Familiar targets like Soviet air bases and missile factories were being
supplanted by the more varied and elusive threats of the post-cold-war
world. At the same time, the armed services, eager for increased
tactical intelligence after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, were demanding
satellites that could stream battlefield data instantly to commanders
around the globe.
In 1996, a commission created by the director of central intelligence
recommended building a fleet of light, small, relatively inexpensive
satellites that, according to a declassified version of the panel?s
report, could together be at least as effective as the Lockheed
behemoths then in orbit. (They cost about $1 billion apiece, weighed
30,000 pounds and were the size of a bus.)
Having more satellites in orbit, the theory went, would increase
?revisit time,? the number of times a day satellites pass above target
sites. That would help combat increasing efforts to camouflage such
sites.
Lighter satellites would require cheaper and less powerful rockets than
the Titan IV?s then in use, which could cost $450 million per launching.
The panel also envisioned saving money and time by taking advantage of
technologies and parts developed by commercial satellite companies.
But as the concept took shape, several powerful forces were bearing
down, turning the satellite procurement system to quicksand, military
experts said.
One was the new policy, cousin to the Clinton administration?s effort to
downsize government, of transferring control of big military projects to
contractors, on the theory that they could best manage engineering work
and control costs.
Another factor was a decline of American expertise in systems
engineering, the science and art of managing complex engineering
projects to weigh risks, gauge feasibility, test components and ensure
that the pieces come together smoothly.
Finally, troubled by the free-spending habits of the satellite agency,
Congress demanded rigid spending guidelines for the satellite project.
The first concerns about the project?s formula ? high-concept technology
on a fast schedule with a tightly managed budget ? came from the
satellite agency itself.
In early 1997, as the project began to move from conceptual thinking to
concrete planning, the agency?s acquisition board, which reviewed
programs at an early stage, questioned the feasibility of the new
approach, given the expected $5 billion budget cap for its first five
years. As Dennis D. Fitzgerald, the agency?s principal deputy director
from August 2001 until last April, recalled, the board?s review ?had the
most reds and yellows? ? agency parlance for cautionary notes ? he had
ever seen.
Even so, in January 1997, the agency invited military companies to a
classified briefing about the project now called Future Imagery
Architecture.
A Company Trying to Diversify
Albert D. Wheelon, who founded the Directorate of Science and Technology
at the C.I.A. in 1963 and played a leading role in the early development
of spy satellites, said in an interview, ?Writing winning proposals is
different from building winning hardware.?
That could be an apt epitaph for Boeing?s handling of F.I.A.
Boeing, famous for making airplanes, had never built an electro-optical
or radar-imaging spy satellite. But with the European Airbus consortium
threatening its commercial airliner business, the company was trying to
diversify.
By contrast, the other invited bidder, Lockheed, saw the contract almost
as an entitlement, military and government officials said.
Lockheed all but owned the imagery-satellite franchise. Over four
decades, as the company built successive generations of satellites, the
government had, in effect, invested more than $30 billion in its
operations. What is more, Lockheed had recently acquired the traditional
builder of radar-imagining satellites, Martin Marietta (and with it a
new name, Lockheed Martin).
?Lockheed believed it had this program in the bag,? said Leslie Lewis, a
military analyst who reviewed the project for a Rand Corporation study.
As Boeing mobilized, Ed Nowinski seemed the perfect man to pursue the
prize.
Mr. Nowinski, 63, was familiar with the concept of smaller satellites
from his years at the C.I.A. An electrical engineer, he had joined the
agency in 1967 and worked on the first electro-optical systems.
Eventually, he became head of the agency?s satellite development
programs and of imagery operations at the National Reconnaissance Office
and received several medals for distinguished service.
Former co-workers describe Mr. Nowinski as a fine engineer and an easy
colleague, an unassuming man who took pride in working on secret
projects that enhanced American security. They also said he could be
insufficiently demanding, a potential weakness for someone running a
multibillion-dollar project. Mr. Nowinski did not contest the
description in an interview.
His government career had ended abruptly in October 1995, when the
C.I.A. fired him for using a government car for personal travel. Mr.
Nowinski said he was trying to make the most efficient use of his time
when he was swamped with work and had to travel frequently between his
home and several government offices in the Washington area.
In 1998, a former C.I.A. colleague, Robert J. Kohler, invited Mr.
Nowinski to help Boeing put together its satellite proposal. He was soon
living in a rented apartment near the Boeing defense systems offices in
Seal Beach, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, working 12 hours a day, 7
days a week on Team 377, the company?s secret planning group.
?I never imagined they would recompete the business,? Mr. Nowinski said.
?When Lockheed didn?t call, Bob and I figured we?d go with the
underdog.?
Mr. Kohler recalled that Team 377 requested $100 million just to draft
the proposal; he said Harry Stonecipher, Boeing?s president at the time,
gave his approval the next day. Before long, more than 300 engineers and
other specialists were at work in Seal Beach.
If they looked like underdogs, they had history on their side. Mr.
Fitzgerald, the reconnaissance office?s former deputy director, said the
government had traditionally found it hard to resist new bidders on
space programs, with their allure of new ideas and lower costs. Indeed,
of 18 government space programs re-opened for competitive bidding
between 1977 and 2002, all but two ended up changing hands, he said.
Mr. Fitzgerald explained the dynamic this way: ?You as the incumbent are
probably going to write a realistic proposal because you know what?s
involved and propose pretty much what you?ve been doing, since it has
been successful. Your competitor, out of ignorance or guile, is going to
write probably a more imaginative, creative proposal for which there is
almost no backing.?
He added, ?It?s a little like a divorce, and running off with another
woman.?
The leaders of Team 377 realized that the best hope of impressing the
satellite agency was to design a system that was cheaper and better ?
more technologically daring ? than anything Lockheed might propose.
Having worked closely with Lockheed while at the C.I.A., Mr. Kohler
said: ?I knew what Lockheed Martin was going to do. We would do things
180 degrees differently.?
Multiple Design Challenges
Designing and building a precision-pointing, high-resolution electro-
optical satellite ? roughly the equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope
? requires melding many engineering disciplines.
The satellite must withstand the explosive force of being rocketed into
orbit, then operate flawlessly for years in the unforgiving environment
of space.
To position itself for picture taking, it requires delicately tuned
attitude control and propulsion systems.
The electro-optical system presented an especially formidable challenge.
The large, heavy satellites of the past had been effective at limiting
the movement and vibrations that might mar picture taking, just as a
tripod can eliminate blurred images with hand-held cameras.
?If you vibrate, you?re looking at Jupiter,? one satellite expert said.
Boeing, in effect, sought to replace the tripod with a system that would
automatically adjust the image to compensate for any vibration, much as
a camcorder does, but on a far grander, more exacting scale.
The team also wanted an optical system that could take wide-angle
images, showing large areas on the ground, as well as tightly focused,
detailed pictures of small objects. The goal, to use an oversimplified
analogy, was a revolutionary zoom lens.
As for the radar-imaging satellite, Boeing designed a relatively simple
system with one major exception: to improve image quality, it would
produce a far stronger radar signal than any previous satellite had.
Pulling off such complex new technology typically requires extensive
testing and work on multiple solutions to especially difficult problems.
There is no margin for error ? once in orbit, a broken satellite cannot
be easily fixed.
Yet the budget for F.I.A. was limited and not very elastic, unlike those
for many earlier projects.
?Some programs are slightly underfunded, some are significantly
underfunded,? said Mr. Young, chairman of one of the panels that
examined the project and a former Martin Marietta executive. ?F.I.A. was
grossly underfunded.?
Congress had set a cap of $5 billion for the first five years, with
spending limited to $1 billion a year. (It also budgeted $5 billion more
for the life of the project, including multiple satellites.) While the
prime contractor could seek additional financing for unanticipated
costs, the contract would discourage overruns or delays with financial
penalties.
Also, the satellite agency, under pressure from Congress to control
costs, would no longer have a reserve fund. ?From 1961 to 1995, the
N.R.O. had never delivered a program that I?m aware of on cost or on
schedule,? Mr. Fitzgerald said, adding, ?But we always had this margin
that would allow us to buy our way out of problems.?
To underscore the importance of the budget cap, the agency changed its
system for scoring contract bids. Previously, price had rarely accounted
for more than 25 percent of a company?s score. Now it would account for
50 percent.
As Boeing was putting the finishing touches on its proposal, Mr. Kohler
said he warned the company that a $5 billion bid was unrealistic.
?I did a simple calculation,? he recalled. ?I took what it had cost to
build a comparably complex system before, figured in inflation, and
realized the project would cost $4 billion more than the government had
planned and Boeing was proposing.
?I said, ??We can?t submit that bid.??
Mr. Nowinski rejects the idea that the bid was off base. ?We were very
meticulous in putting together the proposal,? he said. Still, he
acknowledged, ?It?s true there was little if any margin to work with.?
Mr. Fitzgerald compared the bidding to liar?s poker, a game based on the
serial numbers on dollar bills that relies heavily on bluffing and
gamesmanship.
?There?s a lot of money on the table, and no wants to say that they
can?t do it,? he said. The ethic, he added, is ?win the program at any
cost and sort it out later. Correct the government?s sins and my sins
with overruns.?
This time around, that would prove impossible.
Winning Bid Is Announced
The National Reconnaissance Office announced its decision on Sept. 3,
1999, after studying the bids for nearly a year. The top brass at Seal
Beach gathered in shirt sleeves at 9 a.m. in the office of Roger
Roberts, head of Boeing?s satellite operations. Over the speakerphone,
an agency official read a brief statement awarding both satellites to
Boeing.
?The room was momentarily silent,? Mr. Nowinski recalled. ?We hadn?t
really expected to win the whole project. We figured we?d be lucky to
get the radar system. I was stunned.?
They threw open the door and informed a crowd of colleagues waiting in
the outer office. The room erupted in cheers.
The final decision had been made by Keith R. Hall, who became the
satellite agency?s director in 1997 after serving as a senior
intelligence official and deputy staff director of the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Hall, now a vice president of the consulting firm Booz Allen
Hamilton, recalled in an interview that though both bids claimed to fall
within the spending cap, an agency evaluation team had calculated that
only Boeing?s actually would. Its plan was also deemed the more
technologically innovative.
Even a former Lockheed Martin executive vice president, Albert E. Smith,
acknowledged that ?Boeing wrote a better, cheaper proposal than we did.?
The upshot, Mr. Hall said, was that there was really ?no choice in the
source selection.? He added that he considered the Boeing proposal
executable, if moderately risky.
The award announcement had barely been completed, though, when
dissenting grenades started landing at the satellite agency.
Lockheed Martin, infuriated by the decision, filed a protest, which
froze the project for several months as the agency reviewed its
decision.
Eventually, Lockheed Martin withdrew its protest. Dennis R. Boxx, the
company?s senior vice president for corporate communications, said he
could not comment on classified projects. But government and industry
officials said the company stood down after the agency awarded it a
consolation prize, a relatively small piece of the project.
Within a few months, two cost-estimating groups, one operated by the
Pentagon, the other by the office that coordinates work among
intelligence agencies, determined that the Boeing plan would bust the
budget caps.
By then, Mr. Hall said, it was too late to reopen the bidding.
Nor did the cheering last long at Seal Beach. As Boeing moved from
writing its proposal to building the hardware, assembling a work force
of thousands, outside engineers questioned the photo satellite?s
intricate optical system.
?There were a lot of bright young people involved in developing the
concept, but they hadn?t been involved in manufacturing sophisticated
optical systems,? said one military industry executive familiar with the
project. ?It soon became clear the system could not be built.?
The design was eventually supplanted by a more conventional approach,
partly to accommodate added intelligence collection requirements from
Washington, Mr. Nowinski said.
Expectations about relying on the commercial satellite industry for
parts and know-how proved wrong, since those companies curtailed
production and laid off experienced technicians after the dot-com
collapse.
Soon, defective parts began showing up in critical components, forcing
costly delays at Boeing and some subcontractors.
?The No. 1 problem that killed us on this project was substandard
parts,? Mr. Nowinski said.
One of the electro-optical satellite?s most important components ? a set
of oversize gyroscopes that help adjust the spacecraft?s attitude for
precision picture-taking ? was flawed, said engineers involved in the
project. The problem was traced to a subcontractor that had changed its
manufacturing process for a crucial part, inadvertently producing a
subtle but disabling alteration in the metallic structure that went
undetected until Boeing discovered it, three years into the project.
Several kinds of integrated circuits for the electro-optical satellite
also proved defective. Even rudimentary parts like electric cabling were
unfit for use, several engineers said. Customized wiring did not conform
to the orders and in some cases was contaminated by dirt.
As for the sister satellite, Mr. Nowinski said, ?We thought the radar
system would be a piece of cake.?
But the plans were impeded by unexpected difficulties in increasing the
strength of the radar signals that would be bounced off the earth. The
problem, among other things, involved a vacuum-tube device called a
traveling wave tube assembly. Perhaps most surprising was the appearance
of parts containing tin, forbidden because it tends to sprout tiny
irregularities, known as ?tin whiskers,? in space. One military industry
executive said he was astounded when, several years into the project, he
got a form letter from Boeing telling suppliers not to use tin.
?That told me there had been a total breakdown in discipline and systems
engineering on the project,? he said, ?and that the company was
operating on cruise control.?
Signs of a Project in Trouble
The tight schedule called for the radar-imaging satellite to be
delivered in 2004 and its sister spacecraft the next year. Three years
before that first deadline, government and industry officials say, it
was becoming clear that the project was in trouble.
As costs escalated, Boeing cut back on testing and efforts to work
several potential solutions to difficult technical problems. If a
component failed, Boeing, lacking a backup approach, had to return to
square one, forcing new delays.
Yet the company hesitated to report setbacks and ask for additional
financing.
?When you?ve got a flawed program, or a flawed contract, you really have
an obligation to go the customer and tell them,? Mr. Young said. ?Boeing
wasn?t doing that.?
The reason, according to an internal reconnaissance office post-mortem,
was the budget cap, and the steep financial penalties for exceeding it.
?The cost of an overrun was so ruinous that the strongest incentive it
provided to the contractor was to prove they were on cost,? the post-
mortem found.
It did not help that the government ordered two major and several minor
design changes that added $1 billion to cost projections. The changes,
government and industry officials said, were intended to give the
electro-optical satellite the flexibility to perform additional
functions.
It was against this backdrop that Mr. Teets, the satellite agency?s new
director, formed the review group in May 2002 that recommended pressing
on and seeking new financing.
The next year, the government ordered up another look at the project, as
part of a broader examination of failing military space programs. The
study, led by Mr. Young, reported that F.I.A. was ?significantly
underfunded and technically flawed? and ?was not executable.?
By this time, the government had approved an additional $3.6 billion.
Still, rather than recommending cancellation, the Young panel said the
program could be salvaged with even more financing and changes in the
program and schedule.
In an interview, Mr. Young said the panel genuinely thought the project
could be saved. Several members, though, said the group should have
called for ending the program but stopped short because of its powerful
supporters in Congress and the Bush administration. Among the most
influential was Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee, whose Southern California district
includes the Boeing complex where the satellites were being assembled.
The death sentence for F.I.A. was finally written in 2005. Another
review board pronounced the program deeply flawed and said propping it
up would require another $5 billion ? raising the ante to $18 billion ?
and five more years. And even with that life support, Mr. Fitzgerald
recalled, the panel was not confident that Boeing could come through.
That September, the director of national intelligence, John D.
Negroponte, killed the electro-optical program on the recommendation of
the reconnaissance office?s new director, Donald M. Kerr. Lockheed was
engaged to reopen its production line and build an updated model of its
old photo satellite.
Government officials say the delivery date for that model has slipped to
2009. Late last year, a Lockheed satellite carrying experimental imagery
equipment failed to communicate with ground controllers after reaching
orbit, rendering it useless.
Boeing calculated that its revenue losses from the cancellation would
total about $1.7 billion for 2005 and 2006, less than 2 percent of
forecast revenues. Having kept the radar-satellite contract, the company
is expected to deliver the first one in 2008 or early 2009, at least
four years behind the original schedule.
The Search for Lessons
The satellite agency and military experts are still sifting through the
wreckage, looking for lessons ? beyond the budget issues ? that would
prevent a similar meltdown in the future.
In an interview in September, Mr. Kerr, who last month became principal
deputy director of national intelligence, said a pivotal factor was
selecting a company with no experience building imagery spy satellites,
especially when contractors were being given greater responsibility for
monitoring their own work. Boeing, he said, was ?in a way exquisitely
unprepared to exercise judgment in certain areas because it wasn?t
within their own experience.?
The satellite office?s oversight is faulted, too. Jimmie D. Hill, a
former deputy director, said transferring management authority to
military contractors was a morale killer for officers who worked on Air
Force satellite projects, many of whom had been recruited to be midlevel
managers at the National Reconnaissance Office.
?Most of the best and the brightest young captains and majors said, ?To
hell with it, there?s nothing for me to do here, I?m going to go do
something that?s interesting,?? Mr. Hill said. ?And so you have a void
in capability right now.?
There is wide agreement among military experts that F.I.A. sunk under a
surfeit of data demands and technological risks.
?There?s a good rule on projects like this,? said Representative Heather
A. Wilson, a New Mexico Republican on the Intelligence Committee. ?Aim
for only one miracle per program.?
The government has taken remedial steps. While still at the satellite
agency, Mr. Kerr said he was working to attract and keep experienced
engineers and to improve cost-estimating and systems-engineering
expertise. At his invitation, Virginia Tech University is offering a
master?s program in engineering management at agency headquarters
outside Washington.
Mr. Munson, the deputy national intelligence director for acquisition,
said competitive bidding for space programs would be initiated only
among companies deemed qualified. And the intelligence office has formed
an independent cost-estimating group to review project proposals and set
budgets. ?We are not going to start programs we can?t afford,? he said.
Keith Hall, the man who chose Boeing to build F.I.A., said the cost caps
distorted the entire enterprise.
?If I had to do it over again, I should have decided at the time the
cost cap was levied that we would just keep building what we had been
building,? he said, referring to the Lockheed satellites. ?I shouldn?t
have allowed it to go forward.?
In the dying days of F.I.A., Boeing fired Ed Nowinski. He returned to
his retirement home in Florida, where he keeps a hand in the space
business as a consultant.
He blames himself for some of the tribulations.
?You know, I might have been exactly the wrong guy for this project,? he
said. ?After 25 to 30 years in the government, I think too much like a
government guy. I was too sympathetic to the government, tried too hard
to make their jobs easier.?
He also faults himself for failing to assemble a stronger team at
Boeing. ?I should have been more brutal with the government and with my
people,? he said.
Mr. Nowinski remains convinced that with adequate time and money, Boeing
could have built the electro-optical satellite. ?We had solved most of
the problems,? he said.
But, he added, ?When they say, ?We?re turning the lights out, the game
is over,? you might as well go home.?
--
If I were a cactus, I wouldn't need so much water.
.
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