AFA National Symposium and
Annual Air Force Ball
November 19, 1999
Panel – Lt Gen Eugene L. Tattini, Commander,
Space and Missile Center;
Honorable Sheila E. Widnall, former Secretary of the
Air Force;
Mr. A. Thomas Young, former President, Martin
Marietta
National Symposium and Air Force Ball
November 19, 1999
“Challenges Facing the Space Industry”
General Shaud: Last year under the
leadership of Les Lyles, we had a great panel. It is a little changed in
format from what we had done here--with just presenter Q&A and so
forth--that we thought it would be a great idea to have a panel again
this year, and General Tattini and I have worked diligently to get all
this pasted together, and what we wanted to do was pick an issue that
would be challenging, and by God we found one, didn’t we, Gene? The
issue is “challenges facing the space industry.” Then we got into
the various commissions that were helping with launch assurance and
things like that. So that is what we are planning to present.
General Tattini: Thank you, General
Shaud. He does a marvelous job of this, doesn’t he? I have two vice
commanders right now and they are both here in the audience, so I hope
they take heed. General Ryan, General Myers, General Babbitt, General
Newton and to all of our distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I
am indeed fortunate, honored and privileged to introduce two of the most
accomplished people that I have ever had the privilege of associating
with and working with – Dr. Sheila Widnall, our former Secretary of
the Air Force, and Mr. Tom Young. They will share the stage and
participate today with you and then after their opening remarks, they
have generously consented to answer some questions on the topic and the
question that we have posed to them today. General Shaud is going to
officiate, moderate or referee the question and answer session as we go
through this, and I envision some fairly spirited exchange of ideas on
this subject. In the limited time we have available to us this morning,
we certainly couldn’t cover all of the issues and challenges having to
do with space and the challenges facing our nation as we endeavor to
define more narrowly the role of the military in this space environment,
but what we have done is asked our esteemed panelists to focus on their
recent work in examining our space-launch dilemma. Just as the CINC
chooses his words very carefully, I chose “dilemma” very carefully
as we’ve gone through this. As General Myers points out, we could have
used a number of different terms for our current position.
As many of you probably know if you’ve
read some of the advance billing for this symposium, General Larry
Welch, our former Chief of Staff, chaired a government Broad Area Review
panel on launch systems as chartered by the White House, and he was
invited to participate on the panel with us this morning. He had
accepted the invitation and was looking forward very much to being with
us this morning. However, the results of the White House Broad Area
Review, having to do with launch mission assurance, are still pending
final review by the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] staff, and
they will then be forwarded to the White House and the Administration,
who in turn will then release the formal study. Consequently, General
Welch deemed it necessary to forego the privilege of participating on
this panel with us this morning. We expect to see something on this
review released in the very near future, and I think you would all agree
and I hope understand that it is a little bit premature and perhaps
inappropriate to release the results of the Welch study in this forum
prior to the formal release from the White House.
Nonetheless, we do have--as we look at
mission assurance and assured access to space, and we look at the panel
and Broad Area Reviews that have been chartered, both within the
Department as well as by the two premier launch contractors on the
industry today: We are delighted to have two individuals that shared the
Broad Area Review perspectives from the Boeing Corporation and then the
Broad Area Review perspectives from the Lockheed Martin Corporation and
get their individual perspectives on where we are in this business, and
perhaps we will shed some additional light and hopefully some new
understanding into the area of launch assurance--where the United States
of America is in terms of assured access to space.
With that and without any further ado,
General Shaud introduced our distinguished panelists. I am sure you will
agree with me, we could not have found anyone with better credentials to
do these kind of jobs than Dr. Widnall and Mr. Tom Young. I think they
have agreed that Dr. Widnall will go first.
Dr. Widnall: When I left my position
as Secretary of the Air Force, I went back to my normal career, that of
being a rocket scientist. Little did I anticipate that I would be
addressing the Los Angeles meeting of the AFA again in two years about
rockets. That is what I am doing. I’ve chosen to use some of the
view-graphs that we’ve assembled for our presentation but I am not
going to go through them all. We have an abbreviated set. As you know, I
was asked by Boeing to chair the Boeing Mission Assurance Review and we
reviewed all of the launch programs at Boeing, the Delta II, III, IV and
some of the launch hardware: IUS [Inertial Upper Stage], Titan fairing
and some limited view of the Sea Launch. I am going to confine my
remarks to the outcome of the mission area review, but what I thought I
might say is a few things about EELV, because this review obviously
takes place on the context of EELV and in the spirit of this
meeting--partnerships between government and industry--I think the EELV
is truly a unique partnership. It is a new paradigm in
government-industry cooperation, and the vehicles themselves represent a
new paradigm in vehicle design and launch operation process change. It
is truly a unique program: for a fixed amount of government investment,
the government has been able to leverage several multiples of investment
by both contractors. The goal of all of that is that the military, the
Air Force, the national payloads should be able to get access to space
at fundamentally commercial prices, and at the same time we should be
able to get a very vigorous commercial space industry in the United
States. It sounds like a win-win. We’ve got to get from where we are
to there. That is the goal.
First slide. One of the reasons I wanted to
use view-graphs is that I am truly awed by the committee that we were
able to put together and I wanted to share that awe with you. We had a
small committee, which basically meant that everybody could make every
meeting. We had an active energetic committee. We could hardly shut them
off as late as 8 o’clock at night from their involvement in the
activity. I want to point out several fairly important things about
this. First. Steve Dorfman and General Katina played very important
roles. These are fundamentally the voices of the user. Steve Dorfman
from Hughes launched payloads on the two Delta IIIs that failed. Steve
has the look of somebody who has just taken a spear as a result of
those. Don Katina obviously had additional experience as a former
commander of Space Command. He played a double role. Rick Hawk was
absolutely invaluable. He represents the voice of the insurance
industry. He is the president of the nation’s largest insurer of
commercial launches so he was in a position to really bring that
commercial viewpoint to us about what does the insurance industry expect
of the launch industry. That was an extremely important viewpoint. Then,
Ed Repkin was the former president of Aerospace [corporation] and
clearly has been involved in the launch certification business for many,
many years. George Jeff brings a lifetime of work on Apollo programs, on
the manned space programs and clearly is very cogniscent of the levels
of reliability that are necessary to have a successful manned program.
These committee members were absolutely superb. This is really a joint
product of all of ours. Next slide.
Where does Boeing start? Boeing starts with
the Delta II. That is the basis on which these vehicles are being
evolved and Delta II, as you know, has been an extremely successful
launch vehicle. At a fundamental sense, as I’ll indicate, the good
news is that we started with Delta II and the bad news is that we
started with Delta II. This is where Boeing starts in its development of
launch vehicles. The next slide.
I think this slide really tells the story.
It tells the story of the principle conclusions of our committee. We
start with Delta II. It has had a very good reliability record. Boeing
and we do not anticipate major changes to its processes or operations
and in fact it is anticipated that this vehicle will remain in the
inventory as long as there is a commercial demand for it, so you do not
deal with issues of the workforce being concerned about losing jobs,
etc. However, as I think we are all aware, engineers are always changing
things. You are always looking for a little bit more power. You are
always looking for a little bigger fairing. So we certainly, as one of
our recommendations, suggested that as you do make changes, you continue
to need the kind of discipline that will contribute to mission success.
The second observation is that the success
of Delta II has been due to years of incremental improvement. The
organization knows how to do small changes in the vehicle and that has
been successful. However, in entering into these new developments, we
are really talking about major changes, new vehicles. The same kind of
processes that were very successful in a mature vehicle, a successful
vehicle with incremental improvements, are not adequate to deal with
some major changes. We clearly believe that Boeing underestimated the
design challenge of the change to Delta III from the mature Delta II and
to put it in one sentence, we believe this was a failure of systems
engineering. As you might suspect a lot of our recommendations are
really quite specific and oriented toward the engineering organization
to help it move into this new era.
Another observation is that the Delta IV is
yet more complex, perhaps not just the vehicle but the fact that it is a
brand new vehicle with a new design paradigm. It will have a new engine
and be a whole new launch processing paradigm. And also as Boeing moves
into the Delta IV era, Boeing will become a multi-product vehicle
company. It will have the mature Delta II. It will have Delta III, which
will probably phase out as we move into Delta IV, but Delta IV comes in
many variations. It comes obviously in the heavy and the medium. But
there is a whole set of variations in between that have various numbers
of solids to fill out the whole customer space. We believe this will
require an increased emphasis on design engineering over sight, on
testing, on issues of supplier quality and in an enhanced mission
assurance activity. Finally, remarks about these flyout programs. Both
the IUS [Interin Upper Stage] and the Titan FAIRING are expected to
eventually come to an end. The IUS has only a few flights in the next
few years. Some of these flights are separated by as much as two years.
Clearly there is an issue of retaining the skills of that workforce,
retaining their morale and motivation getting them a view toward their
future activities, and Boeing is paying a lot of attention to that. Next
slide.
This is my last slide. This is really a
summary of the area in which we made recommendations and we actually
have a complete fairly detailed slide in each one of these areas but
this will sort of give us an overview. I think our first recommendation
is that quality must be the company’s highest priority. It is quality
first. It is quality from the very beginning of the design up through
the manufacturing and in every process leading to launch and post-flight
analysis. It is our firm belief that focusing on quality first will lead
to reliability. Ultimately, you will get this reliability at a lower
cost and that is what will make the program all come together. No
surprise is that we believe Boeing needs to strengthen its system
engineering activities. This has both organizational implications and
substantive implications. I guess before going through the other
recommendations I should just indicate the process that we followed. We
continued, we did our study, we met at a variety of Boeing sites, we got
briefings on all the programs. We basically finished our work about the
first of October, turned our report over to the Expendable Launch
Division of Boeing. They took about a month and then we all came
together on the first of November and we gave our briefing to senior
management at Boeing Space and then the expendable launch team gave its
briefing on how it would respond to our recommendations, and I would say
that organizational changes are underway that are quite specific with
respect to our recommendations. These things are happening as we speak.
We spent a lot of time talking about
engineering oversight. Another word for that is engineering
accountability. Making sure that there is a design engineering presence
in oversight really from the beginning of design through its entire
life, and in particular including any changes that occur--changes always
occur. This happens not only in the site where the engineers are
resident, but also at the manufacturing sites, key suppliers and the
field sites, launch areas. Extremely important issue is to assure that
adequate communication exists between design engineering and
manufacturing. I think as we looked at some of the recent failures it
was very clear that there was a problem of what I would refer to as
ambiguous technical orders. There was a failure to understand the
function of a particular part, so that the later activities that
affected that part were such that there was a failure. It requires a lot
of thought into how you build that corporate knowledge into a program.
But it is a very high priority item.
Independent review is not something that
you do just at the end before your launch. It has got to be something
that is built into every phase of the program from beginning design and
analysis through transfer to manufacturing to production, finally
fielding the vehicle at the launch site and launching. Supplier
management is a big issue. Roughly 60 percent of the value of the
expendable launch vehicles is going to be supplier parts and components.
Clearly there has to be some rather well-thought-out processes to ensure
that the same procedures that are being used for design engineering
oversight in the Boeing activities are flowed down to suppliers and that
there is a linkage, a cognizance between Boeing engineers and suppliers
as to design and changes and process changes. Extremely important.
Then finally, to really think explicitly
about risk, when changes are propose--we are always making changes in
vehicles. We consider the risk of increased costs, the risk of increased
schedule, and our committee felt that it was important to consider quite
explicitly the risk of failure due to a change. There are, some sub
bullets on this, are part of these recommendations. We also recommended
that there be a more complete postwide analysis of the data. How many
times have we seen a launch vehicle failure due to a particular
component and then you go back to earlier flights and you get an
indication that there was in fact a problems. It didn’t fail the
mission but it was a problem. We think there is a wealth of information
there. We also believe that with the new instrumentation that is
available and new miniaturization and bandwidth, the whole question of
flight instrumentation on the Delta IV should be rethought and perhaps a
more highly instrumented vehicle flown.
Finally, I think everybody who is involved
in this EELV issue is thinking very seriously about a first flight that
is some sort of a test flight of perhaps a less than critical payload in
order that we can gain some early confidence and early knowledge about
these vehicles without risking an extremely expensive payload.
That is the substance of our
recommendations. There is a lot of good things to say about the launch
vehicle business but we also believe that the kinds of changes that we
have recommended will allow Boeing to transition to this multi-vehicle
company and achieve the kinds of reliability levels that are needed,
both in the commercial sector and in the military sector. Thank you.
Mr. Young: Lockheed Martin
established a independent assessment team on mission success in mid-May
following Titan IV, Athena and THAAD [Theater High Altitude Air Defense]
failures. Team members--and I might just read them off, you will know
many of those. I had the opportunity to chair the group. Retired Air
Force General Tom Moorman was vice chairman. Bill Ballhouse, Tom
Betterton, Don Kromer, Rick Davis, Jimmy Hill, Fred Udall, Ralph
Jacobson, Jim Macanally, Ken Meyer, Mal O’Neil, Ron Paulson, Brent
Scowcroft, Art Welch and Chat Whitehair were all members of the group.
After an extensive review of operations at
Denver, Sunnyvale, Michoud the Cape [Kennedy] and Vandenberg and a large
number of interviews that Tom Moorman and I did with something more than
two dozen customers, we presented our final results to the Lockheed
Martin management on the 30th of August. In the launch
vehicle business, if you bat .800 you don’t make the team. If you bat
.950, you lead the league. That difference is about an awful lot of
discipline and attention to detail and that is going to become paramount
in our report.
Our report includes findings and
recommendations, and I might say that when we presented to Vance
Kauffman and Pete Teach, it took us seven hours, so I am going to give
you a summary of a seven hour presentation. I am just going to hit some
of the highlights, and what I really want to do is talk about some of
the things that we think are critical to batting .950 in this business.
First thing that we really highlighted is
that it is important to recognize that the launch vehicle business is
different than most other things that we do. Even in the defense
environment. It is different than defense electronics, as an example. It
is a “one strike and you are out” kind of business. Which really
means that thousands of people can do their jobs perfectly and one
person can make one mistake that can have a total mission failure. What
that really means is that in the launch vehicle business, oversight is a
good thing. You need to have the necessary level of oversight in the
implementation of a “one strike and you are out” kind of business,
to minimize the chance that the mistake by one person can cause a
mission failure.
Second overarching comment I’d like to
make is that even when things are going very well in the launch vehicle
business, it is appropriate to worry. What I really mean by that is that
we took a look at not only mission failures but we also looked at
near-misses. In fact, Astronautics in Denver did really a first-class
study for us where they took the last five years of results. They went
through all launches for this time period and they grouped their
findings in categories. First was mission failures: pretty simple to
categorize those. Second was partial failures, again pretty simple to
categorize. The third item that they identified was near misses. A near
miss, the definition of it is that you flew with the problem but by the
grace of God it didn’t result in a mission failure, but it could have
and would have if you had encountered that particular circumstance.
They went further than that and they
identified something they called diving catches. As the name might
imply, a diving catch is also something that would have been a mission
failure except some individual did some heroic event that they
identified and solved the problem outside of the primary way of doing
business. The way that we have structured to do business did not catch
the problem, but a special person did find the problem.
They went farther and they identified
another category which they called escapements. Escapements are problems
that were caught by the normal process, but not when they should have
been caught. As an example, a problem might exist that should have been
caught during flight acceptance tests of a component and it wasn’t
found until you got to the Cape, which has a lot of ramifications. This
particular process, I would submit to you, is one, impressive, and two,
our group thinks it should become a standard for the industry. One of
the striking items was there were a large number of near misses, diving
catches, and escapements. In fact, of particular interest, there were
many in the Atlas program, which has a record today of 48 consecutive
successes, and that is why I really say, when things are going well in
the launch vehicle business, still continue to worry, because near
misses, diving catches and escapements can be out there.
The other recommendation that we made in
this regard was, treat all of them as mission failures and do corrective
action as if the event really did have its worst manifestations. Mission
success is an important value in the launch vehicle business in the way
Lockheed Martin goes about doing the business. It is our belief that
mission success really needs to be the most important value in
implementing launch vehicle projects, not cost. As an example, spending
resources to find problems early, spending resources to have appropriate
level of oversight, spending resources to have appropriate of
independent verification or examples of putting mission success first.
I want to quickly say, because as I’ve
given this presentation, people easily come to the wrong conclusion: It
doesn’t mean that cost is unimportant. It just means that you can’t
get to cost by putting cost number one. You get to cost in schedule by
putting quality or mission success first. If everybody functions in that
direction, then cost and schedule will follow, but it clearly can’t be
a parameter that leads.
The other thing that we found was in
Lockheed Martin, and I think it is probably true for the industry, a lot
of turbulence and change. This can really have an adverse impact when
you are trying to have a disciplined and attention-to-detail
environment. It can’t be eliminated, but minimization certainly needs
to be an objective. We spend a lot of time on Titan IV. It is obviously
important to Lockheed Martin and the Air Force, but also extraordinarily
important to our country. Most of the items that I have talked about and
I am going to talk about, apply to Titan IV. There are a couple other
items that stand out when you look at this particular vehicle. One, it
is the most complex of the expendable launch vehicles. Two, every one is
different, driven by payload requirements. Three, it launches the most
high value spacecraft that are put into space.
It is important to recognize these
differences when you go about implementing corrective actions. One of
the things when we talked about, and it manifests itself as we go
forward in the EELV program, but we talked one of the differences in
flying a commercial customer on an Atlas and a national security
customer on a Titan IV. Commercial customers can insure their risk, and
they do. They don’t want it to fail, but it is not devastating. On
Titan IV and our national security customer, they, too insure their
risk, but they insure it by investing in mission success reliability and
those things that enhance the probability of the vehicle working.
Sheila mentioned this, but there are 11
more--by the current plan--Titan IVs, and it is important for all of us
to realize that everybody knows that, meaning the people who are working
on the program. Therefore, having a program that: one, retains the
critical resources is important, and that was one of our key
recommendations that has been implemented by Lockheed Martin; and the
second is that a flyout plan, to be sure that the 11th is as
successful as any of the others, is important. I might also point out
that our group, when we briefed this out to Lockheed Martin, really
pointed out that the flyout plan in our view should not be a Lockheed
Martin flyout plan. It needed to be a Titan IV plan. Which means, the
Air Force, the users, and the contractors all need to be parties to be
sure that everything we know to make these next 11 a success, needs to
be part of the flyout plan.
There were other items that we identified
that I would like to just briefly highlight, and one is accountability.
Clearly, critical to success in the launch vehicle business. We really
talked about accountability at two levels. One is senior management. By
senior management, I mean company presidents and the heads of various
functional units, say such as engineering. The senior management has a
responsibility to be sure that processes and procedures are in place
that maintain a high level and a high standard of excellence in
implementing the programs. Their job doesn’t end there. They also have
the responsibility for oversight to be sure that the policies and
procedures are being implemented and that how a project is implemented
is not the local option of the project manager. Senior management has
got to be sure that the standards and the way projects are implemented
really are to a point to maximize mission success. There is also
accountability at the responsible engineer level. Sheila talked about
this.
Our strong belief is that the responsible
engineer for a component, a box, a subsystem, a software package really
should have cradle-to-grave responsibility. One of the things that we
found is that when a particular subsystem, to use as an example, is
integrated on to a launch vehicle, accountability can begin to be a
little bit diffuse. The individual really who is responsible for that
particular sub-system needs to recognize and be held accountable for the
fact that they are responsible for it from day one until it has
completed its mission.
Quality. We had a lot to say in our report
about quality. Lockheed Martin has three functions involved in quality:
the project, which I’ll refer to as responsible party; product
assurance; and mission success. It was our strong belief that the roles
and responsibilities of these three organizations need to be
extraordinarily clear. First off, the project or the responsible party,
it should be established and well understood that they have the
responsibility for doing the job right the first time and that they are
accountable for doing so; That project assurance does not have the job
for doing it right the first time. They have the job of being a second
set of eyes. Mission success has the job of being a third set of eyes,
again to minimize the chance of this one mistake causing a mission
failure.
We also believe that those functions need
to be separate and they need to report to the company president. There
were other areas in the quality area that I want to just briefly
highlight from our report. The items are: When you develop hardware--and
it is important to recognize that these vehicles are all not built the
day before they are launched: typically there are five years, worth of
effort invested in putting a vehicle together. When there is an error,
when oversight is not what it should be, when systems engineering is not
what it should be, when testing is not what it should be, an area of
weakness, it is very important to go back and revalidate the pedigree of
the hardware to be sure that you really do know and you have confidence
in what you are flying.
I want to repeat this because we thought it
was so important in the quality area. Oversight, to be compatible with
the level of risk that is involved in the program, is important, and
insight is not adequate to get the job done. Rigorously implement, test
as you fly, and fly as you test philosophy. So many times we get in
trouble when we go a little bit outside the envelope. Fly what we test
and test what we fly will really be a principle that will hold us in
good stead. Review all mission critical events, particularly those that
you just can’t test as you fly, such as a solid rocket. For most of
those, establish an independent verification process. For independent
verification, it is our strong belief that: one, it needs to be thorough
and complete; and, two, independent meaning off project.
The other item is, as I’ve mentioned but
I want to say again, treat near-misses, diving catches and escapements
as rigorous as treating a mission failure. Analyze out of family data
just as rigorously as you would out of spec. Often times, out of family
is giving a stronger message even than out of spec may be.
They were the kinds of items that we had in
the quality area. We also looked at quality of people, and it is our
strong belief in Lockheed Martin and I suspect true for the industry and
the enterprise at large, we’ve lost a lot of experienced people. You
can easily get into arguments, which we did that “Gee, aren’t
today’s people just as smart as yesterday’s people?” The answer
is, probably smarter, but intellectual capability is not a substitute
for experience. It is an important parameter, but experience is critical
to making these things really work. As you might expect, we had a lot to
say about succession planning and bench strength, but there is another
resource in this full employment circumstance that we have today of
people who have retired from programs who can play critical roles in
critical events and it also adds the importance for the prudent
oversight. We, too, had a lot to say about subcontractor and supplier
management. As Sheila appropriately mentioned, more than half of the
work is done by suppliers and subcontractors. They, too, must follow the
same rigid principles that we both talked about.
One of the things that we note in this
arena, and I don’t have time to go into it in a lot of depth, but
there is a lot of variation as to how it is implemented. You could take
a particular program and you could find one subsystem that was provided
by a subcontractor and managed with excellence and you would find right
beside it the one that was managed inadequately. One of the things we
spent a lot of time on as included in our recommendations is, we should
treat subcontractor management just we treat engineering. That is, get
the variation out. Do leveraged buy and have policies and procedures
that have a high level of excellence and then be sure that this kind of
variation that I talked about really doesn’t exist.
Coming as a conclusion, as I said, we gave
our report to Lockheed Martin on the 30th of August. Since
then, we’ve briefed a large number of customers. In addition to that,
Lockheed Martin actually asked our group to come back and they presented
to us their corrective action for all of the items that we had
recommended. They are off at the current time implementing the
corrective actions and their commitment of all of what I will call the
hard as opposed to employer morale kinds of items that they will have
complete by the 31st of December. Thank you very much.
General Shaud:Thank you very much,
Tom and Sheila. We appreciate the presentation. We do not lack for
questions. Yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Widnall, there was
an article with regard to Boeing and something called the responsible
engineer. Lockheed Martin, as Tom presented, stressed accountability and
oversight. Let me ask, the logical question that came from the audience
was: “How do we get there from here? What do we need to do to make
that happen?”
Dr. Widnall: Boeing currently has a
job title called cognizant engineer and that is where you begin, but our
committee found that as this person is the one who is responsible for
hardware, but as that hardware moves through its life, and things happen
to us such as changes or testing, we found that the loop didn’t always
close. So, Boeing is instituting this basically new emphasis on changing
that job title, responsible engineering, going through a training and
certification program outlining what are the responsibilities--in other
words, making it a more rigorous program responsibility. That is,
basically deals with, this issue we talked about of engineering
accountability.
Mr. Young: If you went to Denver,
you would find a function they call product integrity engineer. If you
went to Sunnyvale, you would find the same thing, but called responsible
product engineer. These are people that have the responsibilities that
Sheila talked about. The thing that we found and I was highlighting is
that really is the level of person who looks after most of the hardware
and software on the vehicle and the critical ingredient is the
cradle-to-grave responsibility. They’ve got to be responsible not only
that it functions well in a test when it is at the component level, but
they also have to be responsible for how well it functions as an
integrated part of the vehicle review and test data at the Cape,
anomolies and post-flight as to how things performed in flight.
General Shaud: The next question,
for Secretary Widnall. One of your Boeing mission review recommendations
was to invoke a more rigorous risk management process. The question is
this, how do you imagine the payload customer would be involved in that
process? Do you think there will be a difference between the involvement
of commercial and government customers? What would those differences be
and should there be differences?
Dr. Widnall: Several part question.
First of all, the fundamental issue of risk management lies with the
contractor, and in fact in the EELV program there is this specific
requirement of design reliability of 98 percent. Clearly the internal
processes of analyzing the risk of failure are fundamentally the
contractor responsibility. How does the customer get involved? I think
there can be another layer that is really the customer’s option. If it
is a government customer, that customer may want an additional level of
independent review. If it is a commercial customer, that level could be
an insurance layer or it could be a combination of insurance plus
insight gathered. I mean, certainly the insurers want very much to be
briefed about the capability, and in fact when we asked the insurers
what is it that they want, want they want is the contractor’s best
effort. They want to be assured that the contractor feels some sense, as
much as responsible, for the success of the mission as obviously they
do. I think, depending on the customer, there is a different layer that
could be put on part of mission assurance.
General Shaud: Any comments, Tom, on
that general idea?
Mr. Young: The risk management
aspect is important. One of the items I would observe is you hear a lot
about the calculated reliability of vehicles and one of the things that
really struck us as we went through this is that most of the reasons
they fail is not in those calculations. That is an important factor and
you need to be careful not to get too much comfort from high numbers in
that regard.
General Shaud: Tom, it addresses one
of your remarks. It comes at this personnel issue that General Babbitt
gave answer to with regard to the Air Force. One of the findings of the
studies dealt with the loss of experienced personnel and their
expertise. How serious is that? Both in the launch business and
particularly in future R&D?
Mr. Young: I think it is a serious
problem. I touched on it. It is hard to replace experience. I will tell
you an interesting aspect. When we went through it, Tom Moorman really
got on this item pretty heavily when we were going through our group
interactions. We kept asking the human resources people about this
issue. No matter how Tom asked the question, and he tried every way he
could conceive of, it always came back that the quality of a work force
was measured by average years of service in the process. You could argue
that if you downsize maybe a work force gets better. The only reason I
am citing that, is at least in the part that we looked at, it is a
parameter that is hard to measure. It is hard to really appreciate the
impact that you have by losing experienced personnel, and it is because
of the age of the process, that way is going out. If you come back and
take individuals and you identify the key individuals that were involved
in making things work and looking at them disappear, then you can see
that it is a real serious problem. You mentioned earlier Norm Augustine.
Norm tells a story of one time when he was visiting one of our plants in
Baltimore. The guy was operating an autoclave curing composite parts and
he had this trolley that went into the autoclave and back in the corner
there was one part sitting there where no other parts were sitting and
Norm asked this guy, “why there?” And he said, “to tell you the
truth I really don’t know. But the guy who had this job for 40 years
before me told me that if you put this part on the far end of the cart,
it always comes out O.K.” Norm uses that as an example. There are
experience factors and that is not the way we should get hardware. I
don’t argue that, but experience is a critical ingredient and I think
the industry and probably the enterprise suffers somewhat today as we
rebuild that experience.
General Shaud: Dr. Widnall, any
comment on this?
Dr. Widnall: Well, you know, I am a
professor. One of the things that I was very interested in is to observe
the quality of the younger engineers and program managers, where younger
is defined as younger than me, which is not actually that young. I have
to say that I was extremely impressed with the energy level and the
quality of the younger people that I saw. I was also impressed with the
interaction between the more senior people, because we did have quite a
number of senior engineers come and meet with our panel and I thought
the interaction was pretty good. I am less concerned about the quality
of the engineering work force. I was very impressed with the enthusiasm
and dedication of the production work force. But I do agree with Tom
that in some sense one of the challenges, and this goes to this issue of
capturing engineering intent, I think we do have to figure out a way to
capture this tacit knowledge that is contained in our experienced
workforce, our production workers, so that it can be transmitted over
the life of the program. Ultimately, we will lose individuals from the
industry and I would say that is a major challenge.
General Shaud: With programs coming
near the end of their utility--Atlas, Titan, and so forth--how do you
retain the talent needed to ensure--there is two problems here. One is
of course having the talent to work on new programs, the other is
keeping people around to keep working on the old programs.
Dr. Widnall: Let me speak to a
specific example, because I think the IUS may be an extreme example of
that. But basically what was done is to put the IUS workforce in a
larger group that was working on a more active program so that the
skills would be available when needed, but obviously the future was more
secure because they were involved in a new development. That is
obviously one technique you can use. If people see a future and the
aerospace industry is just absolutely full of incredibly talented people
and we all know how we move from project to project, through air through
space and back, that has basically been the mechanism to keep the
experience level up.
Mr. Young: Sheila already touched on
it. Number one is to provide as hopefully optimistic, but clearly
realistic, view of the future as you can to people so they really do
know what the opportunities are. I think there are some levels beyond
that. One is, there are extraordinary people who are always going to
have a job with the corporation, not matter what the circumstance. Those
people need to be, somebody needs to put their arm around them and tell
them, because they are the people who really have a choice. There is
another group of people who are critical but might not have jobs in the
future, and it is important to have a financial safety net for those
people so that they don’t have to every day worry about what is going
to happen. We spent a lot of time talking to people like that and
personally I was a little surprised as to what they would really like is
about six month’s worth of security after, for example, the last Titan
goes and they would think that was a very generous thing to do. If you
can put in a financial safety net, that will work that. But I do think
that it is a problem that if it is left unworked will have detrimental
effects on the flyout of any vehicle, particularly Titan IV. But it is
being worked, so that is the good news, by both Lockheed Martin and the
Air Force.
General Shaud: The next question is
for a former secretary of the Air Force and it is something that you and
I certainly have worked and it has been presented from that podium. How
has acquisition reform helped or hurt the industrial processes required
for success launches?
Dr Widnall: Is that specific to
launch? First of all, I am not sure I understand the definition of
acquisition reform in the question. We obviously have made a lot of
changes. Would you call the EELV program an acquisition reform? I guess
I would in the broad context. Looking for ways to partner with industry
so both industry and government basically get what they need at a
minimal cost. There have been some incredible acquisition reform success
stories with the C-17 and the JDAM [Joint Direct Attack Munition], all
of these things. I guess I am an advocate of change. I think that we
have to continually search for new ways to do things. Otherwise, we
become complacent. I think we simply can’t afford to be complacent,
given the budget that I know the Air Force base and the sheer number of
new and exciting programs on its plate. I really believe we can’t
continue to do things the old way. Will we make mistakes? Probably so.
Are we smart enough to catch those? I hope so.
General Shaud: As we move toward
liquid fuel systems, are we jeopardizing industrial capability for the
solid propulsion systems at the heart, for example, of our missile
capability, our ICBM capabilty?
Mr. Young: There is still a lot of
business in the solid propellant arena. Clearly the solids for the
Titans, but in addition to that, most of the advanced Deltas that Sheila
talked about all have solid booster-assist capability that is a part of
it. Shuttles. I don’t think it is a catastrophic condition at the
current time. I think some of the liquid systems that we hear a lot
about, probably some, are not going to happen. We hear about the liquid
for the Shuttle. Probably a ton of experts out here, my guess is that
will never happen. I think that there will be a role for both for some
time and probably not a catastrophic situation.
General Shaud: Given the premise
that oversight as compared to insight is needed to assure the cost
schedule performance of space systems and minimize related risk, how
would you address the resources, manpower dollars, needed to migrate
from insight to oversight?
Mr. Young: First off, oversight is
not free. It is kind of interesting, after we gave our report one of the
senior Lockheed management people went to Denver and was talking about
this and talking about the need for more oversight and the people’s
comment is, we agree with that, but we don’t have time for it. What I
really mean by that is I think this question is a very good question,
because there has to be the necessary funding put in place, not only to
pay just for the oversight people, but pay for the people who are doing
the job who must accommodate and appropriately interact with the
oversight people. I think our group would say that is a small price to
pay to eliminate a failure. It does take resources and it does take an
appreciation that resources are necessary. But investing modestly in
mission success or quality can pay significant dividends. You’ve
probably all done this, but if you just take the MILSTAR failure, which
I read that the Air Force put a dollar value of $1.2 billion on that.
When the Titan program is finished, there will be 41 of those. If you
could have neutralized the MILSTSAR failure, you could have afforded to
spend $30 million addition on every Titan IV and still come out better
than even. You could have come out with the spacecraft in orbit. That is
a little bit of trick economics but all I am really trying to say is, we
really can be very foolish in how we expend our resources if we don’t
recognize that oversight and the capacity to handle oversight is an
important investment to make sure that these things work.
General Shaud: Dr. Widnall, any
comment on that?
Dr. Widnall: I think it is a really
fundamental question. What is the most effective thing that the
government can do to improve mission success? What is the process of
oversight that would be value added, given the relative capabilities and
experience level of the contractors and government personnel? That
entire area should be rethought, because the experience lies with the
contractors. It is possible to put in place processes that force
independent review and those are to the good. The whole question of what
is value added oversight is an extremely important issue.
Mr. Young: Sheila raises an
interesting point. I’d like to highlight that. When I talk about
oversight, I don’t mean government oversight. It can and probably
should be contractor oversight, but one of the things that we observed
happening was when we got moving towards insight and simultaneous with
that there were a lot of things going in American industry. You
couldn’t pick up a journal that didn’t talk about self-inspection,
the person who does the job, count on them to do their own inspecting,
which I am a strong advocate for except in the launch vehicle arena.
What I am really trying to say is that not only did the government move
in the direction of oversight, but at least Lockheed Martin moved in
that direction also. When I really come back and talk about oversight, I
want to make it very clear, I don’t mean to imply government
oversight. I would personally believe government oversight with prudent
contractor oversight might be the way to really do it. But somewhere
that oversight has got to exist and I think one of the responsibilities
of insight is to assure that the right amount of oversight is being
implemented.
General Shaud: Do you think that any
of the traditional launch vehicle concept developments, like
single-stage-to-orbit, now underway have a chance of technical or
financial success?
Dr. Widnall: I think many of those
concepts may prove out in the future. But I felt my responsibility as
secretary of the Air Force was to ensure our near-term reliable access
to space at a really good prudent cost. I focused mostly on this
generation of launch vehicles. Twenty, thirty years from now, no we may
find that some of these new concepts have played out. But I felt very
strongly that we needed to take this interim step to get a new
generation of expendables.
General Shaud: The last question
here. I promised I wouldn’t do this but I am . It is to General
Tattini. The question is, as CA4SR emerges as an integral element of
warfighting, integrated systems development becomes more important
between space and the C4 systems. What is being done to integrate the
development of the activities of your outfit here in Los Angeles and ESC
[Electronic Systems Center]?
General Tattini: The relationship we
have with our Electronic System Center in Boston and the Space and
Missile Center out here has to be brought closer together. We started
under Ron Kadish’s leadership in Boston with a series of offsites
between his staff and my staff. We have continued that under General
Kane’s leadership and we are finding in a little bit more formal
structure something we refer to as architectural [words inaudible]
across each our mission areas that there is an awful lot of room for
this kind of integration and even more so as we bring in our national
partner and bring in the folks down at Langley Field and start targeting
ISR and those kinds of things. In terms of being lashed up with ES, it
is there and getting tighter all the time. In terms of these other
partners that I mentioned to you, we are still in the early stages of
reaching out and putting this together.
General Shaud: Thanks to you Gene
and our panel.
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