Man, work’s been frustrating lately … not because of the work we’re doing, but because of all the obstacles in getting there. I’ve been taking more a role in clearing these road blocks, and that means dealing with Accounting and Contracts and filling out forms and all that. I sorta have a knack for it, I guess, because the Lord blessed with me a folksy manner when I need to get people to do things in an effort for us to meet panic-laden schedules. Yes, the old axiom is true—a failure to plan on your part does not necessitate a need to panic on my part—but we’re in the rapid-response flight hardware business, and, with some minor foibles, we’re still making our teammates and our NASA customer pretty happy at the end of the day.

I’m still waiting for the day, though, when we don’t get a part done until 8:00 p.m. or so and I find myself on a plane to Orlando or Melbourne so that I can hand-carry a part in to Kennedy Space Center the next morning. We keep getting closer to that point …

We’re also getting close to the point where we completely invert the hardware development cycle. For the record, this is the way it should go:

1. Some NASA organization decides that it needs a piece of hardware. It draws up a specification for the designers to meet, giving the basic criterion [size, weight, thermal characteristics, power consumption, etc.] and saying, “Go design it and have someone build it.”
2. Some contractor’s design organization designs the part to the specification. With drawings in a stable-but-still malleable place, they get data to their subcontracts office to find a suitable vendor for the parts if they can’t or don’t want to build them in-house.
3. The contractor’s subcontracts office puts out a Request For Proposal to vendors they’ve dealt with before.
4. Vendors (like us) take the RFP and develop a quotation based on the RFP.
5. Negotiation happens, and some vendor gets the contract.
6. Sometime between RFP and contract award, engineering drawings are released, and the first articles are built.
7. Acceptance testing, if needed, happens.
8. The vendor builds a data package based upon the build paper, inspection reports, materials certifications, and test reports, then sells off the hardware and the data package to the customer.
9. The vendor ships the hardware either to the contractor or to the NASA customer.

Our process lately has been something like this:

• NASA: “Oh crap! We need to modify this part.”
• Design: “Okay, vendor, what would you do?”
• Vendor: “We’d do it like this.”
• Design: “Okay, cool. You go build it, and we’ll make the drawings match the part.”
• Vendor: “Ummmm … okay. Can we have a contract?”
• Contractor: “Hey NASA! We need some kind of contract.”
• NASA: “Just get it done already! We’re at STOP WORK!”
• Subcontracts: “Here’s a pile of money. Go and do. Come back for more. We’ll give you an RFP later.”
• Vendor: “How much later?”
• Subcontracts: “Just ship the hardware, will ya?”
• Vendor: (grumbles)
• Vendor: “Hey, um, yeah … where are our drawings? We’re done with the part, but we can’t buy it off without the drawings.”
• Design: “Uhhhh, we’re still working on those.”
• Subcontracts: “Hurry up already!”
• NASA: “Yeah, HURRY UP!”
• Design (panting): “Here’s your drawing.”
• Vendor: “Uhhhhh, we did this to spec A, and you’re calling out spec B.”
• Design: “Okay. Okay. We’ll fix it.”
• Vendor: “Can we have our contract now? We can’t ship without a contract.”
• Subcontracts: “You have a contract.”
• Vendor Quality: “Ha!”
• Subcontracts: “Okay, you have a point. Here.”
• Vendor: “Okay, part’s done, through quality, and we shipped it. Now can we have an RFP, or should we just come up with a quote?”

And frankly, that’s just kinda the way it has to go when you’re running to meet a deadline. Just another opportunity for excellence.

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I was going to write about house stuff, but doggone it, I got on a roll, and hopefully this will help you understand my world a little bit.