IMO Most of what he said was widely thought by others, but not previously confirmed by ULA.
It's a bit like Trump. A lot of people say they admire him because he speaks his mind. Well, that's not so great if the underlying mind is nuts!
They're just being frank and open about the train thoughts in their head but this doesn't mean that these thoughts are valid, true or sound.
You break it down into overly simplistic, but generally useful ways to explain the situations. I don't doubt his candid explanation was correct, and I don't see anything wrong with it really.
It's the internal analysis of the situation at a given time. Those things change, and are not written in stone.
ULA faces a big threat from SpaceX right now. If SpaceX's reusability plans work out, if SpaceX can get their reliability up, and if SpaceX can work on their delays and start launching on time, ULA is going to be in a world of hurt. They had a long time as a sole-source launch provider for the government, and suddenly they're being undercut by a factor of five which could soon turn into a factor of ten or fifteen. Now, that's a lot of "ifs" up there, but ULA can't be complacent if they want to still exist in a decade or two.
If I was the CEO of ULA, I'd want my upper management to consist of people who understand this situation, who recognize the threat, who take it seriously, and who will work to keep ULA competitive as they go from having guaranteed business to needing to fight for every launch contract. And this fellow does not sound like he fits that description in the least.
“Along came Elon Musk and changed the game completely…we can’t afford [to bid] any more because the price points are coming down as low as $60 million,” he said. “The best day you’ll see us bid at $125 million or twice that number. Add in the capabilities cost, it eclipses the $200 million. … So now we’re going to have to take and figure out how to bid these things much lower cost. The government can’t just say, you know, ULA’s got a great track record, they’ve done 100 launches.”
What are you referring to?
Really, the fuel thing sticks out at me. Maybe I'm making too big of a deal about it, but reuse is going to be very important, ULA is working on their own version of it (recovering just the engines, not the entire first stage), and he ought to know about it. Or if he doesn't, because details are for underlings, he ought to know what he doesn't know about it.
He made no estimate of that and didn't mention SES-9. What are you reading? Is that in the original audio recording because it's not in the article.
His criticism was that "it requires flying additional fuel to perform the landing", which I interpreted to be about weight and not fuel cost, and that ULA's plan is to parachute the rockets down, I assume to minimize that problem. Do you have information that contradicts him?
Where is this coming from? [Deleted last sentence]
What matters is how much you can put into orbit. RTLS hits you with a 30% payload penalty, a normal barge landing is about a 15% penalty, and a crazy hail-Mary attempt like SES-9 is somewhat less.
If your payload is under that threshold then the only downside to it is the extra cost of fuel and support. Both are completely minimal. For example, SpaceX's next ISS supply mission has plenty of margin for an RTLS landing. A Dragon stuffed full of cargo still weighs less than what Falcon 9 can put into the ISS's orbit and land back at the launch site afterwards. For a little bit of extra fuel, you can potentially save a rocket stage worth tens of millions. That doesn't sound dump to me.
For those few payloads that can't tolerate that penalty, they can fly the rocket expendable. It's still one of the cheapest out there even if they don't recover it. Or they can fly it on Falcon Heavy, which if recovered is cheaper than an expandable Falcon 9.
The only big unknown right now is the cost of refurbishing a recovered first stage so it can be ready for another launch. That's what made the Space Shuttle cost so much more than it was supposed to. It sounds good so far, but until they're doing this on a regular basis we can't know for sure.
If you take any company, and ask all of the VPs about their candid take about the tactics of their current situation, you will get a tremendous amount of variety on their perceived views of the situation.
As to if that aligns with the CEO's vision, I don't know. And his firing is not an indication either way, because he would be fired regardless for his indiscretion.
If you believe he is factually incorrect in the specifics of his analysis, I don't doubt you, and I'm not defending it.
Why wouldn't you doubt this? His speech included a number of factually incorrect engineering statements about his competitors (SpaceX). If he was being "honest", then he was wrong. His "candid explanations" of things were fraught with error and also wildly offensive, not to mention dangerous for the business.
Such as ... ?
In this vertical, I don't know if he was wrong or right in the detail of his analysis.
What was the offensive part?
He was candid with the wrong audience, that's all.
What I heard was a completely benign, candid analysis of the situation.
You're quite correct.
not supposed to say the truth ... supposed to pretend
But in the above you're missing a key word in two places:
not supposed to publicly say the truth ... supposed to publicly pretend
And that is the essence of the problem. Any business that wants to survive must have ongoing internal discussions based on reality. However, their public face should necessarily be quite different. This was explained in Bull Durham:
Crash Davis: It's time to work on your interviews.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: My interviews? What do I gotta do?
Crash Davis: You're gonna have to learn your clichés.
You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to
know them. They're your friends. Write this down:
"We gotta play it one day at a time."
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Crash Davis: 'Course it's boring, that's the point.
Write it down.This is covered in V. Rao's "The Gervais Principle", specifically the section on "Powertalk" http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...
My engineer Loser brain is about to explode. Those are secrets of management Sociopaths. It's anathema to me, but maybe I'm just Clueless. :)
He's telling folks outside the company that a) ULA is courting Aerojet Rocketdyne with little intention of actually going with them, b) a prominent Senator is biased against them and and c) the Pentagon skewed a competition in their favor.
As the article says:
> This is not something Air Force procurement officers want to see quoted in the next SpaceX lawsuit. Nor is it something that McCain was happy to hear. At a hearing this morning, he called for an investigation into the contract.
This is likely because of a requirement that ULA put out a bid to multiple candidates. This sort of thing often happens because of well-meaning rules that aim to prevent croneyism in subcontracts or procurement. It's unsurprising, and -assuming that there's no other US supplier that is willing to build the engines for ULA- is not at all controversial.
However, such rules can be a pain in the ass when you honestly know that there's only one entity in the world who can do the entirety of the thing that you need to get done. If you're really unlucky, your procurement rules will be written so that some bozo can come along, promise everything on your requirements list at a lower price than the only guy who can actually do the job, win the contract, and string you along for aeons while they attempt to build the capabilities that they promised they could supply, and that the other guy already had ready to go.
I'm just putting the situation into perspective for the folks who might hold an opinion like "That's such a terrible thing for ULA to be doing! Why are they wasting the time and money of Aerojet if they seriously expect that Aerojet won't be able to provide the thing that they need?".
Do I fell sorry for his firing--no.
Would I tape this speach, and put it online--no.
I don't have any issue with taping and releasing a speech during a class at a publicly funded university.
Anyone got anything on the motivation for the taping/putting on-line?
Lutz? Angry at the language? Supporting one of the other stakeholders? Some concept of investigative journalism?
People don't like assholes, which is why smart assholes take care not to act like assholes. When you're this obvious about it, no one can fail to notice what an asshole you are. When you piss someone off and simultaneously hand them a way to hurt you, you shouldn't be surprised when they take it.
My opinion is lower than that. Generation Text posts everything as a reflex without much thought.
Only later when things happen like the cops showing up at their doorstep do they realize that maybe that isn't such a great idea.
It just never gets recorded.
I wouldn't have even noticed it. I'd never have used the terms he used, but I don't have any real issue with the way it was framed.
I find it odd that would be the thing to pick out within the statements, but perhaps I'm not as sensitive to the language as I should be?
Edit: I can't seem to reply to a level deep, so I will put some remarks here.
Re: over - In my view it was just an analogy, and had no deep insight into the views of marriage. Just my impressions
Re: th0ma5 - Boys doesn't have any negative connotation, but I understand the point you're making. I don't have much to add except that I didn't read it as anything other than an analogy.
Re: zepto - I keep saying bar because that's often where you'll hear this sort of language, but it isn't limited there. I respect your views that it isn't appropriate, and again, I would never use that language to explain it.
But I don't take offense to it. Again, perhaps I should. I may not be as enlightened as I should be.
But then again, it does reflect a lot of marriage decisions, particularly in high society, so it's probably appropriate. This is actually what happens when personal life starts to look like business life. So probably... better not to be so brazen about it because it's a bit chauvinistic. Honesty isn't always the best policy, sometimes you have to consider people's feelings and reactions.
The problem comes when an executive is speaking on the record in the way he would speak off the record.
“The government was not happy with us not bidding that, because they bent over backwards to lean the field to our advantage,”
This is a serious accusation (corruption) and shouldn't be taken lightly and the upper management has every right to fire him for that. Other than that, it's just a harmless case of "drunk words/sober thoughts".
I think the point is that they're all like that, or at least a lot of them. This guy isn't any more of an asshole than anyone else in his position is likely to be. He's not more honest, either--laudable honesty lies in telling the truth even when you know it could hurt you, and it sounds like he somehow honestly hadn't realized that. He's just stupider, or at least more tone-deaf. (Or possibly drunk/high/otherwise impaired. It's hard to imagine a man getting as far as he did without developing a solid understanding of when you're expected to lie.)