The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project.
That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
Anyway the process as such did not work as documented.
You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere.
Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work.
Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.
Have others come in and follow the directions.
Every time i am dealing in new hires, i realise how much we just take for granted
He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will not be making the company any money.".
We tried to explain the long term savings, but he was not interested.
Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps.
You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.
The technician refused to document the procedure because he was afraid of becoming replaceable. He was afraid of becoming replaceable because he was afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of losing his job because he would lose his sole source of income.
Let's just give people free money already.
Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.
The air force is currently going on an in-housing and "agile all the things" binge because they're sick of 30yr of getting screwed by contractors.
My money is on Northrop giving them a sky high but not without precedent price and someone saying "screw it, this is the perfect thing to learn how to do"
It’s a bit terrifying when you realize that the people at the top don’t know what they are doing either. Much of the world runs on guesswork and inertia. This is also true of most companies.
In my early 20's this 'discovery' shocked me
Not saying this is how it actually ends up, but they certainly are prepared to use a lot of leverage tools that are not available to more free countries.
People are just people. Organizational psychology is universal. Bit rot is inevitable.
No, but we'll totally sponsor/fund research into things like mind control and astral projection. Funding something totally useful like reverse engineering skills is totally anathema. Just really sad commentary
I don't get your point. The government does invest in reverse engineering, and much more than they invest into mind control and astral projection. It's nonsense to say that investing in useful skills is "totally anathema".
What GP was saying was not that they don't invest in reverse engineering, but they wouldn't try to backdoor it or secret the experience into the industry with some project like this. They wouldn't try to "trick" the industry into developing the experience by putting out smaller contracts like this. They do invest in it, but directly. That one program office has put out a contract for reverse engineering of one system does not mean that the general capability is ignored, within the government or the industry.
And, possibly, before the 1960s.
Small departments in poor cities occasionally wind up highly competent because they wind up staffed with a high enough ratio of workers to get things done and everybody above them has bigger problems than micro managing so they have the freedom to get things done. And it runs for awhile then comes under scrutiny and gets made back into junk because politics.
I agree. And there's a massive depth unwinding to that.
The really interesting thing about that is one of the main things they had to reverse-engineer was an impurity in one of the ingredients that the original designers didn't even know they were depending on.
This was true of lots of things outside NASA. This was one of the problems that killed the UK attempt to modernise the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft [0]. They wanted to fit new wings to the old planes, but only discovered after the contract had been signed that the different airframes had not been built identically, but were different interpretations of a common plan. Each of the nine planes was in effect a completely new refit challenge.
Interchangeable parts don’t.
Additionally the F-1 engines were redesigned using more modern techniques around 2012 with the F-1B [0].
The SLS went with the RS-25s for a number of reasons. While the F-1s provide high thrust they're not as efficient. The RS-25s can burn longer and with the SRBs providing massive amounts of thrust to get the stack off the ground the RS-25s can provide more delta-v to the upper stages. An F-1 reboot would have required a lot of extra work to add in modern computer controls which already exist in the RS-25. They have also flown in the past few decades and are well understood.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/new-f-1b-rocket-engi...
In fact most 'stories' and 'news' is like that. The SLS is known to be in a congress sub committee hot potato game. So that there are different versions floating around of what happened and is happening is not surprising. Teasing out the 'truth' of what happened is not always easy. As many have interests in distorting it, or just remember wrong.
The whole "we can't make them anymore" meme has a tiny kernel of truth but it's been blown way out of proportion the more it's been repeated.
When the F-1 was manufactured a lot of the actual assembly of parts was done by hand. That meant Rocketdyne's engineers and machinists had a lot of tribal knowledge that was lightly or partially documented at best or not documented at worst. NASA and Rocketdyne maintained all of the designs and documentation and knew everyone involved in the engine manufacturing.
In the early 90s a lot of these Rocketdyne people were interviewed [0] and asked to review F-1 manufacturing techniques as part of the Space Exploration Initiative [1]. Restarting production of the F-1 would have been practical but more expensive than the alternate plan to go with an SSME derivative.
While the F-1 is an impressive engine it has downsides. It's enormous and heavy. The Saturn V's first stage (S-1C) was 10m in diameter while the Space Shuttle's external tank was 8.4m in diameter. The Shuttle's ET was going to be the core of the proposed SEI rocket (and SLS). With a 8.4m tank diameter it would be more difficult to mount more than two F-1s.
With only two engines it would be more dangerous of a vehicle for manned missions as a flame out in one engine could be disastrous. It would also make it more difficult to throttle the engines for different launch profiles. Moving to a larger core would have required all new manufacturing infrastructure, flight qualification, and unknown follow-on issues.
Tl;dr The F-1 was an awesome engine but not perfect or even desirable for all purposes and the "we can't build them" meme is stupid.
[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3724/1
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative
Basically, someone created a F1 engine inspired design with modern manufacturing technology but ultimately it was never used.
Also it is no longer known how to make the Saturn V rocket which flew to the moon - https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/26/science/hunt-is-on-for-sc...
I also recall that Lockheed had to take special effort to preserve production know-how and tooling for the F-22 when they shutdown production early, so it would be possible to restart if needed. You can't capture everything you need to know in blueprints and documentation.
The AF finally hired a bunch of old WW2 airplane mechanics. Those mechanics never looked at the manual, they just listened to the engine, made few adjustments, and the engines were soon singing at full power.
The difference in technology likely plays a large role - these parts were designed without CAD and modern fabrication protocols have changed.
It reminded me of NASA's endeavor to reverse engineer the Saturn rockets
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
Actually, the B-2 was one of the first military aircraft designed with CAD.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/B-2-Spiri...
(search for "NCAD")
For example, the Saudi's really don't need all those M-1s they buy from us (with money we give them), but we offer the it keeps our production lines open and active.
It's a devious way of laundering military readiness expenses.
Which I thought he was joking at the time.
Similar: See Dilbert, the cartoon version had a funny episode about company names through acquisitions.
I have no reason to believe that defense projects are not plagued by bureaucracy, office politics and incompetence like in a lot of government entities and large companies. If anything, it is worse because secrecy is a convenient way to hide incompetence. And when information is shared on a "need to know" basis and we realize that no one "needs to know", then it gets lost.
I have touched a bit on defense projects (not in the US) and generally, compared to civilian, open projects, if feels slow and primitive. I didn't get to the super-secret stuff but I have a feeling that the only parts where civilians don't do much better are the ones that only the army is interested in.
> You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-bud...
I suppose they could always call the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed who designed it in the first place. Like getting tech support for your Huawei networking equipment, just use the Cisco guide! [0]
[0] https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...
[0]https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728...
It's pretty interesting, but a lot of this stuff is structured specifically so that the contractor organization doesn't retain knowledge that it's "not supposed to have", as wasteful as that ends up being. Even stuff like a list of personnel who worked on a project or production line might be included... so that a few years after the project is completed, the management of the contractor might not even be able to figure out who to ask, because they've destroyed even their knowledge of the list of people who worked on the component's design and manufacturing.
I though they already had enough practice reverse engineering the alien tech at Area 51?
So, the tinfoil hat interpretation of this story would be, of course the Pentagon has the original blueprints in quintuplicate, but it's identified reverse engineering as a key strategic advantage China has over the US (pretty reasonable so far, right?) and has announced this as a way to shuffle some money into building up domestic RE expertise in the defence industry.