I felt something similar walking through Weird Stuff Warehouse and seeing old SGI workstations that I used to covet sitting on shelves for a pittance. Even if you bought them, you probably didn't have a 13w3 monitor or software to get them up. and now weird stuff is gone itself.
It's that "it's gone and can't come back" feeling.
When we look backwards in time, we see lots of tributaries that dried up for various reasons. That SGI workstation is still in your head, it is really up to us to copy and extend those concepts forwards in time.
That software is still sitting on a box of junk in someones basement somewhere, it just has to be found.
First, the B-2 was the first large, complex product in history to be entirely developed digitally. Everything. was in CAD, and only the CAD geometry was authoritative. All drawings printed out were VERY clearly marked warning of this. IIRC, most of this was in Catia, so it should still be possible to read and use that data.
Second, if there's one thing Defense procurement Is good at, it's configuration management. This is doubly true of black programs like the B2, where not only do you want to make sure you never lose data or docs, but also that no bad guys ever have a way to get that data.
Either something went badly off the rails somewhere, or someone needs to rebuild something without the proper clearance. Otherwise, this makes no sense. BTW, the combo of the first complex CAD-only product multiplied by the hideous costs of any black program were largely responsible for the B-2's exorbitant costs.
Congress was stupid to cut B-2 production numbers, though, because the lion's share was fixed, sunk cost that remained the same regardless of whether one or a hundred airplanes were actually built.
(I think I've posted here before about how we spent many millions of dollars to develop a method to repair a major composite part in place. That part was pretty much what you started with when you put the airplane together, so even that was way cheaper than disassembling and reassembling the entire airplane!)
That was an innovative plane and the reality is that nobody is going to wake up and build it again once production stops. Once you break up a team, the team is gone — that’s why we always build submarines, even if unnecessary. You have to keep the people and plant working.
That tooling was going to be compromised and useful to the Soviets or some other adversary. There is a well established record of traitors selling plans or materials to the KGB/FSB/Chinese intelligence that have been caught. Also, from a PR perspective, a headline like “Air Force spends $50M/year to guard stealth bomber tooling untouched in 30 years” isn’t great either.
I mean if instead of discussing a topic freely on HN you were supposed to share your information using some I-1969 standard form with sections of one word answers, how many compelling and sensible posts would we usually see.
Many people are reasonable shrewd with their own money, and about stuff that directly impacts them. But people in charge of government organisations often have very different incentives and concerns.
(Other big organisations in the private sector can also go haywire. Especially when the threat from competition is low.)
That being said, it destroyed a large part of the Canadian aeronautical industry since Avro ceased operations soon after and the well trained workforce was scattered to the States. There's a long history of Canadian governments doing shortsighted things like killing industries and then paying out of the nose to try to restart the industry every generation/ See shipbuilding in Canada and how Canada can't build ships for its own navy now, despite being one of the largest shipbuilders in the world in the early 20th century.
I agree though, the government has been short sighted and procurement of ships, planes has been a debacle for years. It seems that either way a lot of money is going to be burnt, either by propping up a non-competitive industry locally, or burnt buying something insanely expensive like F-35s from an ally.
I think this is why people like to refer to the Communinist Party of China (CPC [1]) as the CCP, because it evokes memories of the Soviet Union.
[1] cpc.people.com.cn
“In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.”
Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.