ULA mostly advocates for the status quo regulations in launch
ULA enjoys a good working relationship with the FAA and addresses licensing issues with the agency in real-time… The FAA is doing an excellent job […]
Month: November 2019
The debate over how Chinese military expenditures should be normalized to dollars
The American defense budget is still over 2.5 times larger than Beijing’s, but China has steadily been closing the gap. Moreover, China faces much lower […]
Commercial launch faces conflicting regulations that slows technology growth
The FAA rules specific to ELVs [Expendable Launch Vehicles] are a voluminous set of prescriptive and detailed regulations. FAA promulgated these ELV regulations almost 15 […]
The never ending challenge of proposing, collecting, and reporting costs consistently
A recurring problem in Government Contracting is that contractors may select from alternative accounting methods without specified criteria governing such selection. Contractors sometimes present cost […]
Risk identification, the acquisition process, and system resiliency
“We want to expand people’s view about what technology is; it includes people and process and is part of a sociotechnical system,” Mineweaser said. “The […]
Podcast: Andrew Hunter on software-defined, hardware-based adaptable systems
Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial group at CSIS, joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a set of papers on adaptable systems, […]
Acquisition headlines
How Anduril’s Palmer Luckey plans to take on Boeing and Lockheed Martin. We’ll see if Marc Andreessen’s theory that good software firms can learn hardware […]
What did we learn from the use of OTA contracts in the 1990s?
In 1994, Congress authorized use of Other Transactions (OT) for the development of prototypes “directly relevant to weapons or weapon systems.” Under this authority, projects […]
Aircraft sustainment costs, inventories, and implications for design choices
The “digital century series” approach for the next-generation fighter could leave the Air Force with more costly small fleets of aircraft that exacerbate growth in […]
How SpaceX does software for 9 vehicles with only 50 developers — and gov’t requiring 50x the staff
The biggest gap in the government today is enterprise services. You go to big companies, they have infrastructure cloud team, they have a platform team, […]
Differing opinions of requirements: how fixed should they be ahead of prototyping?
Here is the opinion of the Requirements & Concepts Panel for the Army Materiel Acquisition Review Committee (AMARC) of 1974: In the opinion of our […]
Do government pricing policies hinder 1,000 fold improvements in cost or capabilities?
Felix is developing a highly differentiated product that he’s been working on for the last 15 years that also has these massive business implications for […]
Does Lockheed own all F-35 data created by military users? Problems of IP.
“We still have concerns, there still are roadblocks as we go to execute,” Fick said. “Everything from something as simple as U.S. government documents that […]
Acquisition headlines
NASA report finds Boeing seat prices are 60% higher than SpaceX. A slice: “[Boeing] has received a total of $4.82 billion from NASA over the […]
Out with the heel-to-toe acquisition process, in with DevOps
We realized it was time to stop the heel-to-toe acquisition process of developing a concept and then going to Combats Development to develop a requirement, […]