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 lifetime of the commercial crew program, compared to $3.14 billion for SpaceX. However, for the first time the government has published a per-seat price: $90 million for Starliner and $55 million for Dragon.”
Report warns US Army to watch out for creeping operational costs with future helos. Operations & Support (O&S) costs for Future Vertical Lift expected to be ~65.6% of program, and 33.8% will be procurement, leaving RDT&E at only… 1.6%? That sounds wrong. Perhaps if more effort were put into RDT&E, with emphasis on the Test & Evaluation, then you’d have a more simple/reliable system, you could afford more of them, with knock-on effects in O&S.
First 2 Columbia SSBNs Will Have Cost-Plus Contract; Remaining Subs Will Be Fixed-Price. Read it this way: don’t worry about cost control on first two units, where plenty of cost data will flow to gov’t as the basis for pricing follow-on ships, which can then be beat under fixed price contracts and earn handsome profits for at lest a few orders. Consider the time lags associated here: “The contract needs to be in place in [Fiscal Year 2021] so that we can get construction rolling and meet that FY ‘27 delivery.”
Related: Navy Beginning Tech Study to Extend Trident Nuclear Missile Into the 2080s. the biggest effort is replacing the Electrostatically-Supported Gyro Navigator (ESGN) as the inertial navigator for the Trident D5 missile.
Palantir Software Engineers: How Much They Make. Short cut: $124-159K salary, $41-44K stock, $16-23K bonus. That’s in-line or beats entry-level engineers at Apple, Microsoft, Google, and most definitely IBM.
Contractor-reliant F-35 model a legacy of Total System Performance Responsibility. “TSPR dictated that the Pentagon should take a step back and give the contractor greater freedom to be innovative in its management practices without the traditional level of government oversight. Instead of this, Kendall said TSPR institutionalised vendor lock, or sole source sustainment roles, and created poor incentives.” And if you go further back, it’s another Total Package Procurement.
Related: Stealthy Lockheed F-35 Breaks Down Too Often, Pentagon Says. We’ve heard reports of F-35A increased mission capability rates, but they still lag significantly in “full mission capable” status.
Huntington Ingalls lays keel for US Navy’s first Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyer.
ComNavOps: LCS OTH Missile Procurement. A slice: “From the Navy’s 2020 Budget Highlights we see a procurement plan for NSM of 101 missiles from 2020-24 inclusive. That’s an average acquisition of 20 missiles per year. That’s significantly short of the 256/1800 requirement!”
Potentially The Most Revolutionary Aircraft You Have Never Heard Of Has Flown
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