From the Scotish Sunday Herald:
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. ….
Neither the NNSA nor the UK Ministry of Defence would say anything about the nature or function of Fogbank. But it is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. US officials have said that manufacturing the material requires a solvent cleaning agent which is “extremely flammable” and “explosive”. The process also involves dealing with “toxic materials” hazardous to workers.
I wish I could say this sort of thing was rare, but it’s disturbingly common. I’ve seen it multiple times in my own career. My favorite incident occured one day when I was sitting bored out of my mind in my cubicle at ATK , and the phone rang. It was someone from elsewhere on the plant; they were having a problem with a coating for some igniter components for a rocket program that ATK inherited from United Tech, when United Tech went under in 2004. The instructions to make the coating came with the rocket, but no matter what they did, the techs couldn’t actually make the stuff. By this point, United Tech near San Jose had been abandoned, and the buildings bulldozed. There was nobody there to ask anymore. But someone found that I had worked there, so they called me up in hopes that I might have been in touch with a former co-worker who knew something, *anything,* about this particular program. When they explained the coating issue to me, they had to wait a minute or so for me to stop laughing.
As it happens, *I* was the one who had cooked up that coating at Untied Tech. I was one of two guys working this issue there; it was the other fellers program, I was providing assistance. Shortly after we got the coating to work, he left United Tech. And apparently he left before all the paperwork could be updated. So the techs at ATK knew what most (but not all) of the ingredients for the coating were, but not the manufacturing process. And there were a grand total of two people on the entire friggen’ planet who could tell them how to fix it. And through sheer dumb luck, they managed to find one of them right off the bat. But if I hadn’t worked there, or if nobody had thought to call me, Odin only knows how many taxpayer-funded manhours would have been blown trying to figure out how to make a coating that this other feller and I whipped up in about 15 minutes.
Heh.
Good luck with “Fogbank.”
So I publish APR and sell aerospace documents, in no small part to help make sure that not all this knowledge is lost.
3 Responses to “See, THIS is why I publish APR!!!!”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I read somewhere that something similar happened with the ablative material used on the Apollo capsules. Apparently NASA tried to make some more to test for their “new” man-on-the-moon program and couldn’t figure out how to make it – with recipe in hand.
…I had a similar situation occur while I was at Dell the second time doing the thankless job of phone tech support. There was an issue regarding the Sound Blaster AWE-64 and Windows 98 and ME that required a tweak to a batch file to force the driver to load in a specific place in upper memory. I determined the fix and worked up the technical change order for manufacturing, as well as the tech support document. This saved Dell millions when a stop ship occurred and I was able to unjam all the logs during a Christmas season, which of course meant I’d get laid off with ingratitude a couple of months later.
…About a year later, I was doing phone tech support for a good reason that didn’t pan out – but that’s another story I’ll save for OMBlog one day – and on the last systems Dell was shipping with ME they encountered the same problem. Except this time the idiots were SHIPPING the systems as-fucked! We started getting in tons of tech support calls, and since I recognized the problem I decided to look up the tech support doc and forward it to everyone on the floor. Come to find out, after I left, they’d change the name of the doc originator to some mid-level manager who was in *MARKETING* and had nothing to do with the technical side whatsoever. I informed my manager, who called that marketing goon, and the marketing goon was almost ready to kill someone because he’d been getting calls for days about the problem! Thanks to Dell’s laying everyone off who knew sound cards, they didn’t have anyone who knew the problem except me, and another layoff a few months later was another example of how they appreciate talent.
Bottom Line; Fire your mid-level managers, not your talent.
That’s one of the main aspects of the non-profit I’ve wanted to set up for the last 15 years, The Aerospace Design Museum. The goal of the ADM was to preserve the information and knowledge of the aerospace industry by saving documents, photo’s, models and most important, the oral histories and knowledge of retirees and workers whose experience was never written down. What would be better to save…a complete Saturn V, or all the info and knowledge that went into building it?
I forgot the word I was looking for when describing what i wanted to do. It’s the one word that’s a synonym for corporate knowledge and experience..that word is “Methodology”
NASA has the habit of hiding failed projects in storage and eventually throwing them out. I built 11 1/8th scale X-33 models for many of the NASA sites and I don’t think one of them is on display. My idea is to show these projects usihg a narrative that shows what was learned from the failures so the next generation doesn’t make the same mistakes.
I’m hoping that I can present this to NASA in such a way to show them that it’s possible to show these projects in such a way that public support is maintained and funding continues or at least interest in space continues. Also, it won’t cost NASA much more than setting up a computer and some display area. Sites could even be set up near the centers in one of the many stores that have closed down, like the underperforming Starbucks..
I doubt that most taxpayers really understand why we’re going back to the Moon. Most of the sites have models and documentation of these projects in storage and what I’m going to propose is each site could have a small space that could show a lot of these projects and be set up so access to the info is easy and recording of oral histories is done in such a way to make everyone contributing info is important and will be remembered.
If you take a look at my Yahoo group Aerospace_design_museum I have a few pics of an important piece of aerospace that’s going to be scrapped because of PCB contamination. I’ve been in contact with UCLA and tracked down the person who hopefully saved the wind tunnel models.
The facility is North Americans tri-sonic wind tunnel. it has 6 33′ diameter tanks that get charged up to 100 psi. I remember one of the reasons that MacDac didn’t win the X-33 contract was there was no autoclave big enough to make the 33′ dia. carbon fiber fuel tank. So, how hard would it be to split a air tank in half so you could lay-up the cf tank then close it and turn it into an autoclave?