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18h57m
During a visit to Michoud in 2023, for example, inspectors discovered that welding on a component of the SLS Core Stage 3 did not meet NASA standards. Per the report, unsatisfactory welding performed on a set of fuel tanks led directly to a seven-month delay in EUS completion.
“According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision,” the OIG says. [...]
Welders are highly qualified and well-paid craftsmen. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been hit particularly hard by management that doesn’t value tenured, expensive employees.
If you read the OIG report, it states:
"Michoud officials stated that it has been difficult to attract and retain a contractor workforce with aerospace manufacturing experience in part due to Michoud’s geographical location in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lower employee compensation relative to other aerospace competitors."
The entire purpose of SLS is to create high-paying jobs and they just... didn't. Imagine having a blank check and cheaping out. Amazing.
If you can get away with the share buybacks and other self enrichment, with no accountability mechanisms, this is a natural outcome based on who is in charge of these companies. But, if we were to have made these workers government employees to pay them the desired wages (and cut out the management and shareholder middlemen) as well as “pay, train, retrain”, we would have been laughed at as promoting government waste. Much harder to skim government wages as a for profit enterprise vs government contracts.
Like a religion or a cult, you have to cut through the ideology; the ideas are parroted to control the narrative.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-rot-at-the-heart-of...
https://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-disaster-american-bus...
The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)
What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.
The USSR had just beat the US to put the first man into space. The same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy set out the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then he was assassinated.
People wanted to make that happen. So they did.
There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.
That's a funny perspective. USSR just before that time mostly killed communist apparatus members¥ and with them innocent people. In such an environment, there naturally won't be too many dissidents, so I don't think they registered.
They did kill a lot of supposed sympathiers of pre-Soviet Russia, though.
¥ As they say, internal competition is the most fierce one.
Are you forgetting that the USSR took control of about a dozen other countries during and after the war? That led to events like Katyn, which had nothing to do with communist dissidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
While this is how this story is regularly retold it's not quite accurate. Polling around the Moon program tells that while there was a large minority of people vehemently in support of it, the overall response was mixed, and NASA was generally seen as a good target to cut funding from. [1]
I think there are lots of parallels between the Moon landings in the 60s and the idea of colonizing Mars today. In particular, most people don't think it's possible, and so they think it's a waste of money. The Apollo program only received majority approval once we landed on the Moon. People also tend to dramatically overestimate the cost of achieving great things in space. Polling suggested people thought the Moon missions were taking up about 22% of the budget. In modern times it's down to less than 0.5%, and that's with NASA blowing tens of billions of dollars of pork projects like the SLS.
Overall support for the Moon program only began to steadily rise in the years after human spaceflight was defacto completely cancelled by Nixon, and people were able to coolly reflect on what a ridiculous and important achievement that was.
[1] - https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...
According to your own link, the thing people don't like isn't space exploration, it's paying for it:
Because obviously; people don't like paying for anything.
If you ask someone without a lot of surplus in their life whether they'd rather have the money themselves in tax cuts or benefits or they want to spend it on astronauts, they want food on their table. Especially when they're overestimating how much the space program costs.
But the question was, did people want to work for NASA? And then you get to select your idealists from the >75% in favor of the space program.
No, it just aligned with elite interests ("If they can put nuke platforms above our heads and we can't put some above theirs, it doesn't matter how much better our economy runs, in theory.") There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen, so it didn't.
Also, you remove that second S and first R from that second sentence, and it would still be true. Our entry into the space race wasn't a matter of unmatched moral nobility.
One more factor: decolonisation created new countries. That created a unique competition for ideological supremacy.
Corporate culture changed radically in the 70s adopting Milton Friedman views that ethics and responsibility towards society have no place in the private sector, and as a consequence started maximizing profits in spite of everything else.
Corporations never had "responsibility towards society". In fact I much prefer corporations that don't pretend to have such a burden. It's almost always a false front.
Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.
Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.
Maybe, but somehow their behaviour and their products and services changed. Companies are made of people, and individuals had more freedom to put value in what they did, they took pride in the quality of their work. After Friedman everything got "optimized" for revenue, even if this meant screwing the customers (or the society). There are some things that cannot possibly work with this "self-regulated" market, so if we want to accept this way of doing business, we should move back some responsibilities to the public sector (healthcare, infrastructures, rehabilitation, education, research), because the search for "immediate gratification" of shareholders can't move the society as a whole out of local maxima that are far away from society best possibilities.
I'm not convinced that's exactly what he thought, though corporates might have gone that way.
I think we're talking about highly-skilled precision welders who built things like the F-1 rocket engine. These people didn't work for NASA in the 1960s: they worked for private contractors like Rocketdyne. NASA doesn't build rocket engines, and never has.
The Apollo project was the most ambitious engineering effort since the Manhattan project. What was next though? We didn't establish a moon base and instead opted for the Space Shuttle program which was considerably less ambitious than Apollo/Saturn V.
We were spending more money. There was competition among contractors. And there were skilled low-level labourers from WWII.
While SpaceX has been successful and innovative, it certainly doesn’t keep folks around. Average tenure is ~3.6 years. Those folks are smart, and can always find work elsewhere. Are we optimizing for the individual? Or for an aerospace manufacturing and supply chain system that requires care and feeding over decades? A tale as old as time.
What was it for the Apollo programme?(The entire programme was 11 years [1].)
I’m not arguing against having more people at NASA. Simply against the claim that this is the evidenced issue. Unless the entire American space programme is a failure, private operators are not the root problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
The Apollo program doesn’t seem to be a good example of a space pipeline that is sustainable for a few decades at least.
Correct. OP suggested the root of the problem is we haven't made "these workers government employees." The Apollo programme had lots of government employees. Commercial interests clearly aren't at the root of the problem.
Im pretty sure the government employees working on Apollo were mostly already there before the program or stayed there afterwards, so their tenure was probably much longer than 3.6 years. And a lot of work on Apollo was done by contractors (for example building basically all flight hardware as far as I know).
As a private company how are you even getting those numbers? I'm certain they vary dramatically by specialty within SpaceX.
I think LinkedIn exposes these stats on Company pages. Search company and click the Insights tab.
Edit: Median tenure is 2.8 yrs according to LinkedIn.
Average tenure will always be low in a growing company, not due to people leaving but due to people joining.
Can see here space X has more than doubled the number of people the past few years, that is enough to explain that "low tenure", its just due to people joining.
https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/62ac4aacc75a115ff9dcb9bc/639...
Sure, but we aren't talking about hiring astronauts (who ironically do tend to spend their entire career in government because it's the only place to get the thrills they want from fighter pilot to space).
We're talking about quality professional welders. Stereotyping them into one bucket would be silly, but I think it's fair to assume there are a large number of welders who wouldn't mind a guaranteed, high paying job with a guaranteed retirement package.
Extend that to like 90% of the jobs required to make a spaceship...
Do you make more welding for the USG than you do welding in the private sector?
If so it might be the only government job in the country that beats the private sector in terms of pay.
People say this so confidently, shortly before the layoff that keeps them out of the job for half-a-year (for the 3rd time).
Why would the qualified people who desire to work in that location and have better options suddenly work for the government. If the idea is to train non-experienced people that's what Boeing did. What is going to prevent them for leaving for other local work that pays better once they have some experience.
What the government should have done is reduce their pay for missing deadlines by having milestones in the contract. At that point paying more makes economic sense and wages would rise.
Because government jobs are secure, Boeing subcontractor jobs where you are a cheap disposal cog are not. If you don’t see the value in security to someone making $20-$40/hr who needs healthcare benefits, you might start there.
A union fixes this in the long term, but that will take time. Government can employ rapidly. Something, quickly, needs to change before we forget how to build because MBAs, accountants, and lawyers burned the place down for shareholder value. There are two astronauts stuck in space very publicly demonstrating this.
A welder making double outside of the government would take a chance the more experience they have. Similiar to how many people here would rather get a job at Amazon vs the government. Chances are you are out in a year or two compared to a government job where you can survive longer for half of the pay.
Remember we are talking about experienced aircraft welders. They are not available for 20 an hour when industry is paying so much more.
Collins Aerospace is offering $19/hr for third shift welding work on aircraft. It was referred to me by someone in the labor community, and I spoke with HR under the guise of a prospective candidate to confirm. They do $26B/year in revenue.
This should be a top level comment - it kind of reinforces the point of the whole article. I understand that 15/hr is the (planned) US minimum wage?
People have been talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 for so long now (the "Fight for 15" movement started in 2012) that the inflation-adjusted value of that would now have to be almost $21/hr. However, the minimum wage is still $7.25 and seems to be likely to remain so.
The federal minimum wage has zero chance of increasing unless we get a supermajority of Democrats in both wings of congress and the presidency. Republicans, voters included, largely do not want the minimum wage to go up.
excuse me but what is third shift welding? is this the security lvl of the welding job?thank you
Third shift is the overnight shift at a 24-hour workplace. Usually that means midnight to 8 AM.
The US has already forgotten how to build. This process has happened for 30 years, a full generation.
NASA has piss all experience hiring and keeping the best fabricators, the government uses contractors to build things. The problem is with this contractor being rotten and NASA not being willing to kick them to the curb.
New Orleans is one of the greatest cities in the world and definitely has access to experienced welders, this argument makes no sense to me.
Not only that but Stennis Space Center is nearby. It's no Cape Canaveral but it's not as though aerospace is completely unheard of there.
Stennis is not getting its personnel from local grad schools.
Welders don't go to grad school so I'm not sure what we're talking about here.
Stennis isn’t going to keep welders around. Those are the design and engineering support personnel.
Might want to remember that experienced welders demand stronger compensation. Can't have that compensation going to the wrong people, though. Boeing can't survive as a business if it had to compensate fairly!
There have to be a lot of welders in that region due to the oil and gas and heavy industry. If there aren't enough welders there I don't know what area would have enough. As others have said, maybe they're not paying them enough?
You’re building rockets and complaining about the cost of skilled labor?
I always found the obsession with location-determined compensation weird. Experienced workers know exactly what their skills are worth regardless of the local labor market, so why even try surpressing their wages?
Besides when you're an aerospace company producing rockets for NASA you are not building a product that the local market pays for, so why should your workers be affected by what the local market is willing to pay for their skills? How can the local labor market accurately value their skills if the product of their labor isn't sold in the same market?
Because with non-remote work like welders you're competing with the local market for welders. Of course if they're paying 30% below market that means they're not properly doing location-based compensation.
It's also a plain idiotic move because you'll end up with workers who cost 70% as much and are half as productive, at best, or at worst workers who cost 10,000% more because they screw up a critical component and cause massive delays.
I live in New Orleans. It’s 1h away of commute.
They pay a solid 30% below market. ( 100k for a senior eng position )
At 30% below market, I imagine most of their applicants are either true believers, fuck-ups, or lying about their experience. Probably mostly fuck-ups.
Fuckups lying about their experience who truly believe they can get away with it.
The tri-fuckta.
There is a reason that major contractors for government have widely distributed facilities in politically relevant states.
Ideally there should be one facility in all 435 districts.
This isn't ideal for optimizing quality work.
aka they aren’t willing to pay, many such cases.
Their wages are fine, there is simply a shortage of labor which is everybody's problem and needs government intervention in the form of tax dollars or something. /s
UNO’s enrollment has dropped by 2/3rds since Katrina. What did people think was going to happen to the labor supply?
How did they build LIGO then? Fairy dust?
Related: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/12/whats_b...
The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.
Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
I think it is a great development, the US decided to export jobs to other countries to pay less its own workers, so it fits well that now it has no expertise to build its war machines.
It doesn't even have to be like that. People want comfy WFH service jobs and college is basically just becoming 13th-16th grade at this point.
America is an advanced economy and the advanced work is where the money and comfy life is. No one did anything wrong, really the problem is that too many are doing everything right.
The only real answers to this is either immigrants (who undercut local workers) or some kind of wage incentive rebalancing/redistribution (which pisses off service workers above the median income).
No, LIRP and ZIRP are totally responsible for fundamentally causing 'growth' businesses to be valued ridiculously higher than 'dividend' businesses. Basically any business that was "profitably make stuff now" had to compete with "no profit now, but we'll for sure change the world in 20 years" for capital and making the DCFV denominator's risk-free-rate term 0 tilted the table 90 degrees toward the latter.
The reason comfy "knowledge" WFH jobs are so much more financially desireable than anything else is absolutely the fault of the FOMC. They killed price discovery.
I don't know why so many people on HN get ZIRP wrong.
The problem with ZIRP isn't the absolute level of interest. The problem is that the central bank thinks it can simulate negative interest through QE. The zero lower bound is ultimately a price guarantee by the government that it will offer an infinite quantity of bonds to the general public to prevent the interest rate from dipping negative.
Any form of lower price control will cause an oversupply. In this case (mostly rich) people are oversupplying capital to the government instead of simply spending it.
Since the money is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, their investment decisions are going to either be a random crap shot, since information is distributed in the economy and the people who have information to make informed purchasing decisions have no money, while the people with money have no idea what to do with it, or it will endlessly get cycled through more QE and government debt.
In a hypothetical scenario with negative interest, wealth deconcentrates so that money goes to where it needs to be.
100% agree. No-profit high valuation businesses can easily borrow its way into existence, and profitable businesses in the real economy have to compete for the same pool of money.
Everything about this reeks to me. Why do we need to build so many warships? (To fight China? We're going to war with another nuclear power?) Why are we fighting Houthi rebels? But also, why isn't the government sponsoring this training? Why is it only thousands, and not hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers being trained? And when did the call go out that they were going to be offering training? (I never hear about these initiatives, or when I do, it's for a couple thousand people to get into a position that pays $18/hr starting. Might as well walk onto a warehouse job.) If this is so important, why did they close so many shipyards during realignment?
Like, from every angle, it's ill-conceived.
Because they're attacking commercial shipping heading to and from the Suez Canal? I mean it wlso pleases our Saudi allies but the shipping attacks are the main concern.
>Why do we need to build so many warships?
Igitur quī desīderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").[1] While I think there's immense scope for debate over what constitutes appropriate preparation in this or any other context, I believe the core idea, that effective preparation for war can prevent it, has merit. (Though it should not be the only way a country works to prevent war!) And there are ancillary uses for militaries, such as the prevention of piracy mentioned elsewhere.
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum
This has been posted here a good bit before, but adding it in as relevant.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
We've let everything go to rot for the sake of a giant financial ponzi scheme that we call the U.S. economy.
Government incentivized wall-st backed outsourcing of critical skill sets turned out to be a bad idea.
There was an ad for Navy shipbuilding recently that did the rounds online, targeting gig workers [1]. The snake grows hungry, and slithers toward its tail. :)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1IZC3t8NRc
You must have seen how beautiful the welds are on the Rocketdyne F-1 joints. Whoever made those put pride in their work.
If anyone else is curious this article has close-up photos of the joints: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
Can someone please explain why this is a high quality welding job? In India, welders are not paid handsomely and are rarely rigorously trained but I'm unable to distinguish between a welding job done by them compared to these photos.
didnt read the article but I am assuming it is the material they are working on. copper and iron are easy to handle but aluminum is a bit harder and then there is stuff like titanium which recuire very high skills… and all those cases with titanium with steel or whatever. they need to know what they are doing. …. got my information from my ex roommate who welded bikes with titanium and he was a highly skilled enthusiast.
https://www.cwbgroup.org/association/how-it-works/how-it-wor...
Oh just like Skyrim smithing.
The photos don't do a great job of showing it, and a lot of the skills in welding aren't immediately visible.
Welding joints that look good as-welded, instead of passing over it with a grinder and a coat of paint to cover up any imperfections? That needs decent skills.
Welding thin material, and not having the heat of the welding process just melt a hole right through? That's needs skill.
Welding thin material to thick material, where it's easy to blow a hole in the thin part before the thick part gets up to temperature? That needs skill.
Welding complex shapes where some of the work has to be done upside-down and you have to control what's going to happen to that molten metal under gravity? That's a special skill.
Doing continuous welds around complex shapes, where you have to keep the weld puddle in the right place and moving at a constant rate while completely repositioning your body and moving your feet? That's a special skill.
Because of thermal expansion/contraction, to get precision results you don't just put the parts in the desired location and weld them - you need special 'fixturing' that anticipates the inevitable change of shape due to the heat of welding. That's a special skill.
Welding joints where, to prevent contamination, you need to get shielding gas not only at the front of the joint but also at the back? That's a special skill.
Welding unusual metals, like special high temperature rocket nozzles might involve? That's a special skill.
And most importantly, if you're welding a part that takes 40 hours of welding and 39 hours in you slip on the pedal and ruin the part, you've lost loads of work. So a part that needs 40 hours of welding requires exceptional consistency too.
Of course none of this stuff is impossible. But for sure it's skilled work, and not easy to hire for.
MVP, thank you.
A welding book I had mentioned that stick welding aluminum is no longer done because it is too hard and used the F-1 stick welds as an example of such welds. I think they we not so much welds as strategic strengthening.
I'm surprised they stick welded it. I know they oxy-acetylene welded aluminum aircraft in WW2, (which I've attempted, I found it impossible to do) and TIG welding has existed since the 50s.
I guess they felt, correctly, that they were not just making a weld, not just making an engine or a rocket, but helping to put people on the moon. "Building a cathedral", indeed.
Much more than that though, they would have been highly skilled people with thousands of hours of welding high pressure piping and exotic metals. It doesn't matter how slowly or carefully somebody goes, or how much they revere what they are working on, if they aren't experienced then they will turn out poor work.
Having NASA come and test stuff.. Creates a 'see what sticks' kind of attitude. Eat your own dogfood
The obvious patch for this is to have monetary penalties for failing inspection written into the contract, so that submitting shoddy work has a price measured in dollars. Money is the unit of caring, at least at a corporate scale, so there needs to be money involved if you want them to care systematically.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
One of the very interesting parts of the report is that the OIG recommended 4 areas that needed to be fixed/worked on. NASA agreed to 3 of them, and was working on making those areas better. The one recommendation that NASA did not agree with was to monetarily penalize Boeing for continuous quality issues. I found that interesting.
Regulatory capture
Inspections can help to an extent, but you can't inspect quality into a product. The customer can't anticipate every possible serious failure. Good results in safety-critical systems require an organizational culture that focuses on quality throughout the product lifecycle.
Yeah but as we see with Boeing now, when its shitshow, its more like crap is landing left and right and not a situation of overall excellence with one singular failing point.
Meaning many failures would be spotted. Maybe not 100% automatically corrected but much better situation than current regulatory capture one and stuff we see in news every second week.
They’re not. You must be one of those people that hears something once and quotes it as gospel. My BIL did that yesterday: “nfl viewership has been down because of all the different platforms, and it’s been trending down for years.” As it so happens, last year was their second-best year of ratings since ratings were tracked. But, it fit his narrative, facts be damned.
“We all see the welding school advertisements: Make Over $100,000 As a Welder! And while it’s true that skilled welders are among the most sought-after workers in the job market, the average welder is bringing in $48,000 per year, a far cry from six figures.” [0]
[0] https://primeweld.com/blogs/news/how-much-do-welders-make-in....
This is 1000% false and misleading. My Dad was a journeyman machinist and many of his friends were highly sought after welders in the area we lived. These guys could weld anything anywhere and exceed quality criteria.
Welding is an art and at a certain required level of performance it's not something you teach, but find the folks who have the drive to be that good and want to weld for high precision requirements.
What you've linked is a run of the mill welder. My Dad machined classified parts for USG and NASA. When they'd get those jobs they would go to the guys who had a reputation to be able to produce the die to the spec required. Messing up a multi-ton die of a specific quality could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost material and time. You don't make $48k on those tolerances, even back in the 80s.
I'm not sure how to address this. I sent a link that says "sure some people make 100k+" and your dad was one of them. The link ALSO said "most people make half of that" and your anecdote doesn't refute anything.
Your dad had a a trade skill, and obtained a clearance. Congrats, he is an outlier. Nothing I said was false or misleading.
I can assure you that skilled welders like the ones you need for aerospace applications are rare and valuable. The welding techniques and standards are much higher than your average welding application
I agree with you. 3% of welders make good money. I never disagreed with this.
I had a friend who was a welder for nuclear power plants.
He got shipped around the country.
Not exactly a trade-school C-student.
Had a better house than mine, but I’m a cheapskate.