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NASA says Artemis II report by its inspector general is unhelpful and redundant (arstechnica.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/nasa
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14947835

After concurring with each of the six recommendations in the inspector general's report, Koerner made the following comment:

"NASA is dedicated to continuous enhancement of our processes and procedures to ensure safety and address potential risks and deficiencies," she wrote. "However, the redundancy in the above recommendations does not help to ensure whether NASA’s programs are organized, managed, and implemented economically, effectively, and efficiently."

A careful reading of the second sentence reveals that Koerner feels that the inspector general's efforts are both redundant and unhelpful. This is not accidental language. Koerner's response was certainly reviewed by NASA's senior managers, who could have flagged and removed the text. And yet they went through with it.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

As an auditor, I feel this, and I sorta-kinda agree with NASA. The OIG has been all over the Artemis program, and rightfully so, but these audits are extremely disruptive and usually take up huge amounts of time from subject-matter experts to explain why they do things and how it fits into their quality-control. I've never seen so many OIG reports come out so quickly, and at such massive variation in quality. If I ran three audits on the same project, asking the same questions, people would rightly hate me too, especially since I am not a rocket scientist, and neither are the OIG people.

Here the OIG delivers a 36page report, the result of probably millions of dollars in both direct and opportunity cost, and their conclusions are 6 things NASA already knew, 3 of which they've already done and the other 3 are already well in the works.

Ffs, the document lists bent doors on utility cabinets as "signs of excess damage to the launch facility" in the same breath as damaged heat tiles (which are a problem). I fully agree we need audits on multi-million projects, but this is a bit extreme, and NASA is probably justified in being annoyed at this. Audits are great if they help, but this report seems exceptionally nitpicky about stuff that's either already known, or irrelevant.