Ryan M. Patrick

Posted this to X/Twitter, will post the story here too.

I’ve talked about this before, but after I got through grad school I PCSed to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque and became the mission manager for the STP-2 launch. That launch was a task order on the OSP-3 contract, which had a few different vendors on it – SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and…Lockheed Martin.

No, not ULA. LockMart. This was the Athena launch vehicle, which only launched 7 times – and only once after 9/11. It was a piece of junk. But, the vendor had received a lot of GFE (government-furnished equipment), and some of that had transferred to SpaceX in the 2012-2013 timeframe when they were still an underdog.

But this was 2017 now and there was about $20M worth of equipment left at the Cape belonging to my task order, the only one active with SpaceX. Mostly stuff to integrate payloads onto a PAF or equivalent or networking/communications gear.

Problem is…they could only account for about half of it.

Shockingly, it wasn’t even really SpaceX’s fault. It was both theirs and the governments. Everyone was so focused on getting satellites up and into orbit that this equipment had been forgotten about.

Unfortunately, I had DCMA and DCAA on my ass about $10M in government-owned equipment that no one could account for.

This is why the Pentagon can’t pass an audit, by the way. Take my little situation and multiply it by thousands, and that’s where all of those “missing billions of dollars” are.

So, I had to stop everything and go out to the Cape and try and hunt it down. It took me about a week, and some close calls (there’s a lot of stuff at CCSFS/KSC that’s not space-related – think submarine missile launches and whatnot) with me ending up in areas that I wasn’t supposed to be in – but I tracked most (but not all) of it down in an obscure, abandoned highbay near SLC-41. If you’ve read Lag Delay, you know where the location of the climax came from – this exact experience. There’s a TON of unused buildings there holding all kinds of treasures.

I got a bunch of 45th guys to come tag it and move it to a better location and DCMA wrote off the rest as a loss. As to where the rest of the material (a couple of server racks and some machining tools) went – who knows? But it wasn’t my problem anymore.

That, in a nutshell, is why the Pentagon will never be able to pass an audit. There’s too many moving pieces, too few people looking at the books, and lots of poor junior officers trying to track down abandoned hardware that we don’t need anymore.