GPS-OCX is Dead.

[murphey]

Pentagon pulls the plug on one of the military's most troubled space programs

Problems with the ground system would have "put current GPS military and civilian capabilities at risk."

arstechnica.com

I spent a few months on it in 2017. Went to lunch one day and didn't go back. Major disaster back then, had no interest working on another disaster altho the paycheck was ok (6 figures) and only 15 min drive from home. So now I've worked on two of the most expensive non-aircraft, non-war-specific software disasters in history. The FAA AAS program was killed in 1993 after spending $6 billion, which is almost $14 Billion in today's dollars.

Which in the world of federal govt. is petty cash.

 

[Bob Noel]

we could play buzzword bingo with the linked article...

 

[DaleB]

So, OCX did what it was supposed to do... which was to suck a few billion dollars out of the government.

 

[Bob Noel]

So, OCX did what it was supposed to do... which was to suck a few billion dollars out of the government.

Acquisition/procurement objectives:

The Government has a big bag of money. The Government's objective is to spend the big bag of money.

The contractor knows the Government has a big bag on money. The contractor's objective is to get the big bag of money.

There are no other objectives.

:-/

 

[Van Johnston]

I spent over 1/2 my USAF career in satellite command and control, on both the operations side and acquisition/development side. Never worked on GPS though, so can't offer any first hand observations about this particular development. But generally speaking, the unstated presumption in USG space system development is the satellite or space segment is the exquisite and hard part, and all the infrastructure - launch vehicle, control segment - is the easy part, and can do whatever the space segment needs it to do. In my experience I saw tradeoff studies between space segment capability and space segment cost, but never trades between space segment capability and control segment capability/cost. That may be the case here; the space segment capability got out too far ahead of what the control segment could do. Affordably anyway. To paraphrase George W. Bush, satellite control is hard.