Incompetence and bigotry at NASA and Lockheed Martin
Joshua Foxworth
In a brutal podcast posted a year ago that I have just discovered, an engineer hired by a minority subcontractor hired by Lockheed Martin during the decades-long development of the Orion capsule gives a blow-by-blow account of the failed culture at both the agency and the company that has resulted in it taking more than two decades to build only a handful of capsules for more than $30 billion, capsules that are still not quite ready for a lunar landing mission.
The engineer’s name is Joshua Foxworth. The time period for his story appears to have occurred sometime between 2021 to 2025, so much of what Foxworth describes is dated. Nonetheless, all the bad culture he describes still exists in both the SLS and Orion programs, as well as within the middle management at NASA.
I have embedded his podcast below. It is long, but well worth watching. He is apparently no longer working in the space business, and during his approximately year-long or so experience he found himself working on difficult engineering projects surrounded by unqualified managers at both NASA and Lockheed Martin — most of whom were hired to fill DEI racial/gender quotas — who had no technical experience, had done nothing valid before he arrived, and demanded he do all the work, without any support and equipment. When the two projects he worked on both failed — as he expected and predicted — these unqualified managers then used Foxworth as the scapegoat and had him fired.
Foxworth notes that this absurd system existed because of the DEI racial/gender quota system that both NASA and Lockheed Martin followed faithfully at the time and which is still deeply embedded in the corporate/government world. Both favored minorities and women in their own staffing, routinely hiring unqualified individuals simply to maintain those racial and gender quotas, including minority contractors who in turn were also unqualified. To get any engineering done they all hired true engineers at the bottom of the ladder — mostly white according to Foxworth — to do the work. Since the upper managers did not know how to do it, and could provide no guidance or mentoring, and since they were protected by DEI from firing, the blame when things went sour had to always fall on those underlings.
Foxworth focuses on the DEI nature of this disaster. It certainly plays a part, forcing whites into the lowest paying positions with no chance of promotion while protecting the minorities who have real futures within the agency or company, even though they are patently unqualified for the work.
It is also true that Foxworth’s podcast only tells us his side of the story. Nonetheless, it rings very true to me. Moreover, to me DEI is only one component. Foxworth is really describing the overall failed culture at NASA that many have documented repeatedly for almost four decades, since the Challenger accident. He also illustrates in general the failure of Orion and SLS, both of which have been nothing more than government jobs program, designed not to get into space but to stretch out the work as long as possible in order to funnel those tax dollars to NASA and Lockheed Martin. DEI only made this bad system worse.
Whether NASA administrator Jared Isaacman can fix it remains unknown. Foxworth does not believe it can be fixed. I tend to agree. It is apparent Isaacman does not have the clout to really reduce this failed NASA workforce. At a minimum all he can do is transfer as much NASA work to the private sector of new startups (avoiding old companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing). This new space industry, involving companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Firefly, New Glenn, and others, do not use DEI quotas, and clearly hire people based solely on talent and engineering capability.
By funneling the work to them, Isaacman will at least succeed in partly neutering this bankrupt government culture of make-work and racial bigotry.
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I have a friend who just transferred to the Orion program, working on software. From my conversation with him I’d say NASA and Lockheed-Martin are using generous amounts of hopium in their flight software development. I want to be wrong about that, but you don’t always get what you want.
Two things.
Forty years ago my brother graduated with a degree in Management. They fully indoctrinated him to believe that with a BS in Management one could manage any kind of work as long as the budget was managed. We would argue about this. I contended and still fully believe that you have to have some knowledge of the work being done to manage it. A case in point was a VP of a program in an aerospace company I worked for. Myself as a military officer, I had over a decade of active duty and was at the time a reservist, saw him as a good leader. He understood what was going on. I found out that in his earlier days he was just a mediocre engineer. The thing was, he had the background to do the job. The current crop of DEI hires often are MBAs that don’t know anything.
I worked for Lockheed Martin for 21 years. Before I retired in 2017, Human Resources was destroying the Corporation through DEI. Unless you were very talented you had to be a racial minority, ethnic minority or female to get promoted. I knew some that were competent but there were others that should have been promoted out the door. In addition if a manager was a problem it was the subordinates fault; I had one manager screaming at me about something that I had nothing to do with which I reported to HR because it was causing a very hostile work environment and later found out that HR listed me as being the problem. I am glad I retired because I would have been fired for being an older, white, straight male.
It can work the other way around too: In my career I’ve seen smart, competent engineers and PhD’s made manager and fail horribly. Some had the arrogance to think that because they earned Phd that this managing thing can’t be nearly as difficult.
I first noticed something similar while in the service. and then noticed it also on the civilian side. There are some people who are fantastic doing the technical end, but were horrible at management and vice versa. Unfortunately in all too many organizations in order to be promoted one is forced to be in management while those who were excellent managers were frozen out because they could not do their technical jobs.
Have you read, or are you familiar with the ‘Peter Principle’, folks in large organizations tend to get promoted beyond their level of competence?
I have seen outstanding technical personnel passed over in government departments for DEI candidate who were unqualified, yet the work was always sent to the people who should have headed the section in question. I have seen contracting given to minority owned “firms” which were masks for firms like Boeing or L3 because minority owned firms qualified for no bid status allowing the majors to bid up contracts to outrageous amounts. I will not comment on the contracting officers who often sought to influence the awards committees and the lack of action when complaints were made about this unprofessional conduct. I will also not mention discuss what happened when I spoke to the IG about these incidents excpet to say if I made an issue out of it my career would end. The entire DEI is a ghastly fraud and conmans dream for grifting.
I worked at a major defense contractor in the early 1980’s. This period was the actual beginning of the DEI demand for Federal contracts. Since this particular contractor hated blacks with a passion – they went out and hired every female engineering graduate they could find. The gals were told to sit down, shut-up, and observe the process. A couple were kind of cute – which got numerous real engineers fired pronto.
In 1968 , as a new hire by IBM, the OPD branch office received its annual AA/EO (Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity) presentation from “corporate.” It was about one hour in length by someone from corporate HQ with a certain amount of time set aside for Q&A.
At its conclusion, the audience of about 40 employees was silent with no questions. The meeting was adjourned without further comment and, as a new hire, I approached the Branch Manager who had recently made the decision to hire me.
I asked if this was indeed IBM corporate policy? He indicated it was and asked why I questioned whether or not it was? Me, being a naïve and “unthinking” bozo, thoughtfully asserted, “was this not a case of IBM using the “virtue” or discrimination to end the “evil” of discrimination? He smirked and replied, “I suppose that is one way of looking at it, but IBM does not look at it that way.” Further demonstrating that I had not satisfactorily understood the presentation, I asserted, “apparently, equal does not mean equal?”
He glared at me in silence while I quickly determined my time should be better spent……….
NASA receives %0.35 of the budget. Medicare/Medicaid/Public-Health received %27.
That’s 77 times more money going to the poisonously corrupt pharmaceutical industry and medical fraud industry than the industry (NASA) which hires people who try to do real positive work even though they may not be good at it.
Horrifying. I feel sorry for all the white young men who are graduating from high school and college and entering the work force.
Joshua Foxworth does a great job analyzing and presenting the problem. And he’s courageous both in the way he stood up to the bureaucracy, and in making YouTube a video about it… even naming names.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson says a common psychological response to being promoted beyond your capabilities (which is what DEI does) is to become a raging tyrant. Three of my most recent bosses have been like this.
I worked at Raytheon McKinney, TX for 3 years 2019-2022. It’s not just sub-contractors, white males are 3rd class citizens at the primes, too. Maybe even morso, there. The traditional, legacy, Cold War era defense and aerospace industries are sclerotic and incompetent. I will never work for them again, which will be tough as that’s about all that’s left in DFW.
Thanks to Dave for pointing out that this has been going on for a long time.
Sociology is the airstrip woke warplane pilots use to attack other disciples.
I seem to remember the only real pushback coming from nuclear weapons specialists–you know the usual suspects were just slavering to get at them…the latest attempts featured Trans:
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/how-the-nukes-were-queered-case-study-dei-political-and-bureaucratic-weapon
Instead of the government-bad mantra of free-traitors who weakened American industry–hiding behind flag lapels—I say these institutions need to be protected from outside forces that can get into private outfits like ASTRA as easily as the military.
Otherwise, the argument is no different than “see how bad pederast priests were? Time to 86 the Church.
Worked as a drug discovery scientist under a Sr. VP of research information systems at a major pharma with no backgound in biomedicine, biomedical research, or anything related to the life sciences. Female of course. Had to have the basics of drug development 101 explained at a sixth grade level. Often didn’t get it, which our secretary found stunning because she did get it. The old-timers simply shook their heads knowing they would soon retire thanks to the company’s heyday when they hired people who knew what they were doing.
There are a lot of stories out there about NASA contracting like Joshua’s, alas. And, it does make you wonder just how much it is to blame for the long development delays and overruns of the aspects of Orion that Foxworth was *not* involved with, to say nothing of Lockheed’s other flagship contracting programs.
I gather things are shifting at NASA, from what I hear from my Goddard friend. The problem is, it’s all so systemic. Executive orders and new management can only go so far. And whatever changes this administration makes will die a quick death if the next election goes the other way.
Increasingly, I think that only a fundamental revisiting of the entire Civil Rights Act legal settlement is going to be necessary to really address all these problems.
That would be met with riots of course….time for a Ray Donovan approach
I feel for you. I worked for Lockheed, Northrop, CSC etc on federal contracts for a number of years and have seen all this stuff play out. My only advice here is realize when the game is rigged and get out while you are still employed. I started working for minority contractors for the remainder of my career and that was a lot better. Believe it or not Xerox was actually worse than Lockheed. I was told right to my face by my black female manager that I would be blamed for an inevitable failure and she would be scooting off to AT&T to become a regional executive. I was gone two weeks later. I worked for another company where a white male was sacrificed for each of a particular female manager’s projects failures. I was told to fire a guy for a project he had nothing to do with. I told the guy what was happening but he didn’t believe me. I refused to do it so they transferred him to another manager who fired him the next day. The game is rigged so you have learn to work inside it. Don’t talk about this experience with your prospective employers. It is illegal for your contractor to give you a bad reference so keep this experience to yourself and move forward. Your success is the best revenge!
Having spent 20 years at LockMart (until 2019), I’m not at all surprised by the DEI beast having grown and starting to consume ongoing programs. Diversity & Inclusion had become a big thing there even at that time. There were awards for Black, Hispanic, Woman, and Asian-Pacific Engineers of the Year, but no “Old White Guy” award, despite the white geezer demographic being the backbone of the company. Similarly, they were establishing “affinity groups” for employees of certain appearance, probably better described as “grievance groups”. Personnel appraisals always had an entry for your Diversity & Inclusion inputs. It was already pretty clear that any manager wanting to keep his/her job had better not have any “minority group” employee getting paid less than the median for their grade level. So who did that leave for sub-median pay?
In LockMart’s defense, I also spent 21 years in military/Civil Service. They were a lot worse.
Long time engineering manager here. Not defense or gov. work related, but I think the DEI is only one part of the problem (a big part, but there are others as big.)
(I have a lot to say, but I will only hit one point here.)
Contract work is very common everywhere. This is devastating to institutional knowledge but I mostly blame the US’s short term mentality (meet the quarter, meet the metric for the bonus, vest the options.) And the carreerism is prevalent at many companies. A good manager has to have a lot of skills – technical, personal, and career politics. Engineering is hard to manage because it is creative, abstract, and most engineers are ego-sensitive. There are two ways to manage engineering departments — long term mentoring and development, or what we have described above Our corporate incentives are all wrong for the former, and the latter does not work.
But there is a third way — H1bs. They facilitate the careerism of non-productive and incompetent upper management while the guys doing the work will put up with a lot of crap (as they are indentured servants) or they are willing to play along and not really do anything for months or years at a time. And some of them will go home and learn the stuff their managers should be helping them with on youtube at night, so some stuff does get done. Best part is, you can treat them like crap and they don’t sue. Is is starting to make sense now?
Oh, in my comment about contract work, I should have mentioned that another big reason for it (and for H1bs) is that our employment regulations make it very difficult to fire people.
Contractors are not protected, in general, although being a DEI does give some protection.
We created a system where it is so expensive to fire people that many companies go with contract employees (fixed term, easier to fire mid-term). So by over-protecting employees we make the protected direct-hire jobs harder to get, and then pay more for a contract agency to get the same person in a form that is easier to fire.
DEI only adds to the problem, but the regulations and liability are already there.
But the companies also lose all institutional knowledge and the ability to develop skills and employees.
While I think everything you say is true, I wonder why companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab don’t go these routes. They hire Americans, don’t do DEI (SpaceX doesn’t even have an HR department), and demand quality from everyone.
The bottom line is laziness versus a demand for quality.
There are a lot of companies (and departments within bad companies) that work. The difference always comes from the top and executives that have passion for what they are doing. It percolates down through the culture and then the engineers — guys like in the video — have that passion and will crawl on glass to get the job done. Most people who become engineers are not primarily looking for money (those kids go into law) but they get great satisfaction learning, doing, and accomplishing.
I was not saying all companies do this, only that there are correctable reasons that so many companies have problems. BTW, it isn’t just engineering.
Musk seems to understand the problem (I don’t know about RL) and also understand that once you start down that path you are doomed. He also has passion.
Space X and Rocket Lab are run by their founders. People with the vision and drive to focus on what needs to be done and an intolerance for nonsense that gets in the way.
The founder may hire MBAs to handle business related tasks but the MBAs don’t set company policies.
Once the founder is out of the picture and “professional management” is put in charge things go downhill.
Remember back in the 80’s when Apple’s board booted Steve Jobs and put in a professional manager from Pepsico?
(I have to give that manager, John Sculley, major credit for recognizing the error and essentially firing himself to bring back Jobs ).
Jeff Bezos was the founder who built Amazon, but he took a hands off approach with Blue Origin and hired a “seasoned professional manager”. After years of stagnation Bezos had to step back in. I figure Limp knows Bezos is looking over his shoulder.
Boeing, LockMart, NG etc have long been run by “professional managers”.
I advise if you hear a company you are invested in is hiring a Harvard MBA as CEO, sell the stock!
(One person I’m thinking of is General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner. When he became CEO, GM had about 80 billion in cash. When he left (on a “golden parachute”) GM was 80 billion in debt and declaring bankruptcy…)
All true, but it shouldn’t require a leader with ethics. More people need to stand up and demand that the boss or management does the right thing, and if it doesn’t quit. Make them uncomfortable. Make it public, as Joshua Foxworth has done.
Too many commenters on this thread talk about keeping their heads down and looking the other way. All that does is make them complicit in the evil.
Major reason I’ve been self-employed for 40 years+. Not DEI, but arrogant incompetents that I don’t play well with. As a contractor, I can fire bad customers without losing my job. Of course, it requires having many customers such that losing one is not good but not disasterous.
I do this website for the very same reasons.
The primes were likely targeted by the Soviets decades ago, before Elon was even born. Sociology has long been a more effective weapon than the Penguin umbrella that spikes ricin in one’s calf, or the Kuchma special soup.
SpaceX is still a newborn, largely untouched.
I wonder why companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab don’t go these routes.
I think it really comes down to the owner. Both Musk and Beck were *highly* hands-on, and both held out as long as possible before going public; and by the time they had, they had established highly results-oriented organizational cultures that endure post-IPO.
Eventually both will succumb to entropy, I’m sure, especially after their founders step back or die. But I’m very, very glad for what we got out of ’em.
He is describing all government science and engineering labs. They do nothing. Look at the Navy Rail Gun, look at navy lasers at sea. Look at navy MCM and all aspects of the littoral combat ship and its modular capabilities. Still none after 20 years of work and development. Don’t work as a white male contractor at any of these places unless you love disappointment and discrimination.
Ugh
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfrx7xT43U&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D