Dear SAE 550 Class--

Several students have expressed some concern
regarding the dearth of clear-cut examples of
Fact Of Life (FOL) #5 in Case Study #3:
The Best Engineering Solutions are Not Necessarily
the Best Political Solutions.

Don't panic!  It's often the case that a particular
FOL doesn't appear to strongly influence a particular
system, and this may happen to you when developing
your Research Paper.

What do you do?  Well first, one might think that
FOL #5 doesn't seem to apply to the SSC.  In my
humble (and ever so unbiased!) opinion, FOL #5
DOES apply to the SSC, but in subtle fashions.

Please consider that root cause of FOL #5: the
Political Process does not use the same kind of
logical reasoning process used in science, math,
and engineering.  The Political Process uses the
fine art of negotiation, compromise, and appearance.

To find examples of FOL #5, one should look for
situations with multiple reasonable choices for
alternative answers.  In Case Study #3, you'll
notice that there were a large number of choices
in the site selection process... which were
eventually narrowed down by the NAS evaluation
committee to a list of 8 candidate sites.  Why
did the DOE eventually pick Texas?  Why not pick
Utah or Nevada, with plenty of geologically-
stable, empty land?

By the way, notice that the rejection of the New
York proposal is an example of FOL #1, and not of
FOL #5.  FOL #1 constraints technology, as is
evident by the "all-US" rule for the SSC tunnel.

And did you notice that the String Test had to be
accomplished, even though the SSC had operational
experience to prove that their Quadrupole magnets
worked?  Why on earth didn't the SSC Program
Managers simply tell the GAO to jump over a cliff
instead of wasting money on the String Test?  That
would have been a better engineering solution, in
my humble (and ever so unbiased!) opinion.

And if Cost Rules, when why on earth did the SSC
program start to include total program costs in
their cost estimates?  Why not just advertise the
construction costs, and not include Life Cycle
Costs in the total figure?  I wonder why someone
made the technical choice to tell the truth, the
WHOLE truth, and nothing but the truth?

And honestly!  About this whole injector energy
level business... disgusting!  Why not just
confess that they made a mistake in the original
1 TeV estimate, and change the requirement to be
the correct value of 2 TeV?  Yes, this technical
problem became a Political problem... but why
did they not choose the correct technical
solution? (By the way, notice that some events
impact multiple political FOL?)

On the subject of Termination Costs... you may
have been surprised by the statement that the
costs to shut down the SSC project exceeded the
$640M budgeted amount!  And worse yet, it cost
more to terminate the SSC contracts than to
complete the construction!  ("How in the world
could this be true?", you ask.)  First of all,
the SSC contract and subcontracts were let
during an era of Firm-Fixed-Price contracts.
For many of those FFP contracts, the terms and
conditions included a "Cancellation for the
Convenience of the Government" clause. So when
the SSC was cancelled, the termination costs
for all of these multi-year contracts was a
large cost-- more than the amount that would
have been spent in any one year. (And may
result in more profit for subcontractors than
if the contract were actually completed!)
Obviously, the best technical solution would
be to complete the work-in-progress.  But
politically it was "better" to appear as a
big-program-cost-cutter, even though it cost
more money in the long run! (Especially given
that the 1994 Congress had 100+ freshmen or
first-time members that were eager to
demonstrate their support for change from
business-as-usual.)

Hopefully the above gives you some "food for
thought" in completing Homework #3?  And by
now you should be more familiar with the methods
for analyzing the Case Studies and completing
the homework assignments, so this is the last
set of hints for a while.

Dr. Elliot Axelband
axelband@rand.org
axelband@usc.edu

Ken Cureton (TA)
cureton@usc.edu