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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      On SpacePolicyOnline.com [spacepolicyonline.com] last week, Marcia S. Smith reported that:

The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on Tuesday that praised NASA for some aspects of its management of the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with SpaceX, but reiterated earlier concerns about the independence of mishap investigations into these "commercial cargo" launch services. NASA concurred with most, but not all, of the OIG's recommendations.

      Referring specifically to the June 28, 2015 SpaceX CRS-7 (SpX-7) Falcon 9 rocket failure that was intended to send a Dragon spacecraft full of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), the OIG criticized NASA for not having "an official, coordinated, and consistent mishap investigation policy for commercial resupply launches, which could affect its ability to determine root cause of a launch failure and corrective action."

      The article continues, describing the various levels and branches of oversite authority. It also outlines another area of OIG concern. The entire OIG report can be found here: Final Report IG-16-025 [nasa.gov].

      A related article on Quartz, "How SpaceX kept its number one client happy after its rocket exploded [qz.com]" outlines how SpaceX retained the confidence of its government bosses. In addition to pricing and fee structuring, no-cost extras (such as it ramped up the electrical power onboard its Dragon spacecraft so that it can take more three times more cargo) keep the agreement attractive.

      Moreover,

[In] response to NASA's concerns, the company has reorganized its quality control teams and how it assigns work to its technicians and tracks their progress, as well and now tests each individual component of the rocket for reliability.

      The Falcon 9 rocket has flown seven times without incident since the 2015 accident.

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