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Technology Stocks : LORAL -- Political Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (815)	5/25/1999 2:03:00 PM
From: Rocket Scientist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 880

I read the 82 page chapter of the Cox report related to Loral as available at MSNBC web site. If anyone still has an open mind on the subject, the following may be interesting. The Cox report provides a lot of detail, much of it published for the first time, about the events surrounding the "Independent Review Committee" (IRC) chaired by Loral after the Long March 3B failure of involving Intelsat 708. Some of it does not reflect credit on the company's management, which, of course has admitted some mistakes. There are several instances of bureaucratic lapses, communications failures, inadequate training (in export control) etc. However, important mitigating facts are present in this report, although cerainly not highlighted, including: 1. The IRC included at least one English and one German national in addition to several other non-Loral employees. Indeed, the English national, John Holt, "drafted the technical section of the report" (p. 4) He was asigned the "task of writing the major portion of the report" "because he seemed to have the best understanding of the issues" (p. 20.) In other words, the IRC report was not based solely or even primarily on "US" technology. 2. The IRC (and in turn the USG) learned immense amounts about the design and test philosophy of the LM3B. For example (p.3) "IRC members reviewed the extensive reports furnished by China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) documenting the PRC launch failure investigation" and "The committee's activities also included tours of PRC assembly and test facilities for guidance and control equipment." On P. 10: "CGWIC provided Intelsat and Loral with three volumes of data and eight detailed reports on the current status of the failure investigation" On P. 14: "participants were taken on a tour of the Long March rocket assembly area. They were also shown, in a partially opened state, units described by the PRC as the older Long March 3 inertial measurement unit." Careful reading of the Cox report makes it clear that the west learned a lot more about the Chinese technology than vice versa. A further example: starting on page 36 there is a correlation (prepared by CGWIC) of IRC recommendations vs CGWIC corrective actions. In every case the IRC recommendation is generic "motherhood" (e.g. " Improve quality control in manufacturing") and the CGWIC corrective action is relatively specific and detailed (e.g. "To strengthen soldering quality check, including pre-soldering raw material detect (sic), post-soldering non-destructive tension test and sampling destructive test for key parts") 3. The significance of the "assistance" provided by the IRC is in dispute within the USG; for example: "The interagency review also noted that the LM3B guidance system on which Loral and Hughes provided advice is not a likely candidate for use in future PRC intercontinental missiles" (p. 7) and "the CIA reported to the State Department that the IRC report did not disclose any significant missile-related technology or know-how to the PRC's ballistic missile program" (p. 31) 4. The report's conclusion (p. 64) " To the extent that ballistic missile manufacturing processes and practices are similar to those for rockete, an incremental potential benefit to future PRC ballistic missile programs could come from increased production efficiency, and improved reliability through adoption of improved quality control and reliability-enhancing measures in design and manufacturing that were introduced after the accident investigation, including some that the Independent Review Committee advocated" seems pretty underwhelming to me, to put it mildly. -RS