Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
NASA is making progress in reforming its financial management and has begun a get-well plan called "Operation Clean Opinion" to set the agency back on the road to clean budget audits, according to Chief Financial Officer Gwendolyn Sykes. The plan addresses organizational weaknesses identified by auditors, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the NASA inspector general and internal reviews, Sykes said. Despite its name, it doesn't focus exclusively on audits, she said.
NASA on March 1 issued the final request for proposals (RFP) for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which answers a number of questions raised by industry in response to an earlier draft and sets a deadline of May 2 for proposal submission.
U.S. Air Force program managers should make greater use of tools that quantify the costs associated with schedule delays, according to Lt. Col. Ross McNutt, director of the Research and Development Management Program at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). Researchers have discovered that the dollar value of lost program schedule time is not intuitive, according to McNutt. Informal estimates of the value of time made by different personnel often differ by factors of 50 to 100, he said.
