Personal Views From The Aldridge Commission Meeting

03/28/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

As many of you are aware, I blogged the Aldridge Commission hearings in Atlanta last week. This is an review of the meeting given my own re-reading of the logs and some time to reflect on them over the weekend. My gut reaction is one of very cautious optimism.

The thing that strikes me about all of the meetings is how utterly useless some of the presentations are. Some of the presentations are nothing more than infomercials for the organization being presented. Some presentations are apparently picked simply to “fill in the third seat”. The Commission has a rapidly approaching deadline and frankly only about half of the presentations seem to be cognizant of that fact. Many seem to simply want something but then offer nothing back to the commission that can help it meet its goal. Maybe that is just the nature of these things, but if I were a committee member I'd be extremely ticked off at the waste of time.

Ok, on to some specifics. I'm going to mix up the order here since I'm going to finish up on the various commercial space themes. The first will be various minor observations, the second will be a trimming of my diatribes during the various educations and labor union discussions, and finally a discussion of how I thought the commission viewed the various commercial space presentations.

There were several things that I found simply worth noting. In no particular

order:

• The entire room laughed at the “If we can send someone to the moon, why cant we send someone to the moon?” quote. This struck me since I would have thought that this crowd would have heard that quote so much that it would find it to be cliche and droll. But then I realize that, with the exception of Paul Spudis and possibly Neil Tyson, these guys simply don’t run in the circles where that quote resonated. Which reminds me yet again that these guys a) want to be educated and b) don’t have the luxury of time in which to be educated.
• As others have noted, the voice of dissent when it comes to commercial space is Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But its not really that he opposes it __per se__ but that he simply hasn’t seen an existence proof. And he has enough experience with programs like this to know that you have to stick with the time-line or else. So I can’t find much fault with repeated basic question of “If commercial companies __don’t__ step up and offer these services at a competitive price point, then what?” He can’t, in good conscience simply tell the Whitehouse and NASA, “Oh well, I guess we’ll just shelve all of this and wait.”
• A few of us are pretty sure Carly Fiorina gets it. But its hard to tell since all of her questions are really cagey. But as someone else pointed out, if you were the CEO of an $80 billion public company, you’d be cagey too!
• Dr. Komerath invoked O'Neill, which is the first time I’ve heard of that at any of these hearings. I suspect that only about 3 or 4 commission members have heard of Gerard K. O'Neill.
• Daniel Hegeman is a name to remember.
• The Commission is struggling with whether or not NASA is actually up to the task. Which to me is __extremely__ interesting since the original presentation of the vision was at NASA HQ and its implementation guidelines were all presented in terms of NASA’s budgets. So, while the original ‘vision’ was presented as a new direction for NASA, the Commission’s marching orders seem to include a determination of what NASA is capable of and what to do about that.
• IMHO, there is __way__ to much emphasis on ‘inspiration’. There is some nostalgic yearning for the great flood of engineers that happened after Sputnik and some fantasy that those kids did it out of ‘inspiration’. Sure, inspiration will get you interested while your in grammar school. But as you enter highschool and college you simply aren’t driven by inspiration anymore. In high school you’re driven by hormones. In college and the few years after that you (hopefully!) start thinking in terms of opportunities. There are countless thousands of aerospace engineers in other industries. You can’t pay bills with ‘inspiration’. And today’s youth aren’t content with simply “paying the bills”. They want to get Payed. They want to be shown the “benjamins”. They need their “bling bling”, whatever form it may be in. In 2000 everyone was getting into IT. It was the thing that could change your life. Stock options were changing people’s lives. We need less inspiration and more “bling bling”.

Other, more minor, insights can be gleaned from the transcripts and from my inline comments.

The second thing I'm going to discuss is the “Building Space Jobs” section, which was mainly organized labor. As I said in the real time commentary, I'm not a fan of organized labor so if you are then ignore this part. It was my determination that this group is one of the main problems with how space is done these days. They are organized and seem to hold a very large amount of political capital because of that. Apparently their members have been a large determining factor behind ISS and Shuttle. They view these programs as purely ways of creating what they view as “high tech jobs”. At one point Paul Spudis threw out a strawman (transcripts aren't available yet so I can't quote directly) that asked that, if the goal of our space program was to “keep our technological sharpness” then should all of it belong as part of DoD as simply a national strategic priority? They answered yes! Not only did they agree with the premise but with its conclusion as well.

One of them even went so far as to suggest that the reason the US is losing jobs overseas is due to the cultural decay caused by television and the lack of good morality plays like they had during the old radio days! If this is what Big Labor has to offer these days no wonder we're losing jobs overseas.

Daniel Hegeman said it best during his presentation:

bq.

Also, if the government is the only customer and Congress can cancel out the whole space program on a yearly basis, we will seek a more secure profession to support our families and an entire generation will miss out. I support the planning and implementation of the President's vision that opens space to true private competition, even at the cost of loss of control and prestige for NASA and its contractors.

Daniel is saying something that Tom Peters is saying in Re-imagine. That the future of America is in its core value: that this land, this system that we've developed, is about radical opportunity. Simply 'earning a living' isn't enough. Simply 'manufacturing' isn't enough. Simply doing what we did last century isn't enough. Every moment has be to worked at the tip of innovation; at the sharp edge of creative distruction. And these labor guys find that to be the worst evil that could be visited on man because it means there is no such thing as job security. It means no such thing as jobs. Period. Every American's new responsibility is to be his/her own CEO of Me, Inc.

It means things like re-thinking the relationship between 'labor' and the processes it supports. It means having a worker in a factory actively spending his/her own time to figure out ways to not just increase his/her production, but to obsolete his own current job. It means things like figuring out how to build dark factories so that where one 'factory worker' ran one stop along an assembly line, that same 'worker' is the owner of an entire factory that runs itself. It means thinking of space as an opportunity and a market segment and not as a source for government ensured job security.

These are the people who have killed America's greatness in space. I lay Columbia and Challenger at their door.

Finally, the various commercial space presentations seem to have been very well received, except for some of Neil Tyson's appropriate scepticism. I do have some concerns though. Much of the conversations centered on finding the right model for how to interface with the commercial sector. The problem is that each market segment will require a different model. And those models are going to change over time. Neil's concern was how to deal with the mandated timelines in the vision they were given with that unpredictability.

These, and other comments led some of us to gather that the Commission is struggling with this issue on a regular basis. Thus, the commercial sector should be helping the commission figure that out. In my opinion, Jeff Greason had a good suggestion: for each NASA program, bid out that program at a 10th of its projected cost. If someone else can do it and qualify under FAR rules then do it. If no one can, then NASA does it. The other was to move launch contracts under FAR Part 12 rules, thus going to a fixed price instead of cost-plus.

It even seems as though they are toying with the idea of “creating an industry”. At one point Lauri Leshin rattled off three options. I don't have the transcript so I can recreate them but the way she asked the question suggested that the three alternatives were almost “verbal macros”, as though they had been said enough already that she really didn't have to think about it. And one of those was to create an new space industry. I'm going to guess that this means that they are actively considering it. Which is why I'm optimistic.

The other reason I'm optimistic is that, with few exceptions, the commission is being repeatedly told that NASA is incapable of realizing this vision on its own. In many cases its obvious that they're toying with the idea of an 'uber-agency'. Some kind of standing version of this Commission but with an oversight role over NASA and, to some extent, DoD and other agencies. The perfect solution in my mind would be for the commission to come out with recommendations for creating a real space industry, starting with encouraging the current crop of companies. And that strategy would be directed from outside NASA by a group that reported directly to the Whitehouse.

But the reason I'm cautious is that those labor unions have pull. They are in states that Bush will need to win. There are huge constituencies that will fight got keep the status quo. As one presenter put it, “the first thing you do when you're going to have a revolutions is to build pine boxes for all of the bodies”. Well, those bodies aren't going to go without a fight. So if this committee does attempt the bold, it will have to figure out how to throw a distracting bone to those constituencies so they won't know they're being put into pine boxes.

I'll wrap this up with a final observation: while watching and sometimes participating in politics is interesting (and seductive!), the real value of these hearings is the networking opportunities. I was able to meet fellow space entrepreneurs, space advocates, fellow bloggers, and students. But when I say 'networking', don't think in terms of “Business After Hours” parties with hundreds of insincere introductions. Think more of things like highly motivated individuals of like mind getting to know each other and working and competing together to build something important. So whether its one of these hearings, or a space conference like Space Access '04, Return To The Moon V, or ISDC 2004, go and meet people. Sit in the bar, have a beer and work out some crazy idea on a bar napkin. Then take that enthusiasm and go do something with it. That's how we built the Internet….