Infighting

05/03/05 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

One of the themes at Space Access was an attempt to tone down some of the intramural name calling that pops up from time to time. And apparently its not just a Space Access thing either. I recently discovered Dan Schrimpsher's __ Space Pragmatism__ blog which has this quote in his byline: “I am tired of all the infighting I see in the space community. RLV's versus EELV versus Saturn V clones. Who cares!? Just get me up there…”

While I definitely agree with the sentiment, I'd like to bring a little bit of perspective to this perception that all we do is fight about things. First of all, every industry does this. For all the talk about the egalitarian cooperation that formed the Internet, some of the worst screaming and gnashing of teeth have been at IETF and W3C meetings. The space industry in its various forms has nothing on those people. And the same thing has happened in the steel industry, telephony, medical, etc. In those industries they play hardball with issues like pricefixing, fraud, IP theft, wholesale stacking of standards processes to define competition out of their industry, etc.

The key difference is that its not the CEOs doing the nasty stuff. As you “grow up” you have the luxury of the CEO sitting back looking distinguished and “nice” while the minions in their flying monkey suits go off and do the bad stuff behind closed doors. So it at least has the appearance of being nice to people on the outside. Case in point, the IETF back about 5 years ago instituted the policy of requiring journalists to have a special badge so that regular participants could be sure to not fight in front of them. It helped. Although with blogs the distinction is becoming useless.

So I guess my point is that we're a young industry. Our CEOs are still active engineers. And engineers get wrapped around the axel about engineering minutia and really get torqued when they perceive someone is criticising their work. As this changes the gnashing of teeth will calm down a little. But it will still be there. The secret is figuring out how to hide it. That's why no one ever thinks that engineers from Sun or Microsoft bad mouthing each other at an IETF meeting is a bad thing. Its expected. Its when Scott McNeally and Bill Gates do it that it gets noticed and is considered a bad thing (and the fact that both men started out as engineers suggests the pattern holds).

I think it will fix itself. Somewhere in the process conferences like Space Access will need to decide if they're an engineering conference or a business/public relations conference. And even then you will probably need press badges and conversations about what is or is not “on the record”. And even policies about bloggers identifying themselves as such (this conversation is already happening).

So I wouldn't be to concerned about the infighting. It will solve itself. Just focus on execution and everything else becomes an irrelevant side issue.