Potpourri XXXVII

Let's see, what's out there? Oh, yeah! Got to start with this: the Obama administration knew that the Supreme Court's ruling that the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant even though they did NOT like the decision! Someone, of course, is in big trouble. There were all sorts of "green" laws that were going to happen under Obama. The whole article from The Hill deserves to be quoted in full:

OMB memo raises doubts about EPA findings
@ 4:17 pm by Eric Zimmermann
An EPA finding last month that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health rests on dubious assumptions and could have negative economic impacts, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) warned.
The memo has no listed author but is marked "Deliberative–Attorney Client Privilege." A spokesman for OMB told Dow Jones Newswires that the brief is a "conglomeration of counsel we've received from various agencies" about the EPA finding, the conclusions of which would trigger regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The author(s) of the memo suggest the EPA did not thoroughly examine the relationship between greenhouse gases and human health.
"In the absence of a strong statement of the standards being applied in this decision, there is concern that EPA is making a finding based on…'harm' from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects," the memo says, adding that the "scientific data that purports to conclusively establish" that link was from outside EPA.
Additionally, the new regulations triggered by the finding would likely harm the economy, the brief warns.
"Making the decision to regulate CO2…is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities," the memo reads.
Finally, in language sure to anger climate change activists, the memo questions whether climate change might bring benefits that would mitigate the costs.
"To the extent that climate change alters out environment, it will create incentives for innovation and adaption that mitigate the damages," the memo reads. "The [EPA finding] should note this possibility[.]"
The memo goes so far as to suggest that global warming might be a net positive for certain regions of the United States.
"It might be reasonable to conclude that Alaska will benefit from warmer winters for both health and economic reasons," the authors note.
At a Senate hearing today, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) grilled EPA administrator Lisa Jackson about the memo.
"This is a smoking gun," Barrasso said, accusing the EPA of making the finding for political reasons.
Jackson responded that the finding was based on science and was in no way politicized.
"That analysis had been done really before I took the oath of office," Jackson said.
She acknowledged that curbing climate change might have economic impact, and added that the costs could be minimized through the administration's favored cap-and-trade system.
"We do understand that there are costs to the economy of addressing global warming emissions, and that the best way to address them is a gradual move to a market-based program like cap-and trade," Jackson said.

The genie is out of the bottle. Let the merriment and chaos begin.

Your Humble Narrator is famous, from an academic point of view. I’ve got a textbook here called “Societal Impacts of Spaceflight,” which was printed by NASA and based on a bunch of papers presented by historians, sociologists, and those sorts of folk at a symposium a couple years back. One of these writers actually cited one of my articles. Page 493, reference 43, links to my "Save Our Planet: Space Advocates See the Bigger Picture" article on Space.com. Wacky!

Tip o' the fedora to Michael Mealling for finding this article by George Will on the upside-down economy. Will references an article in Foreign Affairs that might be worth reading, if you're a subscriber.

Speaking of Mr. Mealling, a Masten Space Systems guy, Masten has performed a successful test of one of their rockets. Martin and I, of course, got into a lot of back-and-forth about the relative merits of government- vs. private-funded space travel. Martin's position is basically that "Physics is a beyotch" and that if there were a better way to get into space, someone would've come up with it by now. I beg to differ. And while I won't divulge any confidences or comments Martin made, I'm not shy about mine:

I agree that X-projects are the way to go. Unfortunately, we don’t do those anymore. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To wit: if you have a large organization with lots of money (NASA, as opposed to a startup), then you are only going to think in terms of a multi-constituency, large-organization solution. The U.S. was working its way toward space using airplane-based thinking, with X-20 Dyna-Soar as the next step after X-15, but the Russians got there first using a ballistic missile, and the airplane-based approach was dropped. Airplane designers have a different approach to problems than rocket builders. We’ll never know how the U.S. space program would have turned out if we’d stuck with the airplane-based approach because we get sidetracked by the artillery shell approach. We’ll also never know what would’ve happened if we’d stuck with the company-based model of production instead of the government-based approach because we had Apollo. Can we go back to that? I don’t know. Maybe someone could try to build Dyna-Soar and find out the hard way.

Is business-based rocket travel “imminent?” Perhaps not. I’ve gotten my hopes up too many times to be that much of an optimist anymore. However, the big-government, big-rocket approach is also fundamentally flawed and needs to be rethought. The entrepreneurs should be encouraged and funded, even if it means doing things that are considered tacky, hucksterish, stunts, or Not Worthy of the Grandeur of Space, as NASA would have it.

Martin did have an interesting link to a Jeff Bell article on spaceplanes, which I will share.

New from Hu:

• The Mars Spirit rover is having road troubles.
• Boeing is moving its missile defense division from Arlington, VA, to Huntsville. Gosh knows we could use the business. Here's hoping Obama doesn't cut the missile defense budget.
• Vladimir Putin's price for signing the next Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) is for Obama to scrap our missile defenses. Reagan's answer at Rekjavik to such a gambit was historic and world-changing. One can only guess or hope with the current president
• Google is mating with a spreadsheet...and producing products that should help web searchers better organize their data. Sounds useful, but I'd like to see the final output.

Potpourri XVIII

Never mind space, Obama, or the economy: "V" is making a comeback!

NASA eClips has a very cool education-focused video about Ares I-X on YouTube.

Someone's made a graphic novel about Apollo 11 called "T-Minus." How'd I miss this??

NASA.gov has a copious collection of Great Moonbuggy Race pictures.

Interested in tracking your popularity or "reach" on Twitter? My wiki guru Nick passed on these links for future reference:

• http://TweetDeck.com
• http://hootsuite.com
• http://twittercounter.com
• http://www.twitalyzer.com
• http://hashtags.org

Back to politics for a moment: President Obama is going to start pushing a bill through Congress that would make illegal immigrants legal. Why not just open all the borders and be done with it? I'm all for legal immigration. My family wouldn't be here without it. But they played by the rules, became citizens, learned the language, and educated their kids and grandkids to become Americans, and we're all the better for it.

Boeing is looking to cut production of some of its airliners due to the economic slowdown. This isn't a good thing. Boeing's commercial airliners are one of the few things keeping America's trade deficit from falling deep into the sewer.

Some folks think that if Ares/Orion can't be completed on time that we should hitch a ride with the Chi-coms. Right, because they're MUCH more reliable partners than the Russkis. At least we know Soyuz can dock with ISS.

The "who's going to be the next NASA administrator?" game continues. Wouldn't it be better if Obama had a policy first? Of course he did throw $400 million more at Constellation as part of the stimulus bill, so it appears that he's sticking with the Bush policy for the moment. Fine by me. Leave Scolese in charge, and let NASA do its job!

The Ares Projects have been holding a TIM (technical interchange meeting--can't do anything without an acronym, ya know) this week on the thrust oscillation issue on Ares I. There's a pretty decent, though rather techie, blog on the Constellation site.

Missing Pieces: What NASA’s Gen Y Keeps Missing

I invite you to visit this web site, and read where Nick Skytland, a Gen-Y civil servant at Johnson Space Center (JSC), posted a presentation from the PM Challenge conference entitled “Participatory Exploration: The Role of the User Contribution System.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, now that you’ve read that, I’ll make some obligatory grumpy comments. These are being written in the spirit of constructive criticism, not "Siddown, kid, and wait your turn!" I'm looking at specifics in the presentations and so am asking/commenting about specifics.

I’ve met Nick once or twice at space-related events, and he’s a friend in Facebook. I'm not sure he reads this blog, but I might direct him to it just to provide him with food for thought for his next presentation. Nick is one of many under-30 contributors at the agency who’s trying to get NASA to think more like a dot-com (e.g. Google) and less like a command-and-control military organization. I wish him and his compadres well. Gosh knows all government agencies could think more quickly on their feet. However, being a Gen-Xer who’s spent most of my career in large, command-and-control organizations, I suspect that Nick has bigger challenges ahead than he realizes.

One of the gripes I’ve had about these types of presentations is that they are very brain-heavy. Here’s what I mean: despite the fact that, until the recent recession, America has continued to break records in the amount of manufactured stuff we export, media pundits and younger folks focused remain captivated by the "service economy" and the “information age."

Now admittedly a lot of our mass-produced products can be assembled, packaged, or shipped robotically, and that trend will no doubt continue. However, one of the largest contributors to America’s exports has been The Boeing Company, which depends on a large, skilled workforce capable of bending metal, installing wiring, turning wrenches, welding structures, and all the rest. All of this is still too complex for robots and likely will be for some time to come. These activities involve people doing physical labor, not just sitting in front of a laptop at Starbucks, sipping lattés. I don’t know what the specific percentages are, but I think I’m safe in assuming that not all of the people producing or building stuff—from farm goods to airplanes and spacecraft—went to college. Skytland is “privileging” (a favorite phrase of one of my grad school profs) intellect and symbol manipulation over physical labor. This is a mistake because not everyone can contribute this way, nor do they necessarily want to. Any future educational system—and any future space program—must find ways for individuals with mental and physical skill sets to contribute, because we will need both educated minds and skilled hands if we want to get to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Another issue I have with these Gen Y presentations—and I apologize now if Nick covered this, all I have to go by are the PPT slides—is how they emphasize collaborative technological tools but do not specify how these tools will enable people to make fundamentally better contributions than they might make through, say, face-to-face meetings, phone calls, or memos. I would also be interested to see what specific engineering or scientific contributions have been made in the aerospace industry using Skytland’s proposed new work environment. One example I can think of off the top of my head is the "virtual collaboration" Boeing has been doing to design and build the 787 Dreamliner at multiple locations around the globe. However, that plane is now likely to start deliveries more than a year late. Was that the result of--or despite--worldwide, international collaboration? That question should be answered.

Next on my nitpicking list: the global marketplace. It is one thing to have global “participation” in a robotic exploration mission (the standard example I’ve heard is allowing people to vote on “where to plant the flag”). It is another to have people from other countries reviewing and building the rockets--see the 787 example above. Since the dawn of the space age, rockets have been a critical national and strategic technology because of their ability to carry weapons. As noted above, if America has had one distinctive competitive advantage over the past 50 years, it has been in aerospace technology. This includes everything from materials to aerodynamic shapes or computer codes for analyzing flight paths to the guidance systems that allow a rocket to travel 25,000 miles per hour and reach a target millions of miles away with a margin of error measured in inches. These are all technologies that require United States citizens to produce them—at least if the United States wants to remain a spacefaring nation. There are some jobs that NASA and its primary contractors simply will not and cannot outsource to other countries because it’s the law.

We have a truly unique and challenging future ahead of us. I look forward to future contributions by Nick and others like him. I’d just like a little more organizational, cultural, and operational realism brought into the discussion.

Political Chaos Theory

There's this cliché from chaos theory that says, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, a hurricane blows in Florida. Something like that. The point being, in chaotic systems like weather or human societies, small initiating events can have large consequences down the road. Another old lesson from history states that we must guard against our baser selves or bad things can happen to us. Call it karma, call it punishment for sin, call it what you will. Today we have a marvelous illustration of both of these effects, but one needs to go back to the butterfly before getting to the hurricane.

About five years ago, an Executive Vice President at Boeing hired a former civil servant to become a Boeing executive under unethical circumstances.

That same year, Senator John McCain spoke before the Senate on Boeing getting a sweetheart deal from the U.S. Air Force for leasing 100 Boeing KC-767s at inflated prices. These two events cemented--in the minds of Congress, anyway--that Boeing was not to be trusted, and that its business dealings were questionable, to say the least. McCain thus led the charge against giving Boeing a sole-source contract to supply USAF with tankers.

Flash forward four or five years. The U.S. Air Force is once again in need of tankers due to the wear and tear of war operations on much of its airborne tanker fleet, which consists of 40-year-old KC-135 aircraft (the tanker version of the Boeing 707). Because of the bad name Boeing gave itself in 2003, the sole-source option was not available. Instead, the USAF went with a competitive bid. The bidders were Boeing, of course, and a team made up of U.S. company Northrop Grumman and its partner EADS (parent of Airbus Industrie, Boeing's major European competitor in building commercial aircraft). The goal was to shoot for "best value," which in government parlance usually means the lowest bidder. The lowest bid would have addressed both aircraft development and long-term operational costs of the fleet.

Despite some rumblings early on that Northrop-EADS might have gotten short-changed by the process, the point became moot when it turned out that they had won, right? Hardly. The game wasn't over.

Boeing's lobbyists kicked into high gear, claiming that American jobs and security were at risk by going with a European aircraft maker; this, despite the fact that Northrop-EADS plans to build some parts of the aircraft in Alabama, among other places. But never mind that: Boeing decided to wave a disingenuous flag of xenophobia, filed a protest, and got the right people in Congress to start raising hell over jobs in Washington going to Alabama and France. This is nonsense, in my opinion. This is like JFK raising hell about the "missile gap" with the Soviets, only to become president and discover, oops, the gap was on the Russkis' side. If anything, the contest was slanted in Boeing's favor, and they still lost; they should just let it go. What's the French word for chutzpah?

But the butterfly's work is not done yet. Department of Defense procurements--especially large procurements like the tanker deal--are rigidly controlled and rule-bound. Contract bids are evaluated by separate teams of individuals based on technical merit, price, management, and (logistical) support. These folks are often put into locked and guarded rooms without cell phones to ensure honesty during the proceedings. Individuals on the boards must disclose all of their financial dealings prior to the review process, and individuals with connections to the bidding companies must recuse themselves and be removed. In the final analysis, even the end customer (say, the Air Force general commanding the tanker wings) does not have the final say in the matter. All of these processes, while laborious and bureaucratic, are established to prevent corruption and influence-peddling within the procurement system. That's why you don't see legislators on procurement review boards.

However, given the fuss Boeing is likely to kick up, that entire system is about to get chucked out the rear hatch to satisfy the chest pounding egos of some folks on Capitol Hill. "Buy American!" will be the new chant, and future procurement boards are now on notice if they attempt similar buys from EADS or other foreign providers.

Here are some other painful truths: the American aerospace and defense industries have become one and the same. The number of competitors has shrunk (leaving at the top of the heap Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon), leaving only foreign competition. Lockheed is nearly out of the big-airplane business, leaving Boeing and Northrop. And if Northrop doesn't have the chops to make all of the hardware they need, they have to look overseas to find bidding partners. The government procurement system prefers competitive bidding. Depending on the item in question, there is usually a minimum threshold of three bidders required before the government will even allow the competition to go forward. If they can't get three bidders, they'll often scrap the procurement and try a new one with a different scope to ensure that they get three bids.

In the aforementioned large aerospace and defense contracting world, the government is going to be lucky if it gets two bids; and given the consolidated American market and the more competitive global market, the odds are pretty good that at least one of the two bids is going to include a company based overseas.

Now I have no doubt that American equipment is still the finest in the world. If it weren't for Boeing, the U.S. trade deficit would be even further in the red. However, as the Big Three auto makers proved in the 1970s, if they're left without competition for too long, their prices go up and their quality goes down simply because they're the only game in town and they get lax. Do we want that, or do we want some competition to keep our folks sharp? And if the competition can't be found here, then we'll have to compete with France, Britain, Germany, or Japan (on matters of defense and national security, Russia and China wouldn't even be in the running because they're on the naughty list; India is still a "maybe" ally). The other alternative is to sole-source everything to one of the Big Three and hope for the best. You might recall all the great press Halliburton has gotten for its sole-source work during the Iraq War.

So we've got a potential long-term procurement crisis on our hands, started off by a lot of butterflies:

• Boeing's bad hiring practices
• John McCain's railing against sole-source contracts for Boeing
• Members of Congress and Senators willing to raise a little nationalistic Cain to score political points
• The Air Force's allegedly botched procurement process
• A potentially deadlocked DoD procurement problem in the future, as review board members start making decisions based on politics rather than cost or technical merit

So what lessons have we learned today, class?

• Behavior matters.
• You can never fully predict the future impacts of your actions.
• Bad situations can be made much, much worse depending on how people react to them.
• What goes around comes around. If Boeing had just behaved themselves, they wouldn't have hired Ms. Druyun improperly, they would still have a tanker leasing deal with the Air Force at reasonable prices, and we wouldn't have a major defense deal going badly in the public media now.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled foolishness.