If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 3D CAD model is worth 1,000,000 “shall” statements. It amazes me, instead of modeling avionics systems on these remarkable PCs we have, we sit like medieval Benedictine monks writing damn useless “shall” statements. It is not the fault of the systems “engineers” themselves, I suppose. Just one more way management can get in the way of real work being done. After all, completing a program competently and on time doesn’t pay nearly as well as dragging it out beyond all reason and time.

I can’t imagine why they use engineers in systems “engineering”. I would think more properly they’d hire accountants, or perhaps street people. The job is not the least bit technical. There again, I suppose you can’t charge $200/hr for someone who you dragged out from under a bridge. At least it would be more humane.

My father was an American Airlines exec, and by age 9 I was poring over every issue of Aviation Week he brought home. When they inaugurated 707 service from Boston to San Francisco, he got me out of school to attend the launch party at Logan.

It was the first 707 I’d seen in the aluminum, and making a connection to another shape I’d been seeing in AW for years, I said, “That looks just like a KC-135.” It was some years before I understood his reply:

“That’s right. Boeing aren’t fools, and neither is C.R. Smith…”

While the “free market” ideologues may not live in anything like the real world that history has given us, conversely, I try very hard not to underestimate the power of the market place. Within it’s limits, it is there and it is extremely powerful. The government may have given us the Internet, but the market gave it to thee and me. The British East India Company may have provided the defense and transport, but it was Twinings, et al, that brought home the tea. The Air Force gave us large jet transports, but Boeing created the 707. NASA may be building the Space Station, but, if it is to succeed, it is the alt.space crowd that will supply it and may yet make something useful of it (like they came close to doing with Mir).

Let Europe waste their R&D trying to make hyperthyroid 747s and a supersonic transport using yesterday’s turbojet technology. Mr. Bush is correct to steer NASA clear of all that and provide the markets for the alt.space community to do their thing. Any turbojet supersonic transport will be left in a museum if surborbial transport can succeed in moving packages or passengers contininent to continent in a few hours. . . .

— Donald

The general ideological shift since Reagan and Thatcher has fostered a faith that government is always the problem, and free enterprise is always the solution, which can be just as blinding as the previous pendulum swing — the 1930-1970 “Got a problem? Here’s a federal program!”

Hence the hyper-optimism in much of the alt.space rhetoric. The earth’s gravity well is still deep… chemical propellants are still limited in energy content… engine materials can still tolerate only so much heat… and that nasty rocket equation is still there… but somehow the Magic Mojo of the Market will transform everything.

For some reason it has failed to produce a profitable supersonic transport (or even a supersonic bomber any air force in the world finds affordable), but don’t worry — Scaled Composites will be rolling out a Mach 15 scramjet mothership the size of Nellis AFB any day now.

Cute nonsense. Johnson’s point is that when a system gets so complex that no person or small group can possibly keep it all in focus at once, you damn well better have *some* set of procedures to ensure that interfaces do indeed interface, that Sub-Team 22 indeed tells Sub-Team 45 about that little change in the nitrogen bleed valve setting, etc. etc. etc. I don’t care if you call it systems engineering or oogabooga, it’s what makes the difference between making a Machine that Does Something Really Cool and making numerous copies that do it reliably under real-world schedules and budgets.

But if it’s important to you to talk about toilets instead of space technologies, by all means get it out of your system.

— Donald

Of course, some would say it is a tribute to the strength of the capitalist core of our economy that we can withstand all the “help” the government gives us and not go broke. Even so, there are some things we are realistically going to look for our federal government to provide, like defense and most likely leading edge space exploration. It seems obvious to me (as a capitalist) that the more capitalist principles we can bring to bear in these areas, the better return we can expect on our tax dollars. And as for me, I’ll be buying my next toilet at Lowe’s.

— Donald

I _strongly_ agree with this, especially its wider implications. I think the genious of the American system is not “free enterprize” which, by-and-large, we don’t practice and don’t really believe in. What the United States invented during development of the National Highway and Freeway systems, commercial aviation, the ICBM, and the wider Apollo project (including Mercury and Gemini) was the unique (until Airbus) ability to combine government and private endeavors to relatively efficiently execute massive technological projects in a way that was stronger than either separately. Apollo combined private and semi-private companies all over the nation under government management to create the parts for an intricate machine, all of which successfully worked together. Until recently, no other country on Earth has been able to do that, and no other country has experienced our economic success. Each of these major projects could not have been achieved as efficiently without government and the private sector working together; having no markets at the time they were implemented, none of them would have been achieved by truly commercial interests without stong government support. Each of them resulted in major US industries.

Assuming that what I’ve said above is true, I believe that the major threat to our contry’s future in space (and in industry in general) is the slavash ideological fantasy that the government does not have a major role in US industrial success.

Hehehehe, you’re right! I was typing in Word and pasting here, and I lost/transposed something. That was last night, and now I have no idea what was lost.

At any rate, the DOA has a larger budget than NASA. Being the son of a farmer, I wonder where all that money goes? My father never seen a dime of it in 50 years of farming. Not directly at least.