Hits the nail on the head about the current state of NASA. My best friend from College just got a job with a certain aerospace company as a systems engineer on the Constellation program.... he WAS the lead trainer on the shuttle sim and instructor in environmental systems but had to find other work obviously. He is getting double whacked... now he may be unemployed.
Link here
http://www.homerhickam.com/cgi-bin/blog.cgi?id=45Embry-Riddle Speech Feb. 16, 2010 - 2010-02-20 16:52:52
Below is the text of the speech I gave at Embry-Riddle University. Of course, I rarely follow the text exactly, always sprinkling in anecdotes about life in Coalwood and the adventures of the Rocket Boys. I like to make my audiences laugh and have a good time. The text, however, represents the core purpose of the speech.
Embry-Riddle University Presents:
An Evening with Homer Hickam
Embry-Riddle University
Gale Lemerand Auditorium
Daytona Beach, FL
Feb. 16, 2010
Thank you, Dr. Kain, for that kind introduction. I can tell by the enthusiastic applause from this mostly young audience that maybe there are a few of you out there who love rockets. And the book Rocket Boys? And the movie October Sky? That's what I thought. This is when I have to apologize to all you young ladies here tonight for not actually being Jake Gyllenhaal. I do however, know his cell phone number and I can be bought.
I have already talked to a few of the students in the audience tonight and they have expressed to me their concerns about the new direction of the American space program and the changes coming for NASA. For those of you not familiar with the reason for that concern, here's a quick review. Last week, President Obama sent his proposal for the 2011 federal budget to Congress. Embedded in that budget were two policy changes for NASA. The biggest change was the cancellation of the plan to build the machines required to carry Americans out of earth orbit, specifically back to the moon. This was called the Constellation program. There has already been many billions of dollars spent on this initiative, mostly for the development of a rocket named Ares I, an astronaut module called Orion, and the ground support equipment and operations facilities supporting them. With the new budget, everything was shut down. In its place, NASA Headquarters talked vaguely about developing game-changing technologies but there were no specifics. It soon became apparent to me that the only possible explanation for this was because NASA Headquarters had very little to do with the decision. I think it was caught flat-footed by the budget issued by the White House.
This is poor management on parade and it did not have to happen this way.
Such a sudden policy change comes at a very bad time for American human spaceflight. The Shuttle program is scheduled to end this year. One of the primary reasons to stop flying the shuttles was to stop spending money on them and use those funds instead to build Constellation. Engineers would also be released to work on the new program. The idea was that there would be a smooth phasing of one program to the other. Although there was a gap of some years between the end of Shuttle and the beginning of spaceflight under the Constellation banner—a fact I very much disliked and would have never let happen if it were up to me—there was at least a plan for NASA to start flying its astronauts on its own spacecraft in the near future. I did not argue with the Ares I/Orion architecture although I'm not certain that would have been my first choice. What I thought was more important were the goals that had been set forth, clear goals that NASA could work toward, even with failures along the way. With the end of the new program, there is now no plan for NASA to build anything to carry its astronauts into space, only money set aside to purchase seats from the Russians to fly them up to the space station.
The result is fear and loathing within the ranks of NASA. The big field centers are just beginning to understand that there may be little need for their facilities or their personnel if NASA is not going to design, test, and operate its own astronaut-piloted spacecraft. This means the displacement and probable unemployment of tens of thousands of engineers and technical personnel over the next few years. If this happens, it is surely a body blow not only to spaceflight but to our overall national economy. This, again, did not have to happen.
If NASA was to be redesigned and restructured because of a policy change, there was plenty of time to develop a reasonable transition program with maximum care to protect irreplaceable engineering and technical personnel. Instead, what happened was the ax fell without warning, leaving the people of the agency worried, confused, angry, and uncertain of their futures. In effect, the program that defined the future of NASA was terminated without a clear goal or set of goals to take its place. This makes no sense. In fact, the foolishness of such an act is breathtaking. There has been some talk that perhaps NASA will transition to building satellites to measure climate change. Well, I have a better and much cheaper idea. Why not take ten thousand unemployed American engineers, issue them a thermometer, a carbon dioxide gauge, and a cell phone, send them to places all over the world, and have them phone in from time to time? Ridiculous? Well, at least our engineers would have jobs.
Perhaps some of you are thinking well, at least the end of Constellation will help lower the federal deficit. Actually, it won't. For one thing, the total NASA budget is essentially a rounding error in the bloated budget. Cash for Clunkers got 3 billion dollars, about what a recent study said NASA needed annually as a supplement to get Constellation going. The State Department, by the way, gets about three times the amount of funding NASA gets. The State Department! I guess we all know how much the State Department needs that money. Yes, mostly for its constant bureaucratic in-fighting with the Department of Defense and White House advisors for supremacy in foreign affairs. NASA, on the other hand, with its pittance, infuses technology into our economy, thus causing jobs, thus causing tax revenue. Oh, well. Kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The second change announced by NASA headquarters was that more monies would be channeled into commercial companies to build the rockets and modules to carry humans into low earth orbit. In other words, NASA was out of the orbital human spaceflight business, commercial companies were in. As one of the earliest supporters of SpaceX, one of the players in this field, I cautiously welcomed this. I am also the co-author of My Dream of Stars (out on March 2), the memoir of the remarkable Anousheh Ansari who not only funded the X-Prize which sparked a race by commercial developers into sub-orbital space, but boldly stepped up and paid her way to the space station through Space Adventures, a commercial company working with the Russians. I am all for private enterprise in space in every way that money might be made up there. However, after studying the situation represented by this federal policy shift, I have concluded that neither the White House or the new staff at NASA Headquarters have a good grasp of the difficulties inherent in this plan nor an understanding of the consequences if it fails or even falters.
Simply stated, NASA is put at risk by these policy changes. NASA is a national asset that the people of the United States have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to create. Its engineers and technicians combined with its test, training, development, and launch facilities are unequaled in the world and are the result of fifty years of experience in spaceflight. NASA is not only the most experienced, it is the most successful spaceflight organization ever. No others come even close, not even the Russians. The Russians have some fine hardware, don't get me wrong, but there's a reason they haven't flown cosmonauts to the moon or built something like the Hubble Space Telescope. They simply don't have the infrastructure or the organization to accomplish such tasks. The Chinese don't, either. Not yet, anyway. NASA, when given a clear goal and the proper support from the President and Congress, can do nearly anything in space. Go to the moon, build a lab there? Of course. Build a single-stage-to-orbit rocket (the holy grail in the space business)? Yes, I believe so, with the proper support. Build nuclear rocket engines? Well, that one's tougher but if there's a need and a purpose, sure. (Let me make an aside here. No human will ever go to Mars in a craft propelled by chemical rockets. That is a chimera, an illusion, a fantasy. They will go, if they ever do, riding big nuclear boomers. Boomers are the only way to go. Chemical rockets are death machines past the moon. They're too slow, too cranky, too prone to failure.)
These sudden new policies, then, are like a dagger aimed at the heart of the great American asset that is NASA. Yet, almost casually, the White House, with its willing accomplices at NASA Headquarters, are proposing to dismantle its human spaceflight component with a promise that, maybe in a few months, it will have something else for our engineers and technicians to do. Or maybe not. No one knows. My dad was a coal mine superintendent. This is as if he decided to tell his people that they weren't going to be miners any more but not to worry, he might figure out something else for them to do at a later time. If he'd have done that, his miners would have thrown him down the nearest mine shaft. Of course, Dad would have never done that. He was a good manager and he always looked out for his people, something NASA Headquarters or the White House apparently doesn't believe is important.
So, now, here we are. Our federal space agency, with a charter to insure the United States has the lead position in space, is in turmoil, its people demoralized, its facilities at risk. What looms is a space program designed, not by clear-headed executives with vision and an ability to think sequentially, but by an eruptive Congress of legislators battling it out with a White House and NASA Headquarters in full defensive mode. It isn't going to be pretty and, of course, it didn't have to happen.
After 9/11, I was asked by a publisher to write a book about how to avoid fear. The result was my book We Are Not Afraid which told how the people of Coalwood, West Virginia, where I grew up, taught its children to not be afraid of much of anything. Sadly, the advice in that book is needed by the men and women of NASA, its contractor personnel, and much of the American aerospace community today. There are four attitudes the people of Coalwood took to avoid the corrosive atmosphere of fear. They told themselves, no matter what happens, these things we will do and these things we will believe:
1. We are proud of who we are.
2. We stand up for what we believe.
3. We keep our families together.
4. We trust in God but rely on ourselves.
Today, we in the world of American aerospace, must hearken to the advice of those tough old coal mining families. We are proud of all we have accomplished and even though our leadership has failed us, we will keep faith with those who have gone before us and set the standards for success. We will do all that we can to keep intact our national space capabilities, facilities, equipment, and personnel.
We will stand up for what we believe. We believe the manner in which these policy changes are being implemented is foolish and short-sighted. We will oppose this mismanagement while recognizing the need to set new goals in space when it is in our national interest to do so. We recognize that engineers thrive when their goals are sharply defined, and often fail when they are not. We will stand up for integrity, both in goals and engineering design.
We are a family of friends who believe in the movement of the human race into the solar system. We will keep our aerospace family together and strong.
And, yes, we trust in God, the spiritual component of what makes us human, but recognize the need to work ever harder to make our personal and national dreams of spaceflight come true.
So, I say to you students of Embry-Riddle, don't be afraid and please don't walk away from a career in aerospace. The nation is depending on you to pry from the tiller of space the hands of those who don't understand what its promise means. The nation is depending on you to rebuild from the wreckage that our present leaders may cause. The nation is depending on you to bring the vigor of youth to aging bureaucracies and to make them all new and bright again. This you can do, this you must do, and this old rocket boy is certain you will do. Now go forth and make me proud.
