MarsBlog.net

The Final Report of the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry is finally out. Skimming the press release we find the meat of the report all ready for easy digestion:

In its Final Report, the Commission recommends that:

1. The United States boldly pioneer new frontiers in aerospace technology, commerce, and exploration.
2. Transformation of the U.S. air transportation system be a national priority.
3. The United States create a space imperative.
4. The nation adopt a policy that invigorates and sustains the aerospace industrial base.
5. The federal government establish a national aerospace policy and promote aerospace by creating a government-wide management structure.
6. U.S. and multilateral regulations and policies be reformed to enable the movement of products and capital
   across international borders on a fully competitive basis and establish a level playing field for U.S. industry
   in the global marketplace.

7. A new business model be designed to promote a healthy and growing U.S. aerospace industry.
8. The nation immediately reverse the decline in and promote the growth of a scientifically and technologically trained U.S. aerospace workforce.
9. The federal government significantly increase its investment in basic aerospace research in order to enhance U.S. national security, enable breakthrough capabilities, and foster an efficient, secure, and safe aerospace transportation system.

(Hopefully I’ll have some time later this week to more fully delve into the report itself.)

Taking them one at a time:

1. This recommendation suggests a new push in to research, development, commercialization, and exploration… which, mostly, is what NASA should be doing anyway. I personally would like to see the agency return to the NACA model, focusing on basic aeronautical and space research and the development of same into workable technology in conjunction with the end users who need it. Commercialization definitely needs a shove, and this can be better administered through prizes, service contracts (such as the “Air Mail” strategy mentioned below), and other incentives rather than the facade of privatization as currently practiced by the agency, and would be better administrated by an agency, such as the Departments of Commerce or Transportation, with an incentive in developing space commerce as an end in itself rather than as a tightly-controlled extension of its bureaucratic turf. In addition to R&D, exploration is another legitimate function for NASA, however, it is also one which can be carried out as well if not better by other government departments which have historically performed equivalent government-appropriate functions here on Earth, such as the USGS.
2. I think someone named Osama bin Laden already made transformation of the U.S. air transportation system a national priority. Seriously, though, work in this area has been underway for quite some time, not only in air security improvements made urgent by 9/11, but also in new air traffic control systems to enhance safety and increase capacity. While air travel is increasingly inconvenient (the aforementioned security enhancements being partly responsible for this), and offers ample opportunity for improvements in that regard, I don’t see how the soft side of air travel can have much impact on the aerospace industry as a whole except insofar as the end results return the airlines to profitability and plane-purchase-inspiring levels of growth.
3. Ahh, now they’re onto something…of course, I would agree with this recommendation, given the nature and purpose of this site, and it’s a given what I think that imperative should be.

   Since July 22, 1969, the U.S. manned space effort has been adrift. Oh sure, we put up a respectable first space station (which we were promised was a stepping stone to bigger and better things and no no not at all an effort at catch-up with the Soviet Union and its string of space stations). Then we scrapped that and everything else we had, and sat on our hands for seven years while we waited for all the problems to be worked out with the Shuttle. The Shuttle was supposed to build us space stations and make spaceflight routine — while it was overwhelmingly successful in the latter regard (in a different sense than what was intended), it never really lived up to its promises as to cost or launch rate. The cost of building and operating the Shuttle put the space station it was built to service financially and politically out of reach for another fifteen years, during which time it circled around and around and around in a desperate bid to rendezvous with any and all substitute justifications for its continued existence.

   At last the space station materialized, just in time to perform its most vital purpose: the transfer of huge sums of money to Russia to help buy dachas for ex-Soviet apparatchiks— er, I mean, to help peacefully employ ex-Soviet weapons scientists. The project thus became neither an end in itself nor a means to further exploration, but a diplomatic after-school program to keep pariah states like Iraq and North Korea and developing countries like Pakistan and India from building their own weapons of mass destruction (space stations may be good for diplomacy in science fiction, but judge for yourself a month from now how well the strategy worked in the real world) [Edited to add: this refers to the December 18, 2002 deadline for Iraq to report all of its weapons programs to the UNSC]. But at least now we have a space station, more or less (mostly less), and we’re planning to replace the vehicle it was built to be serviced by with another new vehicle “built to service space stations” — a vehicle which will be, like the current space station and the one before it, limited to three occupants. Who says the industry doesn’t have big goals nowadays?

   Unfortunately these goals only amount to chasing our tail, and use up so much of our civil space resources that we cannot build further on what we have already accomplished or what we have learned elsewhere. Cutting this Gordian Knot will require the U.S. government to free up NASA’s existing resources for a new goal by dramatically reducing the agency’s mandate — shifting many of its current efforts to industry or academia — or to give the agency a new goal along with the significant investment in the agency and industry required to achieve it. There is promise in either direction, though the former approach probably has the better prospects for long-term, broad-based development of space.

4. I’m sure that a clear goal for the space program would do a lot to invigorate and sustain the aerospace industrial base, if properly formulated (specifically, structured so as to avoid a “flags and footprints” project). However, job creation should not be seen as an end itself, but rather the positive outcome of other policies. Job creation was, in effect, the argument behind partnering with Russia on ISS — the jobs being created for ex-Soviet weapons designers rather than (and ultimately at the expense of) American engineers and craft workers.
5. This I do NOT like. It is one thing to lay out and fund the pursuit of a new goal for the government space agency, or to establish government policies by which commercialization of space may be encouraged and accelerated. It is another thing altogether for a government agency to create a “national policy” for the industry (for ANY industry), and manage the industry in that direction. It is an approach completely at odds with capitalism, as it sets the goverment to the market’s task of choosing the winners and losers — and where the government plans the market, politicization and corruption rapidly follow. NASA can barely stick to its own plans for more than twelve months at a time — do these guys actually expect NASA to successfully implement a Five Year Plan for the aerospace industry?
6. Loosening of trade restrictions, such that it does not aid in the transfer of sensitive technologies to rival powers, is a good idea. Since the Clinton Administration overreacted to the Loral/China mess by toughening export licensing requirements on satellites and related equipment, the U.S. share of same has plummeted. Restoring a proper balance to the export licensing process would allow domestic manufacturers to regain some of that lost market share. It matters little if we have the best components or systems in the world…if no one else in the world can buy them from us. And if few buy our products, we won’t be able to afford the research and development investment necessary to maintain our position as the best in the world in these areas. We can compete and win, if we are allowed to compete.
7. Unless by this they mean some of what I’ve described above (commercialization, exports, etc.), this is just an apple-pie generality.
8. As an aerospace industry engineer, I’m all for this, as I know it means I’m in for a whopping big raise. But seriously, improving salaries are only part of what is required to draw more students into the industry. For one thing, the notorious employment instability in the industry over the past fifteen years needs to be addressed — after all, why take a job in an industry where spasms of hiring and layoffs occur on a cycle approximating the tides, when you might design pacemakers or refrigerators or automobiles for forty years without once having the thought of unemployment stir the placid waters of your career complacency?

   For another thing, as time goes by there appears to be less to do within the industry. Gone are the busy days of a half-dozen companies designing competing commercial and military aircraft, each with several product lines rolling off the assembly floor, and several more on the boards. JSF is the last new manned fighter program for a decade, if not forever. The B-2 appears to have drawn the curtain on any new bombers for a long time to come, with the hoary B-52 being given the “Cher treatment” (nip, tuck, facelift, oil change) for yet another four decades — a total service life long enough for the youngest children of the youngest men to have designed and built the things to have lived out their biblical allotments. And with NASA following this example with the Shuttle, it’s hard to see much of the old “Gee Whiz!” incentive being available to recruit fresh blood into the industry.

   Further, no matter how interesting the project may seem, producing viewgraphs of paper-queen spacecraft is not the same as building and flying real hardware. It’s terribly frustrating to draw pretty picture after pretty picture, watching your real engineering skills slowly erode over time, knowing with every day that passes and every layoff you survive that your marketable skills are just a little less marketable in any other industry. While your friends in other industries are working their way up by launching new product lines or putting out a totally redesigned new look for the coming model year, you just sit in telecons, twiddling your thumbs and hoping against hope that someday you’ll actually maybe get to get your hands dirty. And maybe make it past the “aluminum ceiling” of those who were just lucky enough to get in on the last big program umpteen years ago and thereby get the practical experience required for promotion.

   The real problem with this recommendation is that it puts the cart before the horse — you don’t have a successful and healthy aerospace industry by hiring increasing numbers of scientifically and technologically trained employees, you entice these workers into the industry first by offering them something interesting and valuable to work on, and second by paying them a good enough wage that they aren’t motivated to seek more money in less interesting industries. Both, in that order of importance — engineers want something interesting to work on, and will settle for lower salaries if it’s interesting enough. But not too low.

9. This recommendation takes us back to where we began — basic aerospace research is what NASA’s primary role should be. But investing in NASA’s basic research role is only part of the picture — the federal government should also continue to invest in military research and development, so as to keep our military capabilities orders of magnitude more advanced than those of any other country. The two avenues will increasingly merge, as national security becomes increasingly dependent on space-based assets. Having two agencies pursue methods for routine human access to and permanent presence in space may cause duplication of effort, but it also increases the likelihood that at least one will be successful in the endeavor.

As I expected from the beginning, the recommendations are nothing that any space advocate couldn’t have rattled off in five minutes, yet we needed a fancy Presidential commission to spend bags of cash and months of effort to dream up — such are the ways of government. If it somehow produces a positive policy change, though, it will have been worth it. When I spoke with him back in September, Sean O’Keefe said to expect big changes in government space policy in the December-to-January timeframe. Just two weeks into November we had the reshuffling of SLI, so I suppose that other space-related changes could be afoot in the Bush Administration. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for anything as dramatic as another Kennedy directive, but if Mr. O’Keefe was serious, it should be interesting to see what becomes of these recommendations in the next two months.