Joel Baechle
Jackson, CA

Paul of Alexandria’s reply is spoken like a true reactionary – and that is not a complement, either. It has by now become somewhat tedious to find strict constructionists ever wrapping their political beliefs around any armature they wish to destabilize. Any problem can be explained away by simplifying or omitting vital facts. Applying these simplified methods to the problem results in failure. Perhaps Bruce Bennett does not give entrepeneurs their due, but the criticisms stand.

Paul’s points can be refuted with facts, as follows:
GM collapsed because of bad corporate management. In his book, “Quality Without Tears”, author Phillip B. Crosby details how he took the “zero defects” concept to Japan, where it was received with enthusiasm, after then-president Nixon had rejected the idea as a national business goal. You don’t have to watch Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” to understand that GM packed its management with relatives, it never fully adapted to the desire for Americans to have efficient and ergonomic cars (a void which the Japanese quickly exploited), and the relationship with the union became untenable. GM also disrupted its Electromotive Division (locomotives), and drove good staff out through nepotism, thus giving GE a strong market opportunity, which it exploited profitably.

Chrysler had been faltering for years. Good ideas, poor implementation. Indeed, Ford has been doing some things better than the other two, but it is not out of the woods yet. If you want to blame government bureaucrats for putting a burden on automakers, lay it on the expensive safety and pollution requirements. As a survivor of a memorable 1960 auto collision (no seatbelts), I for one am glad of the mandated safety devices!Innovation is the key. Perhaps the S.P.I.R.L. motor, as described in the NASA Tech Bulletin, could provide the profitable technology to lead the way forward.

So long as any capitalist enterprise is competing against financial interests, rather than focusing on production of goods and services, there will be a tendency to roll the dice. When Kirk Kerkorian was about to buy a majority of GM stock, the speculation was that he could use the cash reserves of GMAC, the lending arm, to pursue more profitable investments. The vultures were circling even then.

The elephant in the room that no one mentions is the lack of incentive for entrepeneurs to go into space. To loosely quote Lewis Mumford (I think), “any transportation system must be pedestrian-friendly at each terminus”. Destinations without a breatheable atmosphere are not pedestrian-friendly. Anything else is a thermos bottle with people in it. Sure, Queen Isabella funded Columbus’s trip across the Atlantic, and he carried his own food and water, but they could still fish over the side, catch rainwater in sailcloth, and put out a pulling boat and row if becalmed. And it was not a ballistic trajectory – the option of turning around was viable. One could even say that they could generate electricity from solar and/or wind power and electrolyse seawater for oxygen and hydrogen to power fuel cells on cloudy days. But no such option is available in space. There is no new market on the ISS, the Moon, or Mars – they are as consumer hostile as Antarctica. And there’s no treaure worth shipping back, unless they discover Unobtainium. Worth exploring? Sure. Enough to inspire a race of the clipper ships? Not a chance.

Now we get to the Challenger and the Columbia. Von Braun’s original Peenemunde team knew all along that the O-rings on the SRB’s would eventually fail – it was “when”, not “if”. The crews knew also. This is straight from one the men who worked on the V-2′s, who was my neighbor in Huntsville, Alabama. After Von Braun died, “they no longer had the clout on the hill to get the funding”. Also, the shuttle program was signed “operational” by then president Ronald Reagan, but astronauts knew, “It was always right on the edge, every time.” (Newsweek) The Challenger disaster occurred under RR – a Republican, trying to stress the commercial aspects. The Columbia tragedy also occurred under a Republican – George W. Bush, who furnished the lead-off statement upon which the above article is based. I found it ironic that the debris fell in Texas, not Alabama.

The NASA bureaucrats who ignored “the advice of engineers” are no different than any other corporate bureaucrats who ignore the advice of their engineers, like at, say, General Motors. Ronald Reagan was a fan of German economist F.A. Hayek, whose book, “The Road To Serfdom”, is well worth reading. Chapter 10, “Why The Worst End Up On Top”, is especially good. Bureaucrats bend the rules for political expediency because that is the nature of their business. That’s how they got their jobs to begin with. Read Federal Computer Week or National Defense magazines, and one will find this to be a common complaint. And if anyone, “crashes . . . airliners for political gain”, it is surely politicians who instigate it, not bureaucrats.

Concering the airlines, Bush let them swallow their debt obligations after 9/11, even after they absorbed, arguably, the worst public relations nightmare since the Hindenberg. I flew on 10/11 – one month after 9/11, and the flap triple slots on the Airbus were hanging like a wind-racked venetian blind. Upon landing and disembarking, the airline representaives would hear none of – it was hostile. Co-incidence?

No, the big carriers aren’t losing planes, but who can forget the wrong runway take-off of a regional carrier in North (?) Carolina, or the crash in Buffalo of another regional under icing conditions? The rot reaches into the realm of human resources. Have you been on an airliner lately where the cross-bleed didn’t work, and an external starter was used, like in the old days? What if you get rotor stall at altitude? That’ll be a flight to tell the grandkids about when the pilot zooms out after re-start! Thank you, W!

Paul’s argument for adapting existing commercial technology is specious. Space flight is not routine – there is simply no commercial base to adapt technology from – this is putting the cart before the horse.

When NASA, hopefully without highly politicised management, can offer an exo-atmosphere, and round-trip revenue runs, the entrepeneurs will beat a path to their door. After all, they talked people into moving to Greenland, didn’t they? (Hint: It has an atmosphere!)

You have got to be kidding. The auto companies failed in large part because of the unions. They had to produce tons of crappy cars just to meet their pension and health care obligations. The foreign automakers did not have the legacy pension costs of the domestics, so they fared much better. Ford also had the luck of borrowing several bilion before the crash. Bankruptcy was the best thing to happen to the auto companies, but due to political reasons, they did not take full advantage to get rid of their unsustainable “obligations.” No, it was not “entrepreneurial energies” that doomed the car companies, but just the opposite – bureaucracy and unions.