Now then, to be serious for a moment...
Jerry Pournelle posted a brief comment today about humanity's return to the Moon, and how unlikely it is that we'll manage it through the government or through corporations; the teams of engineering brilliance no longer exist, replaced by "professional managers" and techniques that seem incapable of accomplishing anything constructive.
I don't disagree with his comments about engineering teams and engineers; I've been there. This is the reason why I'm a systems administrator instead of an engineer; because no engineer younger than 50 can really say they've accomplished anything in the space program, and the way things are going, no engineer ever will be able to say that again. The politics, the bureaucrats, the all-around crap make it impossible to even conceive of accomplishing anything, much less actually doing it. I also agree with his suggested methods of accomplishing his goals; I do believe they would work, in a limited fashion. My one fear is that legislation or some other cause would force a situation where the base would reach the specified 39 people for the required three years - and ten years later, would still be a 39 person facility. It's not enough to just make a simple research station, like the US and other nations maintain in Antarctica; to really accomplish anything, the base must instead be a Jamestown, or better, a San Francisco; a place where people move to create a village, which becomes a town, which becomes a larger town...
So how do you accomplish that? One possibility is the classic "company town", a town that exists only because it is the most profitable means of operation; a mining town, or, just possibly, a research organization. Company towns need gas stations, hospitals, and grocery stores, too. The only problem with this model is that it's hard to imagine anything on the Moon worth creating a viable company town for, at least in terms of the profits companies and shareholders want and expect. A research-station, yes; you could possible arrange a consortium of Universities and research firms for that - but again, you're talking about small manned outposts, not growing colonies. Colonies need resources, families, most importantly they need babies - the growing population pressure is what causes them to grow, and become more than a mere colony, more than an outpost. For the Moon to be anything more than another sterile research outpost, the Moon must become Home.
That's happened before, in the American West. It didn't happen through exploration teams like Lewis and Clark, or through Spanish ships sailing up the Pacific coast; it happened because families went there, in Conestoga wagons, to create a life from nothing but the tools they carried along and the raw materials they found when they arrived. We don't need a fleet of reusable spacecraft; we don't need government programs and decrees, nor even cash prizes. What we need is a relatively inexpensive Conestoga, something that can go to the moon with a family (or more) and land them with the resources they need to build a home. A few foolhardy individuals will try, a few of those will succeed. More probable are groups, heading out together to set up their homesteads in a relatively small area; some of those groups will fail, but not all.
OK. So how do we get Conestogas? Jerry's right, the engineering teams don't exist any longer; and you need a spacecraft capable of carrying, say, 10 people, the necessary tools and equipment, landing them safely, and allowing them to set up a minimally habitable base that can be expanded. And do it all at a cost this fairly small group can afford.
So. Three problems.
1. We need an engineering team to design these spacecraft, and a means of producing them.
2. We need a "basic kit", the things needed to live off the land on the Moon.
3. We need a way to pay for it, or rather, we need a way for each family group to pay for it.
OK. Problem one; the engineering team.
The talent is out there, it exists. It took the best geniuses on the planet to build the first atomic bomb, but once they did it, it became a matter for technicians and ordinary engineers. Well, we've been to the Moon. We know how it was done, we know what the moon is like, we know what's there and what would have to be taken along. Of course, the Saturn V and the Apollo are not acceptable for our purposes; the Saturn V is overkill, I think, for the payload necessary, which is good news considering what they cost. <G> On the other hand, the problems the Saturn V solved still exist today; the Saturn V represents an excellent starting point for finding our Conestoga.
But we still need the engineering team to find the precise answer.
So, let's take a page from the latest craze; Open Source development. Create a central repository on SourceForge.net, and make a simple offer - if you provide information, engineering work, and time, it will be utilized. I knew dozens of engineers who did work on their own time, on projects like this, but no one could ever get anywhere; one person, even two people, can't manage things like this. The urge to see something like this coming to fruition is enough, I suspect, for most engineers to donate their time. It also serves to coordinate things like computer processing time, through Distributed.net or a similar organization. Most importantly, to become a clearinghouse for the information, to allow these small groups to find it and build their Conestogas.
Problem two; the "basic kit". Similar problem; we already have the basic textbook. The problem is refining the textbook, making it something that can be put to good use; taking it from the textbook and the classroom to the instruction manual. The same solution will also work.
Problem three is self-solving. What is the cost? I would assume, just as a very rough guess, that the cost for one Conestoga flight will a full crew and payload will be something like 30, 40 million. That's incredibly low for a spacecraft; I'm thinking the majority of the cost is going to be the initial launch, which can't really be lowered. On the other hand, the cost of the craft itself, and the equipment for the Moon, is hopefully going to be much lower.
Now, 30 to 40 million is considerably more than any normal family, or small group of families could afford. So this becomes a significant problem.
Or does it?
Let's not forget that one of the few things the Moon is "good for", right now, is research. All sorts of research. And we're all pretty much agreed that NASA is never going to get there, and no one else is going to get there just as a research facility. But what if these groups preparing for the flight offered to conduct experiments for these different research groups - 40 man-hours per week of manpower, one ton of payload capacity, to the highest bidder. If the average "Conestoga Team" consisted of three families, six adults, each team could afford one or two research payloads - do you think research organizations might be willing to pay 15 to 20 million for that sort of chance? For a research program running a year, two years, ten... who WOULDN'T pay that? It's less than the cost of a dedicated launch, and certainly less than the cost of a dedicated launch to the moon. There's always the possibility of a bonanza, something valuable and exploitable on the moon; investors may speculate on that, on the off chance that a few dollars now could result in huge gains later. Corporate sponsers will pay, too, just for the chance to see their logo on a piece of hardware that makes it to the Moon.
So. It almost seems everything's set. Not quite. We need one thing more.
We need the will to go.
Thursday January 4 - Happy FTP'ing...
There'll be more later, but I wanted to post this:
Linux Kernel 2.4.0 is out. It's not on many servers yet, but it's getting there.
The announcement from Linus on the Linux-Kernel mailing list:
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
Anxiously awaited for the last too many months, 2.4.0 brings to the table many improvements, none of which come to mind to the exhausted release manager right now. "It's better", was the only printable quote. Pressed for details, Linus bared his teeth and hissed at reporters, most of which suddenly remembered that they'd rather cover "Home and Gardening" than the IT industry anyway.
Anyway, have fun. And don't bother reporting any bugs for the next few days. I won't care anyway.
Linus
Friday, January 5 - Happenings
OK, it's later... <G>
Spent about an hour and a half on the phone last night redoing last week's poor phone interview. Went much better, thank you; we'll see what happens from here, but I feel a whole heck of a lot better about last night's interview than I did about last week's.
Tying in with what Tom had to say about headhunters... it's more than time that's being wasted, people and effort and energy are wasted, too. Take this current job search, for example; I know more or less exactly what I want, and I know what I'm qualified to do. (Fortunately, they overlap... <G>) But that doesn't really matter, because it's the headhunters who control access to the companies.
Now, I've been on both sides of this issue, as the hiring company and as the person looking for a job. On a relatively low level, for a junior administrator, helpdesk technician, or a position of that nature, this system works fine overall. Yes, there's time added to the job search process for the candidates, but from the employer's perspective, it's a definite improvement; I as the hiring manager don't have to wade through dozens or hundreds of resumes looking for the few people I need. I can enter the process relatively late in the game and select from just a few candidates. As for the candidates, there isn't much in the way of "wasted opportunities" because, generally speaking, the employers are looking for something easily defined; the right keywords on the resume and in the first interview are good enough to indicate who's a possible candidate and who isn't. The headhunter doesn't need to know anything about computers to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff.
The problem is at the higher levels. I'm interviewing for Director of IT, IT Manager, and similar positions - and sometimes it seems like the headhunters are determined to misunderstand what I do. (Not all of them, certainly, but a fair percentage, based on the communications I've had.) I've had dozens of calls and emails from headhunters looking for resumes from me; when I manage to pry a description of the position from them, it's a first-level helpdesk position. Or junior administrator. One was a position that goes under a dozen names but is known (at least among the admins I know) as "rack monkey" - an entry-level position whose chief responsibilities generally include changing backup tapes according to a predefined schedule. There's nothing wrong with being a rack monkey; I started out as one. But that was several years ago, folks. There's a slight difference.
I don't know how to fix it, exactly, because I think it's part of a larger problem. Headhunters are not technical people, but (for the senior positions, at least) they're forced to make judgements about a candidates' technical skills. I had one interview a while ago where the headhunter conducted an initial interview - and when we were finished, she commented that I'd missed several questions. Since I had answered every question pretty well (I thought) I naturally wanted to know how. Turns out the hiring company had given her a script for the interview, including answers - and the answers specified products that are similar, but distinct from, the products I use. Since the headhunter had no idea what differentiated the products, or any idea of what the products did, she just assumed I was wrong. (For example, they were using "ArcServeIT" for their backup solution, and I mentioned that I use and prefer "BackupExec". She didn't realize that although they're different products, they do the same job and are in many ways very similar.)
Managers are too often the same way; people go to college to learn "management". Well, that's all very well and good, and the skills they teach are useful; I took a few engineering management courses myself. But you wind up with people being handed degrees in management and being told they're no qualified to manage engineers/doctors/sysadmins/teachers. Says who? Some of these people are excellent managers - but they no nothing about the industry they're supposed to be leading. Professional managers, by and large, have done more damage to productivity than any other professional group save the bureaucrats. (Yes, I know. There are excellent professional managers out there who've been a godsend to their companies. I've known a few, I've worked for a few. But they're the exception, not the rule.)
Hmmm. Ranting again. I should get that checked... <G> Anyway, Tom, good luck. It does, eventually, happen, but the days of "start looking Monday, interview Wednesday, hire on Friday, start the following Monday" are unfortunately over.
