I hate rebates. They are incredibly annoying and force me to do work to keep the manufacturer honest. In the early days of rebates I religiously kept a folder where I filed copies of all the receipts and papers for all my outstanding rebates. I had to use this archive a number of times as manufacturers claimed they never received my information. At times this became an annoying game as I had to submit paperwork over and over. More recently I simply buy an on-sale product that has no rebate.

Then, one day my company assigned me to a new development project. The business guys decided that the product would be sold with a $30 rebate. I protested that I hated rebates and that having one cheapened the image of the product. Business guys rarely listen to the engineers. They explained that so few people successfully claimed the rebate that they were essentially selling the product at a $30 higher price. It was money for nothing and I was therefore condemned to help produce a product that, in my opinion, made the world a worse place to live. I understood how the scientists employed by the tobacco companies must have felt.

After 30 years I’m still very proud to be an engineer. Without our skill the companies couldn’t make anything, yet we have little power and little control. Although most of us have a great deal of pride and skill in our profession, few of us have much influence over the projects to which we are assigned. To receive a paycheck, we work on bad projects that negatively affect the world. We work on turkeys that never have a chance of flying. Few of us are lucky enough to be able to take a project in a direction of our choosing. I must say that I have never seen an engineer refuse to work on a project to which a company assigned him. However, I have seen numerous engineers leave their company over dissatisfaction with project assignments.

It seems to me this is a bad situation. Companies have a ready supply of highly educated and very skilled experts. Their opinions should not only be tolerated but solicited. If the engineers feel a project’s direction is incorrect – a course correction should be made. Skilled technical experts should not have to work on a project they feel makes the world worse. If the company won’t change direction – vote with your feet and change companies. I guarantee this will force products to become better and eventually make the world a better place.

Civil Engineers are in the engineering fraternity and should also decline to work on negative projects. One great example is the horrible proliferation of toll roads. Not many years ago good roads, like good schools, were felt to better society. Schools, roads, sanitation, etc. were viewed as communal resources created and maintained for the common good. No sane person said their taxes should not go to support the schools because their children did not attend and no sane person claimed their taxes should not fund roads since they did not drive on them.

Toll roads are like rebates. They are annoying and are the result of greedy bureaucrats trying to get a few more dollars from their customer. Everyone benefits from good roads. The roads improve commerce, access to jobs and shopping, and save time – time that can be put to beneficial use. Governments want to spend like drunken sailors yet don’t want to incur the wrath of voters by raising taxes. So they look for alternative ways to grab money… speed cameras, toll roads, fines and fees. Man up to it boys and quit nickel and diming us. If you want to keep spending, be man enough to ask for a tax increase and stop the toll road nonsense.

It’s that time of year again – time to walk from room to room and change all our clocks. For some of us, this nonsensical ritual involves staring blankly at the coffee maker while we try to remember how to set its time. On the way to work some of us will try to remember how to set the clock in the car and fiddle with it at stoplights. At work we may find the clock in the meeting room is an hour off. It may stay that way for the next month.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) may have made sense when we were an agrarian society but today it costs us a fortune in added complexity of modern electronic devices. I worked for several years making TV settop boxes. There were two components to the design and implementation of the settops that required significant work yet provided no particular feature or benefit to the consumer. One was the handling of Daylight Saving Time (DST) issues in the program guide and the other was content protection. Not much can be done to minimize the added cost, time, and complexity of content protection so long as the content owners insist on getting paid. However the wasted time and lost productivity caused by designing around DST produced no economic benefit for anyone. It was just headaches, pain, and expensive labor.

Over the last few years the period for which DST is in effect changed from the more traditional dates. This forced software updates to millions of computers and those software updates had to be implemented and tested. This cost money and diverted resources from far more meaningful tasks. In addition, the incomplete distribution of these updates caused confusion and consternation.

The pros and cons of Daylight Saving Time:

On the bad side

· Added expense developing all products and equipment that understand time

· Added delays testing and delivering these products

· Problems with automatic backups when time goes backward

· Problems with automatic anything when time goes backward

· Danger to children waiting in dark mornings at bus stops

· The DST induced longer days are a major contributor to global warming

· DST causes cancer, acne, and flatulence

On the good side

· It provides a twice a year reminder to check the batteries in your smoke detectors

· It, ummmmm…

· …

I can visualize a better world when the burden of DST no longer exists. Join with me in this vision and work toward the elimination of this costly, archaic blight on the design and implementation of electronic devices. With any luck, next spring we can split the difference between Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time. We can spring forward one HALF hour and never again have to spring forward, fall back, or worry about what the software does when time suddenly jumps an hour backward.

OK, maybe just ONE more blog on space programs…

It seems common knowledge that the government snagged a flying saucer from the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947. Expert testimonials from any number of sources repeatedly tell us we got integrated circuits, lasers, fiber optics, Velcro, and other technology from that saucer. It seems there are “expert” testimonials for every facet of our lives. From evolution and global warming to swine flu and trillion dollar bailouts, “experts” tell us what to believe. We live in a world where power screwdrivers are rated by volts, vacuum cleaners are rated by amps, movie stars and professional athletes are paid millions to tell us what shampoo to buy, and an important consideration for our presidential candidates is their wearing of an American Flag lapel pin.

However, as Galileo pointed out 400 years ago, hours and days of “expert” testimonials are worth far less than a few minutes of actual observation. In fact, such testimonials have no place in science and are worse than worthless since they cloud the facts and confuse the issues. Unfortunately, despite hundreds of years of visible success of the Scientific Method, many people still prefer testimonials or even divination over verifiable facts. I guess it is just too much trouble to investigate details and… think.

Anyway, if we had a working, albeit damaged, flying saucer more than 20 years before the moon landing we certainly should have been able to copy it, right? Probably not. If Isaac Newton, one of the smartest people to ever walk the earth, was just handed a cell phone he would not have been able to tell if it was a weapon, paperweight, or religious artifact. He would not have been able to recognize the intended purpose of the resistors, capacitors, or any of the ICs. However, he may have been fascinated with the sparks and heat that resulted from shorting the battery. With no cell towers and no datasheets he would have found it a very curious device.

Many technologies must be invented before we achieve interstellar flight. I’m not worried about the raw science, string theory math, and such. That is fundamental theoretical research. Our many fine universities and brilliant graduate students will take care of that. I’m more worried about the implementation of complex scientific devices. “Big Science” requires big money and big money can only come from governments or large corporations. A large corporation should only be spending big money if it reasonably believes the investment will result in a substantial profit in the relatively near future. Only governments can toss large sums of money at projects unlikely to yield a financial return. Fortunately there is ample precedent for government spending with little hope of tangible monetary gain.

The current mindset of the human race is not well suited to developing technology need to join other worlds travelling interstellar space. Humans seem most willing to invest significant resources and money implementing complicated technology during times of war. Recent examples include the creation of the first operational jet fighter (the Messerschmitt Me 262) and the splitting of the atom. It seems geeks only get funding for Big Science for military supremacy or political advantage. Christopher Columbus wanted to explore but he had to convince Queen Isabella to sponsor him. Wernher von Braun wanted to explore but had to convince Hitler and Kennedy to sponsor him. One must wonder (and perhaps fear) the motivation of the sponsors of the alien geeks who sold their souls for the funding to come visit us.

If it exists, alien spacecraft technology would certainly be many, many years ahead of us, but it is not just the technology. The reliability, to travel trillions and trillions of miles, would have to be astonishing. This seems a far more difficult problem since humans don’t have the patience and focus needed to implement high reliability devices. Airplanes crash, subway trains collide, water pipes break, major cities lose power, and more. Many people talk the talk but ultimately everything gets shipped before the last bug is found and few design anything to last for decades. Furthermore, long-lasting products actually interfere with the future revenue of selling replacements. The fundamental culture of our society does not seem well suited to building things reliable enough to travel between the stars.

Why have humans ventured out to new horizons? Well, some of us are made to want to explore. Some humans risk life, reputation, family, and financial security to invent and discover. It seems most humans, however, are too worried about basic survival to care about that “stupid stuff”. While poets speak of the human inquisitiveness and desire to explore, my personal observation of the human race suggests these traits are confined to a relatively small percentage of the population. That small percentage, however, has dragged the rest of us kicking and screaming into the future.

Don’t believe for a minute the moon landing was about science and exploration. Of course many (most?) of the actual scientists were doing exactly that, but the funding only came because we couldn’t let the Soviets land on the moon first. If alien races are coming here, it costs them money – and lots of it. Thus I conclude that if aliens are indeed coming to our planet, they must have a very different culture from ours – OR – they want something important. I certainly hope their culture is different. If it’s not, I’m pretty sure I won’t like finding out what it is they want, and… I really won’t like the anal probe.

OK, you are right. I’m beating this topic to death. I already did two blogs on this (“They Say We Landed a Man on The Moon” and “July 20, 1969“), but there are two good reasons for just one more.

First, I need to correct a possible misconception. A couple of people seemed to think I was being hard on the NASA engineers. Absolutely not. Nothing could be further from the truth. The space program could not have enjoyed success without outstanding engineers. From the beginning of the space program to the present, some of the very best around have contributed to its success.

My point was that poor management could stymie even the best engineers. In the specific cases of the space shuttle disasters it was not bad engineers but poor management that failed to assign appropriate resources to resolve long-standing problems. This is not my opinion, but accepted fact. After investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the Rogers Commission concluded that NASA’s culture and decision-making was a major factor in the accident. In the case of space shuttle Columbia, NASA management knew for years about the damage to tiles and problems with the foam but failed to properly investigate.

The second reason for “just one more blog” on the space program was a recent newspaper article titled, “NASA’s Trajectory Unrealistic…”. It seems The Human Space Flight Plans Committee has been reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight program and is due to release its report at the end of this month. The article says the early indication is the Committee doesn’t think NASA is on the right track. There is a particularly interesting quote about the previous administration setting down a very good policy then not providing the funding to execute that policy. Maybe the Bush administration could be forgiven for believing the Hollywood or perhaps media image of President Kennedy dreaming a goal and schedule and the miracle workers of NASA successfully executing on that dream.

Unfortunately the Apollo success didn’t happen that way. It couldn’t have. For many years I’ve been bothered by the prevailing image that NASA magically executed an impromptu project on a schedule that Kennedy dreamed up. However, all of my professional experience has been that project disasters result when a bureaucrat imagines a project or schedule in isolation. This conflict was difficult to accept. I lived through enough of the space program that there was no way I could doubt the reality of the moon landing, yet disaster resulted from every situation I’d seen where the engineers were ordered to execute a project on a conjured schedule.

My conflict was finally resolved when I saw a biography of Wernher von Braun and then did some follow-up research. The paradigm I now choose to believe is nearly the exact opposite of the legend of how John Kennedy sent us to the moon. This new paradigm is that an experienced team of technical experts put together a project and schedule, and then executed it with minimal interference. This scenario matches exactly that which I’ve seen be successful over and over. The moon landing was not the creation of President Kennedy – he merely bought into von Braun’s dream and allowed experienced masters of technology to follow their passion. There was no “testosterone engineering” and there was only the good form of the “can-do” culture.

The “can-do” engineering culture comes in two flavors – good and evil. The GOOD “can-do”attitude says we can solve the hardest of problems and can make the most complicated devices work. The key words here are “solve” and “work” – as in we actually solve the problem and the device actually works. Sometimes the GOOD “can-do” attitude gets perverted into the EVIL “can-do” attitude by ignorant or malicious management. The evil “can-do” attitude degenerates into “testosterone engineering” where hard work substitutes for smart work and problems are ignored or prioritized out of existence instead of being solved. Scientific inquiry and good engineering suffer at the hands of “testosterone engineering” as blustering clowns and bumpkins run around posturing and pontificating.

I previously said, essentially, that NASA has little chance of returning to the moon and no chance of going to mars in the next few decades. Congress or the President cannot intelligently establish a schedule for anything. They lack the expertise and domain knowledge. In addition, setting any policy without the assurance of proper and continuing funding is worse than meaningless. Doing so simply causes the agency to waste money as they are whipped from one unrealistic goal to the next. Today, with an apathetic public, there is no chance, zero, zilch, of Congress holding the requirements steady and allocating a solid stream of funding to the space program. Things are bad now but in the future things will get much worse. The public will get far worse than apathetic as the population continues to climb, debt comes due on our previous largess, and the social security time bomb explodes. Joe-six-pack will not want to hear about the benefits of Velcro and Teflon when he has very real worries about feeding and providing for his family.

There was a brief moment in time where some talented dreamers were able to inspire the man-in-the-street with visions of Buck Rogers flying to other planets and with American heroes showing our cold-war enemies exactly who had the right stuff. For a brief moment in time these dreamers were able to gain access to sufficient public funds and not only put a man on the moon but inspired a generation of engineers who went on to create the microprocessor, personal computer, and The Internet.

Today Buck Rogers has lost his appeal and the average person has more important things to worry about than a stranger putting footprints on some dusty, dead planet. Today it seems to be an unrealistic pipe dream that we could use public funds to mount an efficient and successful human spaceflight program. There are too many special interests, too many pockets to grease, and too many conflicting needs for this too happen with any consistency. The NASA moon shot funding appears to have been a one-time event brought about by a brief confluence of diverse political combatants.

No, the only hope for a consistent stream of funding for human spaceflight is private money. Don’t laugh. I think this might be doable. My back of the envelope calculations say that $17 to $30 billion seed money would be required and then $8 to $12 billion per year. This is a lot of money, but just might be possible – perhaps 100,000,000 people annually contributing the equivalent of a few weeks of gas money. For this idea to be even remotely possible, we need the program leader to be very wealthy, technically knowledgeable, and able to give the assurance that at least most of the money is being well spent.

Hey Bill Gates – you’ve been retired long enough. Get started on this.

Yep, you are right. This is yet another blog on the Apollo moon landing. But hey – this was one of the great achievements of the 20^th century and, frankly, I don’t expect to see it duplicated in my lifetime. We are likely to be stuck here on earth with 7 billion of our closest friends for the foreseeable future. Why? Well, consider what went right for us to get to the moon the first time… His name was Wernher von Braun.

Wernher von Braun was born March 23, 1912. He was a geek. He treasured the Star Trek and X-Files of his day – H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. He loved the concept of space exploration and wanted very much to build a moon ship. He mastered calculus and got an engineering/physics degree to further that cause. Von Braun, however, was a very unusual geek. He was born to an aristocratic family, received his early education in boarding schools, and was blessed with good looks and an outgoing personality. Von Braun’s natural organizational skills were augmented by this aristocratic upbringing. He was comfortable with important people and giving orders.

By 1929 Wernher was building rockets. In 1932 he went to work for the German army building missiles. He combined engineering skill and scientific knowledge with enthusiastic salesmanship, charisma, and charm. By 1934 he was leading the rocketry research at the Kummersdorf test site and had several million marks funding from the government and military. By 1936 he had over 1,000 people working for him at Peenemunde, the famous birthplace of the V2 rocket. In 1941 Wernher met with Adolf Hitler in the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) and persuaded Hitler of the value of rockets as a weapon. Hitler embraced the concept. Wernher von Braun was dancing with the devil but suddenly had unlimited funding. By the middle of 1942 von Braun had 12,000 people working for him. On Oct. 3, 1942 von Braun’s A-4 rocket was successfully tested. It became the first manmade object into space, reaching a height of 52 miles.

In the years before Power Point, von Braun was a natural marketer. His color movies of rocket launchings and explosive destruction of targets kept the unlimited money flowing. In March 1944 he learned an important lesson when the SS arrested him. While relaxing with coworkers he was overheard to say he wanted the conquest of space, not England. These were determined to be treasonous words. Fortunately for him Albert Speer, the munitions minister, convinced Hitler that von Braun was critical to the war effort.

Wernher had learned his lesson. His continued freedom and perhaps survival meant he had to turn a blind eye to the suffering and destruction wrought by his creations. On Sept. 7, 1944 the V2 rocket was deployed. By the war’s end, more than 2,400 missiles had killed over 5,000 people.

Seeing the war was not going well for the Germans, von Braun and his top staff created an insurance policy. Despite being closely watched they were able to hide several truckloads of key rocketry documentation in an abandon mine. In May 1945 von Braun negotiated terms for the defection of more than 300 rocketry experts to the United States.

His dream of going to the moon was put on hold for several years. It seemed the American government was not very interested in von Braun’s work or his views. They seemed to not appreciate the treasure trove of engineering knowhow they had acquired. However, another world power was about to change that. In Oct. 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik. In the middle of the cold war the United States government was suddenly faced with the prospect they would be perceived by the world as technologically inferior to the Russians. Wernher von Braun answered his adoptive country’s call. His team launched an American satellite into space less than 90 days after Sputnik.

With international tensions high, von Braun the master salesman sold the young American president John Kennedy on the value of clearly demonstrating to the world the dominance of American technology. On May 25, 1961 president Kennedy announced that we would land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade.

In my blog, They Say We Landed a Man on The Moon, I worried that the success of landing a man on the moon appeared to conflict with my personal experience involving engineering projects. This was because I failed to appreciate the level of skill possessed by von Braun and his team. My recent study indicates the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth was a no-brainer with von Braun directing the effort. Wernher von Braun had been working to get to the moon for more than 30 years and had already solved most of the problems in his head. He had the practical experience of managing thousands of people in this effort and had hundreds of the world’s foremost experts at hand. I believe his most difficult problem was keeping the politicians and corporate executives from messing things up. Fortunately he had the stature to command respect and keeping congress at bay was nothing compared to staying out of a Nazi SS prison. Von Braun and his talented and experienced staff were well position in all aspects critical to successfully scheduling the moon shot and delivering it on time.

· Knowledge of the project technology – check. Von Braun had more than 30 years of personal experience.

· Calibration of the staff – check. Von Braun had been working with a large number of the key staff for more than 20 years.

· Adequate funding – check

· Clear requirements/goals – check.

· Proper culture – check. Von Braun had blown up his share of rockets. He knew through his personal experience and expertise the necessity of resolving anomalies and getting the technology right. He established a culture of quality and enthusiasm. If you walked around NASA in the 1960s and asked engineers why they were there they would answer, “we are going to the moon”. They understood the mission and they understood unresolved quirks and mysterious problems conflicted with that goal.

On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 was launched. It landed on the moon forty years ago today, July 20, 1969.

Opinion:

Do we really believe that president Kennedy simply chose the end of the decade as the proper schedule? No way. It would be a highly visible international embarrassment to miss the deadline. Von Braun and his team certainly did a detailed analysis and told Kennedy they were absolutely certain they could achieve the goal by that time. I wasn’t there but most likely they thought they could do it in half that time.

So, can we do this again? Can we go back to the moon – or to mars? I highly, highly doubt this is possible in the near future. Here’s why:

· The most critical of all issues, as always, are clear requirements. The NASA organization has been tasked with a number of unfunded directives and has had to deal with confusing priority shifts. This must be corrected before there is any chance of returning to the moon. Worse, correcting this problem requires a champion and no such person exists. Wernher von Braun was the champion of going to the moon and he had the unquestioned stature needed to be that champion. Today there is no Wernher von Braun.

· The 1960s culture of quality and of getting the science right has been misunderstood or perverted into a “can-do” culture. I’ve worked on a number of projects where the philosophy imposed from above was that of proving your mettle by making herculean efforts to meet schedules. I’ve seen over and over the project damaging effects of the attitude that real men ship products on time. Science and the development of new technology are not about testosterone, but about understanding what is wrong and fixing it. The “can-do” boys blew up not one, but two space shuttles. The warning signs were there but were ignored. I really don’t think this would have happened under von Braun. He was too much of a scientist and geek to ignore unresolved anomalies. Note – this seems to have gotten better the last few years. Perhaps losing the second shuttle was enough to get the message across.

· The entire space flight organization dangles from congressional whims, random funding, and an apparently uncaring public. When I was a kid in school, instruction was halted and a launch was broadcast over the school PA system. There was excitement. There was energy. There was commitment.

· In every development effort there are disagreements and conflicts. Today there seems to be no one held in high enough esteem to hold off unreasonable demands from congress or to resolve the bickering of major contractors. There is no Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Wernher von Braun to which everyone turns when a conflict must be resolved.

Return to the moon anytime soon? Ain’t gonna happen.

Go to mars? Don’t make me laugh.