Pork in Space!

I saw an article last year that claimed the reason NASA has had so much trouble making any progress – or getting any respect – that that most of its multi-billion dollar budget gets swallowed up by various pork-barrel projects in the home districts of key members of Congress. I was a little dubious about this, both because it’s a given that any spending bill in the United States will be loaded with money that rewards the rich and powerful while simultaneously getting long-serving politicians re-elected, and also because while many of the projects cited do not have anything to do with rockets, space flight, or anything that would match off with the agency’s public image, space science does include things like global changes on Earth, biology in space, long-term empirical research, and so on. The fact is, claims of government waste and inefficiency are as common in the United States as the budget outrages they claim to document, if not more so, because it sells newspapers or television advertising time and is more interesting than watching CSPAN to find out what our government is actually spending its money on…

Then I read this article off of the Quartz site, about Elon Musk of Space-X claiming that his company lost out on a multi-billion dollar contract because they declined to offer the government official awarding that contract a job, but the competition did. The facts of the case are a little murky, but no one is disputing the fact that a contract for 36 satellite launches were awarded to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, on a no-bid contract, or that the official who approved that contract (Roger S. Correll) was subsequently given an extremely lucrative executive position with ULA immediately after his retirement from government service. And while it seems fantastical to believe that anyone would risk “fixing” a government contract in such a blatantly improper fashion, I’m unable to come up with any other explanation for what is going on here…

As a taxpayer, I find this sort of thing infuriating, but not really surprising. During the previous Administration we saw no-bid contracts for Halliburton (and others) supplying the invasion of Iraq, and if you look you will find similar arrangements in every Federal budget since President Eisenhower warned us about the consequences of a “Military-Industrial Complex” taking control of our government. What I find especially heinous about this particular story is that the United States government stands to gain more from the commercial development of outer space than anyone in this Hemisphere, and possibly in the world, which makes stifling all opportunities in that industry not merely corrupt, but also self-destructive. If the claims made by Space-X are true, and they really can launch satellites for a quarter of the price we are currently paying, then our government is quite literally squandering billions of your tax dollars while borrowing ever-larger amounts on credit…

Now, it must be admitted that at least some of the money being given to ULA will benefit our economy; they will have to at least produce launch vehicles (even at a 400% markup) or risk having the contract rescinded. And this will, in turn, allow the participating companies to hire and pay their employees, and order parts and materials from other companies that will do likewise, thus cycling more money into the economy and improving our present conditions. I just can’t help thinking that on a no-bid contract there is no reason for company executives to include huge bonuses for themselves – and while I have no objection to paying for value received, regardless of the form it takes, I do have a problem with people enriching themselves at the expense of the public while returning nothing of value except electable politicians…

I will leave the comments about the ethics, morality or legality of no-bid contracts to those better qualified, and just close by saying that from a business standpoint they can indeed be categorized as “criminally stupid” – and that there is no way we will ever advance into space if we keep trying to haul this much pork along with us…

Flying Cheese

Over the years, I have seen a number of very odd food concepts taken to market with varying results. I can still recall the infamous “Space Food Sticks” marketed during the early 1970s, when everyone I hung out with was a least a little caught up in the hype surrounding the Apollo missions. I’ve seen dozens of things covered with batter and deep-fried, from cheese and hot dogs to Twinkies and Snickers bars. I’ve seen chocolate brushed, sprayed and coated on products where chocolate should never go. I’ve seen foods that explode when they come into contact with your mouth, hot sauce so potent it can literally cause tissue damage, and packaged vegan brownies that were complete unchanged by being stepped on and then molded back into shape (fortunately, the plastic wrapper didn’t break). But I don’t think I’ve seen a concept so completely insane, and yet so appealing, as the idea of a flying grilled cheese sandwich…

I picked up the story from the Huffington Post article about them, but you can visit the company’s own website here if you want to. There isn’t a lot of information about them online, but the basic idea is you pay for a sandwich online (it’s $5) and then go to a location marked with an “X” on a street corner – the location of which will be revealed to you after you pay your money. A short time later a small orange parachute with a sandwich attached will float gently down from the sky, where you can grab it. The company says that if you sandwich gets caught on something on the way down, or otherwise fails to show up, they will “probably” make you another one – but it’s hard to imagine any entrepreneur losing public relations, let alone potential repeat customers, by failing to replace product that happens to get stuck in a tree…

It’s not clear how serious these people are about the company, which they call Jafflechutes – a “jaffle” is Australian slang for a grilled cheese, and they drop them via parachute, hence Jafflechutes – but assuming a customer base with sufficient whimsy there’s no reason this couldn’t work. All you would need is a kitchen located in the upper floors of a building somewhere with a significant population density (the North American location they’re talking about expanding into is New York City, naturally) and a city government which is prepared to be lenient about litter from miss-delivered sandwiches. The business model isn’t functionally different from any other quick-service restaurant with an unusual delivery method, and we have already seen other gravity-based systems (e.g. chutes, elevators, rolling trays) used in this role. There are even restaurants already in operation where all ordering and payment transactions are handled via touch screen on the tabletop, and you have no personal interaction with the employees…

Personally, I was a little disappointed when I saw the details of the operation in the online articles. When I saw the headline I had envisioned a fleet of drone aircraft, possibly akin to the quadracopter drones Amazon is supposedly looking into using for a delivery fleet, soaring over the rooftops of a major city and then releasing sandwiches from an internal cargo bay when they reach the specified GPS coordinates. And once that technology is up and running, I can’t see any reason why the unmanned, jet-propelled, laser-guided, self-chilling beer keg that the Aussies (and the U.S. Marines) have been asking for over the last few decades wouldn’t be possible…

For now, I suppose we should probably just keep watching the skies. Although, if you find yourself standing on an otherwise unexplained “X” on the pavement, you might also want to keep a glass of milk or a cup of tomato soup handy…