THE WRONG STUFF: The current print issue of Business Week has an insulting commentary on the state of the aerospace business: Call It the Wrong Stuff (available here for online subscribers).

I have not read the entire piece, only an extract that was circulated at work today:

In the late 1990s, the aerospace industry suffered so many launch failures that Boeing once sent up a dummy payload just to show customers it still knew how. Snafus with satellites after they're launched are on the rise. And according to U.S. Air Force Secretary James G. Roche, nearly every space defense program is behind schedule, over budget, or both. The following are just a few glaring examples of what might be called The Wrong Stuff: In 1999, a $125 million mission to Mars crashed into the planet's surface. It turned out Lockheed Martin Corp. had made calculations using English instead of metric measurements. The same year, one of Lockheed Martin's Titan Centaur rockets put a military communications satellite into a useless low-earth orbit instead of the intended geosynchronous orbit. Workers had failed to run software that would have caught the error. Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin both missed their schedules for launching new booster rockets designed to replace the space shuttle. Boeing's Delta 4, scheduled for use in spring, 2001, is still on the ground. Many analysts say the problems go beyond the usual challenges of rocket science. Space-related enterprises are under pressure to save on costs by cutting corners. A whole generation of top space scientists is retiring or losing jobs as the industry shrinks, while the smartest science and engineering students are turning to more lucrative professions. Some experts now question whether the space sector will ever duplicate its stellar performance in the post-Sputnik era, when astronauts first soared into orbit. "The American aerospace industry has been running on intellectual fumes," says Roy Danchick, a former chief technologist at TRW Inc. (emphasis added)

What is insulting here is the oft-repreated assertion that younger engineers in space fields are talentless hacks, who just aren't up to the frightfully difficult tasks of getting people and payloads to orbit. Yup, when the last Apollo-era greybeards or baby-boomer Shuttle vets retire, they'll be leaving it to us drooling, buck-toothed Gen-X morons. Maybe they could mentor us and pass along some crumbs of their accrued knowledge and divinely-inspired wisdom -- oh, no, that would require them taking time out from their retirement planning.

The truth, as illustrated by the author's own examples, is not that the younger generation is not up to the challenge, it's that sometimes mistakes happen, and that even the greybeards currently running things display less than Olympian perfection in their work. This is no less true today than it was during Apollo -- for example, the errors on Mars Climate Orbiter are obvious in hindsight, but they didn't kill three astronauts like the flaws in AS 504, which were known about beforehand and not addressed. The difference is that back then, there was a clear goal and enough money to pursue it, or at least to paper over the mistakes and find a workable solution. Doing things that no one has done before also earns one a bit of slack when the occasional failure does occur, a luxury that later projects don't enjoy.

If the industry were truly running on intellectual fumes, one would expect to see fewer and less ambitious missions as time goes by, undertaken with the same or declining level of technology. But that is clearly not the case, as demonstrated by the numerous successful missions to Mars in the past decade, and the sophisticated missions now being planned or under construction for the near future. (And I'm not even getting into the aero side, with JSF and the various UAV/UCAV projects). While yes, the failures he cites were the result of careless errors, the proper response is to learn from the mistakes so as not to repeat them, not to throw up one's hands and wail that the industry is going down the tubes and will never again see successes like those of its mythologized "glory days".

What's really needed, though, is a focus, a program or programs (government or private) which will maintain and expand the skills base and allow new technologies to be tried out. The gradually expanding Mars robotic program is a step in the right direction, as is the sudden uptick in interest in the Moon. There is no reason that the next generation can't build on what has come before -- claiming that decline is inevitable is just ridiculous.

(Of course, Business Week also covers Jeremy Rifkin's unviable hydrogen economy theories, so I guess I should just take their commentary on technology matters with a grain of salt.)