November 22, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
About the billion dollar weather satellite. It is said to be using pioneering technology. It is not sure that private competition is as helpful with that as it is with rationalizing production and taking advantages of economies of scale and scope.
I’d like to see a cost breakdown of the JWST, the $8 billion space telescope. Materials can’t cost more than a tiny fraction of that, and there’s no stuff like plutonium that requires very winded handling, nor procedures like crash tests that consumes expensive prototypes. In the end almost all of this money must have ended up as salaries to engineers and scientists. 2,000 of the most qualified engineers with $400,000 salary during 10 years? Or can the companies involved make huge profit margins?
JWST?!
Just two more years! I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
LocalFluff,
You wrote: “It is not sure that private competition is as helpful with that as it is with rationalizing production and taking advantages of economies of scale and scope.”
NOAA is just beginning to “hire” commercial satellite data. It is kind of an experiment, at this stage, on the way to commercializing satellite weather data so that NOAA no longer designs or generates the requirements for new weather satellites. Commercial companies are testing the “waters” to see if this government/private partnership will work out.
If this new method works out with basic weather data, then I would expect that the companies that provide this data will eventually compete in pioneering new technology in order to provide more advanced information that NOAA would be eager to buy. They may innovate new detection methods on their own, in hopes that the new data will be valuable enough to more than repay the development costs.
Commercializing space, fixed price contracts, and public-private partnerships (government/commercial partnerships) are not guaranteed to work.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Air Force tried fixed price commercialization for new aircraft. The F-20 Tigershark is the result. Northrop put about $150 million of its own money into the development, hoping that the Air Force would purchase it, but the Air Force wanted a more complex aircraft and didn’t buy it. Without the US Air Force as a primary customer, the rest of the world chose not to buy it, either, and only three prototypes were ever made. This experiment failed, and no other company tried to spend its own money on developing new military aircraft. Design-on-speculation did not pay off.
Another, similar, problem in the 1980s was a fixed price project that went over the fixed price (I wish I could remember the project or the company). The company spent some of its own money, charging to an overhead charge number. The government auditors did not understand the unique fixed price contract, and thought that there was mischarging going on. They brought criminal charges, but the judge, after comparing the charges to the contract, threw out the case. However, seeing that fixed price contracts were only going to lead to legal problems, other companies chose to avoid any further fixed price contracts. Thus, cost-plus continued to be the standard system.
It has taken a while for American aerospace to try these methods again. It also looks like the modern pioneers were mostly new companies that did not already have government auditors pouring over the books, eager to find potential criminal cases.