ULA reduces workforce at Vandenberg
Capitalism in space: In an effort to save costs ULA is reducing its workforce at Vandenberg by 48.
The company has been aggressively trying to streamline its operations to better compete against SpaceX. This reduction was expected, and based upon what I saw when I toured Vandenberg a few years ago, entirely justified. While SpaceX’s operations then looked lean and simple, ULA’s set up appeared a bit inefficient.
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Capitalism in space: In an effort to save costs ULA is reducing its workforce at Vandenberg by 48.
The company has been aggressively trying to streamline its operations to better compete against SpaceX. This reduction was expected, and based upon what I saw when I toured Vandenberg a few years ago, entirely justified. While SpaceX’s operations then looked lean and simple, ULA’s set up appeared a bit inefficient.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Concerning Capitalism In Space, I saw you’ve got “mail” yesterday with an op-ed in Space News by Scott Pace who is some guy with a title larger than a visit card. He’s critical, very selectively critical. Remarkably strange claims are being made about economics. That demand for space flight won’t increase until launch costs come under $400 per kilogram, for example. Among standard claims that you made unspecified factual errors and did not realize that SLS/Orion compensates its cost by being safer than any commercial alternative (when you see someone eating his hat, it’s because they made such claims).
That article is like a decapitated hen running around, just a bit more agitated than the same creature was before it lost its cranial appendix. Hundreds of readers’ comments overwhelmingly seem to disagree with Mr. Pace.
http://spacenews.com/op-ed-wishful-thinking-collides-with-policy-economic-realities-in-capitalism-in-space/
LocalFluff–
Good stuff.
— Mr. (they hate it when one doesn’t use their appointed Title!) Pace hasn’t held a real job, in his entire life. He’s one of those Expert-Mastermind’s who knows everything about the Theory of Space and how everyone else should be forced to do it.
-The Usual Gang of Crony Suspects:
https://spi.elliott.gwu.edu/supporters
Mr. Pace’s title doesn’t say much. He’s a director of an institute at a school of a university, dealing with international affairs (which doesn’t sound relevant to his topic). No academic title, but he’s employed by those who have such. I think that this topic is better understood by people working in the space industry than by any academics or their administrative staff.
“I think that this topic is better understood by people working in the space industry than by any academics or their administrative staff.”
That, sir, is the basest form of heresy against the never-to-be-questioned right of academia to be an ever-expanding guide for all society. It reasons as though academicians are not unbiased and above us mortal creatures. Here in the Portland metro area that would get street riots as a reply!
Oh Well, ….
Tim,
One of the reasons why I love, and trust, astronomy, is that it isn’t corrupt, like economics is, which I unfortunately have wasted a couple of university courses at. An astronomer could make anything up, what ordinary person could check it? And some UFO people do make anything up, but they are easy to distinguish. So astronomers make absurd claims and refer to quagmire math, which even if you sift through it and nod that you couldn’t find any errors there, still doesn’t tell you much about anything. But they have this water proof alibi:
You couldn’t make it up!
Today’s cosmology is waaay too weird to be a fantasy, it’s beyond the capability of any human mind to make this up, it has to have been discovered.
Look at the list of sponsoring partners that says all.