Carried Away

Back from Satellite Beach

I just returned from the sun and surf of Satellite Beach, South of Cocoa Beach, where I was busy formulating a couple of blog post ideas.  The sun and surf provided a good excuse to take a vacation week to see the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor and to take a tour of Kennedy Space Center.

My overwhelming sense is that the infrastructure at KSC/Cape Canaveral AFS contemplated very big hardware.  Shuttle is the overshadowed runt little brother of Saturn V.  Once Shuttle is retired, and assuming that SpaceX doesn't have its Saturn V-replacement BFR ready to launch, the scale of operations mismatch will be quite a bit more stark than it is already.

Since KSC/Cape Canaveral is so heavily visited, I'm not sure that my other impressions are particularly unique or noteworthy.  I will not post my further impressions here, but please drop me a line if you have any questions.

3 New Spaceports in 3 Days -- Mojave Spaceport

On the weekend of October 21, after a Saturday visit to the site of Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and a Sunday visit to Blue Origin's West Texas Commercial Launch Site near Van Horn Texas, I flew to Las Vegas for a week of socializing and playing cards with a friend of mine and his wife.  They both worked on Monday, so I decided to drive out to the Mojave Airport and Civilian Aerospace Test Center -- a/k/a the Mojave Spaceport -- in Mojave, California.  It wasn't until I reached Primm that I realized that I had forgotten my camera, but I decided to press on without returning to Las Vegas to retrieve my camera, considering that there is no shortage of images from Mojave published to the web.

Mojave, California is a small desert town of 3,836 a 1.5 hour drive (100 miles) North of Los Angeles, and a 3.5 hour drive (225 miles) Southwest of Las Vegas.  The town is on the Southwest edge of the Mojave Desert, from which it gains its name.  Even though the town is small and "out in the middle of nowhere," it is not at all isolated.  As stated, it is near the major cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  Also, it is near several hotbeds of aviation research -- it is a half-hour drive South to Palmdale, the location of Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works, among other companies, and is adjacent to Edwards Air Force Base, the primary Air Force flight testing and research facility.  It wasn't until I passed an entrance to Edwards AFB that it hit home to me how close Mojave is to all of this aviation research and development.

I drove into town and my first impression was surprisingly favorable.  Mojave is much less desolate than some would have you believe, and much livelier than my small home town, for instance.  The joke is that the aerospace companies at the airport have office pools for how long it takes before the wife of a new hire stops crying about living in Mojave.  But even if the wives don't like living in Mojave, it's nothing that driving commutes won't cure.  Even city slickers should be able to cope.

The airport appears to be the center of attention in town, and it was easy to find my way.  At the airport, there is an industrial park that contains various aviation and non-aviation businesses.  The businesses near the runway are the crown jewels:  among them Scaled Composites, BAE Systems, and XCor Aerospace.  Scaled Composites, the company that designed and manufactured SpaceShipOne and is designing SpaceShipTwo for first commercial flight in 2008, appears to be the biggest shop at the airport.  Besides driving along the rows of business warehouses, there's not much to tour at the airport, so I decided to take in lunch at the Voyager Cafe, the airport's greasy spoon.  The cafe has several nice large picture windows with a view of the tarmac and is comfortably welcoming, so I took my time people-watching.  The lunch crowd was busy with engineers and others.

The walls of the cafe are lined with pictures of pilots and their aircraft that were tested at the airport over the decades.  It struck me that nobody on the walls was involved with rocketry, even though that's where in many ways private spaceflight was born.  The implication is that when Mojave's engineers look at the problem of getting to space and back, they look at is an aviation problem, not a rocketry problem.  Their intellectual heritage doesn't really include people like von Braun or Goddard.  In this sense, Mojave represents a unique view in the entrepreneurial space business.  For example, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Armadillo Aerospace, are all rocketry companies.  Interestingly, a few rocketry companies, such as XCor and Masten Space Systems, have been pulled into the Mojave orbit.  I have no doubt that in the next few years, the competition between the aviators and rocketeers will produce some interesting results.

As I was standing in line to pay my bill for lunch, an older, apparently retired woman got out of line in front of me and said to "go ahead, you probably need to get back to work."  I thanked her and explained that I was only a tourist in town to visit the spaceport.  She nodded knowingly and with a twinkle in her eye said "come back to visit us in '08."  I think I will do just that.

Schloss Nymphenburg Gardens

Here is a picture that my niece Emily took at the end of September in the gardens of Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich.

Digital cameras are great for kids, because they like to take lots of pictures.  You can always delete the bad ones.  Well worth a broken camera or two.

The Amorality of Money

In the real world, money has some attachment to value, and hence responsibility and morality. Money from a job provides for the care of the individual or family, future security, entertainment. Fiduciary responsibility and stewardship are important. Even the richest among us who have no need for this material value may find value in money as a way of keeping score in business or society. In the real world, bad morals with regard to money are practiced. You have to protect your money, because it can be stolen. Acting irresponsibly with your money is a bad thing. If you have a lot of money, then people think better of you, as if you either have better morals or you can give them some of that money. People dress nicely, in part because it indicates that they have some money.

Las Vegas is another world, where money is treated as just a number. When the chips start flying, or slot machine starts whirring, the value attachment is dissolved. It doesn't matter whether you are at a low stakes table or a high stakes table, you are treated similarly well (the service in Vegas is just awesome). If you lose money, it's no poor reflection on you. If you win money, you haven't earned it. Most people dress in jeans, even at the very high stakes tables. That's not to say that a certain minimum of money isn't the necessary entre into this synthetic world, but the minimum is very low. Your money is not stolen from you in Vegas. The odds are bad in many instances, but everybody knows what the odds are.

This is the first time that I have encountered a place with such studied amorality with respect to money. Any other place would collapse upon itself with such an attitude. But it seems to work in Vegas, because they have visitors who are willing to respect and fund this amorality.

7 Card Stud Redux

I ended up $70 after 7 hours of play in two sessions at the $1-$5 7-card stud tables at the Bellagio. Down $55 in the first session of about 3 hours and up $125 in the second session of 4 hours. I remembered the cards that had been played a lot better in the second session.

7 Card Stud

I'm out in Las Vegas visiting my friend Brian.  The game that we have been playing is 7 card stud.  I'm down $55 after about 4 hours of play in the $1 minimum/$5 maximum table at the Bellagio.

While the card tables where you play against other people are the best (never bet against the house), the odds for low stakes games aren't so hot.  The house takes 10% a hand, $5 maximum.  Plus, you tip the dealer a dollar on big hands and 50 cents on smaller hands.  Brian's brother, who lives here, plays at the high stakes tables and they have a much better deal--each player pays $5 a half-hour of play.  Plus, they get comps at the hotel.

It appears that the card tables have seen better days.  While this is still a great place to play, games of chance, such as slots and gaming computer systems, predominate.  These seem addictive.  The casinos were packed last evening.

The US Post-Industrial Economy/European Travels

Paul Kasriel has an interesting tidbit on the decline of the importance of manufacturing in our economy since World War II. While he plots the decreasing share of manufacturing profits against other profits, you could just as easily plot the decreasing share of manufacturing activity against the total economy. The results would be similar.

In my opinion, we hear too often that manufacturing is the backbone of our economy. It clearly is no longer so. It hasn't been the backbone for decades. Almost as much economic activity is tied to information technology or health care services as manufacturing, for instance. But the drumbeat goes on, with calls for trade protection or subsidies of manufacturing industries. This is because manufactured goods are what is traded most often, even if they represent only a small proportion of our economy.

My hypothesis is that many people overvalue tangible products in their perceptions and undervalue intangible products, such as services. I certainly did. During my travels in Germany, it became clear that Germans have a similar number and quality of manufactured goods ("useless stuff") as do Americans. But the size of the US economy per person is about 1/3rd larger. Of course, once I realized this fact, I started to question whether American economist were cooking the economic books and whether we really were any better off than Germans.

It was only after a couple of years of thinking about this that I realized that I was missing the point. Most economic activity has little physical result and I was wasting my time looking at how many DVD players or cars or computers a German had. As an alternative, I could look at the results of the construction industry, for instance, but that isn't the backbone of the economy either (an exception to this is perhaps Japan). A much better, but more difficult exercise is to look at the services and intangible products that a German uses versus an American.

I am interested in hearing from anybody with knowledge of the US and Germany to compare services and intangible products.