Michael Mealing attended last week’s hearings in Atlanta, and has a useful summary. In particular, he has thoughts and concerns about the inputs from organized labor, which I share. I was going to write something about this last week, but hadn’t seen any of the testimony:

It was my determination that this group is one of the main problems with how space is done these days. They are organized and seem to hold a very large amount of political capital because of that. Apparently their members have been a large determining factor behind ISS and Shuttle. They view these programs as purely ways of creating what they view as “high tech jobs”. At one point Paul Spudis threw out a strawman (transcripts aren’t available yet so I can’t quote directly) that asked that, if the goal of our space program was to “keep our technological sharpness” then should all of it belong as part of DoD as simply a national strategic priority? They answered yes! Not only did they agree with the premise but with its conclusion as well.

One of them even went so far as to suggest that the reason the US is loosing [sic] jobs overseas is due to the cultural decay caused by television and the lack of good morality plays like they had during the old radio days! If this is what Big Labor has to offer these days no wonder we’re loosing [sic] jobs overseas…

…Daniel is saying something that Tom Peters is saying in Re-imagine. That the future of America is in its core value: that this land, this system that we’ve developed, is about radical opportunity. Simply ‘earning a living’ isn’t enough. Simply ‘manufacturing’ isn’t enough. Simply doing what we did last century isn’t enough. Every moment has be to worked at the tip of innovation; at the sharp edge of creative distruction. And these labor guys find that to be the worst evil that could be visited on man because it means there is no such thing as job security. It means no such thing as jobs. Period. Every American’s new responsibility is to be his/her own CEO of Me, Inc.

It means things like re-thinking the relationship between ‘labor’ and the processes it supports. It means having a worker in a factory actively spending his/her own time to figure out ways to not just increase his/her production, but to obsolete his own current job. It means things like figuring out how to build dark factories so that where one ‘factory worker’ ran one stop along an assembly line, that same ‘worker’ is the owner of an entire factory that runs itself. It means thinking of space as an opportunity and a market segment and not as a source for government ensured job security.

These are the people who have killed America’s greatness in space. I lay Columbia and Challenger at their door.

This point cannot be emphasized enough. The commission needs to have someone talk to it about wealth creation, instead of job creation, or we’ll remain mired in the failed policy of the past four decades.