Business, Space, Technology and Society

Charlie Bolden

8 Comments

I just got a Facebook friend request from him. Huh.

I was down at the AIAA SciTech conference in San Diego. It goes all week, but I drove back last night. The first two days were space stuff, but the rest of the week is mostly aviation. I stayed yesterday because it was interesting aviation, with supersonics and urban air transport. Anyway, back in the office now.

8 thoughts on “Charlie Bolden”

  1. I’m at the conference all week. Been a weak lineup of technical papers, at least in my areas of interest/expertise; I’m ready to get back to the office and do real work :-/.

    1. I don’t even have the time to go through all the technical papers to see if any are worth listening to. I feel bad for authors at these things, who have to compete with a couple dozen others at the same time, and often speak to an almost-empty room. I go primarily to see the plenary events and network. This conference wasn’t as good for the latter as others, but I could easily drive to it, and I did make a few good connections, particularly meeting (finally) Eric Lindbergh.

      1. Well…the whole reason I’m there is because my employer decide it was worth paying me out of the overhead budget to attend and sift the wheat from the chaff :-).

        But I don’t feel bad for the authors. All of the good papers I’ve seen this week have been well-attended, with good questions from knowledgeable experts in the audience. But it’s kind of like the old joke about advertising – 80% of it is bad but you don’t know which 80% until you try it. This particular conference is so big that they take a bunch of real crap to fill the schedule, just because it was somebody’s MS or PhD thesis. Makes it frustrating. But I did see two papers today that I’m going to start really dissecting next week – and realistically, that’s enough to make it a net win for my employer.

        1. Well, it that’s the case, I’m happy for both them and you…

          But the phrase that I heard was 50%. So if that’s better, great. I just wonder how many are in the service of the NASA Program Of Record…

          1. Oh, the saying about advertising is 50% bad, I just changed it to 80% bad for this. Lots of ho-hum papers. I wouldn’t know about the Program of Record (assume you mean SLS) though; aircraft are my bread and butter, although I’ve done space system proposals before but Boeing (aka the enemy) keeps throwing in their own money and buying the contracts 🙁

            Also, the shutdown is affecting the conference; few NASA people were allowed to travel, and papers were pulled and some sessions were cancelled in toto.

  3. Urban air transport?

    What are your thoughts on the HoverBike (somebody please add ducts or guards before some poor guy loses a leg) and Bell’s urban quadcopter design, both of which are at CES?

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