I’m listening to the NASA announcement on COTS, but I missed the first few minutes. I’m inferring that both SpaceX and OSC won follow-on contracts. First mission is two years from now for SpaceX and a little later for Orbital.
[5 PM Update]
Clark Lindsey has a report.
[Evening update]
Clark has more links.
Alan Boyle has a look back at 2008, and forward to 2009.
Rich Karlgaard says that capital is on strike. He has some good policy recommendations that the Obama administration is unlikely to follow.
…when Toyota is losing money:
Battered by falling demand from consumers around the world and a surging yen, Toyota and other Japanese automakers have been reducing earnings outlooks and cutting workers.
“The change that has hit the world economy is of a critical scale that comes once in a hundred years,” President Katsuaki Watanabe said at the company’s Nagoya office. The drop in vehicle sales over the last month was “far faster, wider and deeper than expected.”
Toyota forecast an operating loss of 150 billion yen ($1.66 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 2009. Toyota has never reported an operating loss since it began disclosing such figures in 1941. But it did have an operating loss in unofficial, internal calculations for the year ending March 1938 a year after the company was founded.
And they think that pouring billions down the Detroit rathole can save them in such an environment? Particularly when the union refused to give on work rules? Mickey Kaus has more, here and here.
What a disaster this administration has turned out to be at the end.
GM was planning to build a new plant in Flint to build engines for the Volt. But apparently those plans have been put on hold.
I’d be interested to understand more about the numbers, though:
General Motors is suspending work on the $370 million factory slated to build engines for the Chevrolet Volt, but says the plug-in hybrid will appear in showrooms by the end of 2010 as promised.
The decision comes as GM frantically slashes costs in a desperate bid to survive while the White House dithers on a bailout. GM and Chrysler have said they could be out of money by the end of the year, but Congress failed to approve $14 billion in short-term loans to the Big Three and the Bush administration appears to be in no hurry to act.
With cash dwindling fast, GM says it has no choice but to postpone work on the the factory in Flint, Michigan, where 300 people would build the 1.4-liter turbocharged engines slated for the Volt hybrid and Chevrolet Cruze compact.
So, they’re spending almost half a billion on a factory that employs only three hundred people? That sounds like pretty good productivity (though it’s not going to do a lot for Flint’s continuing economic decline). How many engines will it produce per annum?
And where does all that money go? Tooling, purchased from other places? How much does that investment in building the plant itself help the Flint economy? Not a lot, I’d imagine, other than the construction itself. I’m guessing that most of those hundreds of millions are going to automated equipment and robots shipped in from somewhere else. So while it’s not great news for the city to delay or lose it, it’s not like it was going to save it economically.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the original announcement from last summer, in the Flint Journal. I was wondering if the plant was going in where the old AC plant had been demolished, but it looks like it is/was planned to go on Van Slyke, over by the airport, and next to the truck plant.
That’s the latest rumor for SecDOT. I’m looking at his committee assignments from when he was in Congress, and see nothing to indicate any expertise or knowledge of transportation issues. The only relevance that the NYT points out is that he’s overseen pork transportation projects on the Appropriations Committee (my characterization, not theirs). And he’s a Republican. But he’s from Illinois. And he’s of Arabic (Christian) descent.
Is this just a token to show bipartisanship by the incoming administration? I have no idea what this implies (if anything) for space transportation regulation. I’d be willing to be that he’s never given it a moment’s thought, which can be both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that he won’t come in with any agenda, but he’ll have to be educated. I’d like to know if he has any natural tendencies when it comes to regulation in general.
[Thursday morning update]
Here’s more on LaHood. Apparently he does have some history in dealing with aviation/airport issues, but nothing about space or spaceports.
At least to me.
Here’s a before and after of the demolition of the old AC Spark Plug plant this year on Dort Highway in Flint. The view is toward the southeast.
I didn’t work there. I worked in the oil filter plant farther east on Davison Road, that isn’t in this picture. But I lived just a few blocks from there for the first decade or so of my life. That road that bisects the plant is Averill, and I lived two blocks north and two blocks east of the intersection of Davison Road and Averill.. If you follow Davison Road a few miles east, you end up in Michael Moore’s home town of the same name. The engineering building, where my uncle worked, can be seen in the top picture, on the corner of Averill and Davison (and the Red Rooster, one of the best restaurants in town, that I only ate at once, was across Averill). My father worked in the HQ building on Dort Highway (which was also called Dixie Highway — it came down from Bay City and Saginaw, and continued south to Detroit, and thence all the way to Florida), in personnel.
Anyway, it’s all history now. It’s hard to imagine the town without that facility — it was there all my life until now.
I have some thoughts today on the real problem with the UAW, over at PJM.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Mickey Kaus — from Taylorism To Wagnerism.
[Update a little after 9 Eastern]
Here’s an excellent piece on the same subject by Michael Barone.
[Afternoon update]
Jim Manzi has more thoughts on Wagnerism versus Taylorism:
…there appears to be a cyclical nature to these things. More-or-less the same, basically sensible, method for business operational improvement — carefully observe current work practices, think of them holistically and in light of the goals of the business, and then redesign work practices — keeps getting reinvented. Taylorism, “Goals and Methods”, factory statistical process control (SPC), Total Quality Management (TQM), reengineering, and so on are all just manifestations of this approach. Each is typically pioneered by innovators who have a fairly supple understanding of the often unarticulated complexity of the task. It drives clear profit gains, and many other people want to apply it. A group of experts are trained by the pioneers, who are also quite effective. There is an inevitable desire to scale up the activity and apply it as widely as possible. It becomes codified into some kind of a cookbook process that can be replicated. This process becomes a caricature of the original work, and the method is discredited by failure and ridicule. (Seeing this phase of reengineering at several companies in the 1990s, a close friend of mine once described it as “like the Planet of the Apes, but the monkeys have taken over from the humans”.) Within a few years, some new pioneers develop some new manifestation of the approach, and the cycle begins again.
Just before I left Rockwell in the early nineties, they had caught on to the latest TQM management fad. We all went to courses on it, as well as taking classes based on the management philosophy of Stephen Covey
Much of it was absurd. There is no sensible way to apply statistical management process control to research and development, but they attempted to do so, having us set out the processes by which we did trade studies, etc. This senseless training was, of course, charged to overhead (i.e., it was included as part of the burden on our Air Force and NASA cost-plus contracts). Just in case you were looking for more reasons that space stuff costs so much.
…but won’t get. Iain Murray describes what will be necessary for a successful auto industry:
…the best way to save the auto industry remains a deregulatory bailout, reducing government-imposed burdens on the industry, and in particular Congress backing off on its destructive CAFE requirements.
One of those government-imposed burdens is the Wagner Act and the NLRB that enables the UAW to maintain a stranglehold on the industry. Unfortunately, all of the above, while the most needed, are also the most unlikely things to be had from the new regime. If anything, as I’ll note in a Pajamas column tomorrow, they’re only going to make things worse.
There’s nothing I enjoy more than being lectured about being un-American by a Canadian, because I don’t support a taxpayer bailout of the UAW.