Some supposedly egregious examples. But I wanted to focus on this one:
$4.7 million for Lockheed Martin to study supersonic corporate jet travel
Now, I don’t know much about this money, or what its actual purpose is. Is it to just study the market? It’s not enough money to do anything serious in terms of advancing the tech, unless perhaps it’s for CFD.
But I don’t think that it’s necessarily intrinsically a bad thing for the federal government to be spending money on, though I think that it’s quite likely that the money will be wasted. More efficient supersonic jets are, after all, a green technology, and they could lead the way to cost-effective supersonic transports, so it could in theory be a good federal investment. The question is: is it appropriate for the government to be making such investments, or should we rely on the industry?
Well, the problem is that most of the industry, at least the big airframers like LM, don’t believe in R&D. At least not as a cost of doing business. They view it as a profit center — that is, they see it as simply another source of revenue, whether provided by the government, or some other customer. But they rarely put their own money into it. Neither does Boeing. Because for decades, they have become conditioned and inured to avoid it, instead going hat in hand to Uncle Sugar for R&D funds, which is happy to hand them out, even on boondoggles. I think that this is one of the reasons that we haven’t seen much aviation innovation — because the people who actually build airplanes aren’t willing to spend their own money on it. Of course, the regulatory and liability environment are also significant factors.
[Afternoon update]
I assume that this is what is being referred to:
The work will focus on “systems-level experimental validation activities” and is part of the NASA aeronautics research mission directorate fundamental aeronautics programme’s supersonics project. Managed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center, the supersonics project is to provide proven capabilities that address the efficiency, environmental and performance challenges of supersonic aircraft. The studies also seek to identify potential requirements for future supersonic aircraft, assess the effectiveness of technology today and identify new research opportunities.
As I said, don’t expect much useful to come from the money. I could do a lot more with it.
This is all true and the point is right on. One the one hand it’s the Dr. Robert Stadler effect – science sells out to government for the steady paycheck, only to find out that their science is subsumed by politics. Generally you get a lot of things like Ares 1-X and Climaquiddick out of the mess, but on the other hand you get things like Andrews S&T – decent small companies that may or may not be equipped to make the leap to actually producing something. On the balance, it’s not the worst thing a government can spend on, and if there’s anything good about ARRA it is the parts that were spent on technology development.
Now, from the other side, there is the Airbus effect. Industries like aerospace – especially the military, space, and large transport side of things – are forever beholden to the maxim that if you employ enough people in a democracy, or your product has military applications, somebody’s government is going to subsidize your competition. It’s why SpaceX is lobbying so hard for commercial crew – it is not that SpaceX doesn’t believe they can beat the competition on cost, it’s that SpaceX knows it can’t beat the competition on price. It needs its hand in the cookie jar just enough for it to be politically unappetizing to eat its lunch.
Of course, the regulatory and liability environment are also significant factors.
Indeed. Research on supersonic corporate jet travel would have been done decades ago except for the regulatory and liability environments.
Considering Hillary’s pollster got $6M it sounds to me like LM’s Gov’t Affairs team has some splain’ to do regarding how they seemingly left at least $1.3M on the table…
Indeed. Research on supersonic corporate jet travel would have been done decades ago except for the regulatory and liability environments.
France and the UK spent a boatload of money developing Concorde to find the main target market (CONUS) making laws banning supersonic jet travel for alleged noise and pollution levels, when some existing subsonic aircraft actually had worse performance in these regards. Since Concorde has been retired, the US is considering investing technology in supersonic travel again. A suspicious person would think this is not a coincidence.
BTW the turkey (maybe turd is more appropriate) named A400M is supposed to begin test flights soon.
You have to translate out of politicianese.
“$4.7 million for Lockheed Martin to study supersonic corporate jet travel”
Means: “We rented a flight on a Blackbird for our lobbyists, and their report says they liked it just fine.”
Wow. A supersonic “corporate jet.”
There just may be some serious economic reason, in a mercantilist world, for funding this. There may be an international market for this kind of thing, and “we” want to get there before Airbus Industrie or Mitsubishi or whoever.
That that this merits ARRA money tells you all this stuff about Climate Change and Green Jobs is a grand bluff, or perhaps there are a lot of unserious people out there.
Regarding the mall geothermal project: Well, just maybe the reason the mall is empty is because units in it cost too much to run, and just maybe if it was cheaper to run a store in that mall there would be less empty units in it, and just maybe full units would mean more jobs and more local and federal tax revenue and pay back the money fairly quickly. Unknown on all counts.
Given that the amount of money involved is a couple of hours’ worth of the military budget, if that much…