Industry Panel
Moderator: Lieutenant General Michael Hamel
Commander, Space Missile Systems Center
AFA National Symposium on Space
Los Angeles, CA
November 17, 2006
Moderator: The moderator of our Industry Panel is responsible for managing the research, the design, the development, acquisition and sustainment of space and missile systems, launch, command and control, and operational satellite systems. He’s responsible for more than 6,500 employees nationwide and an annual budget in excess of $10 billion. He’s also the Air Force Program Executive Officer for Space and is responsible for the Air Force satellite control network, the space launch and range programs, the space-based infrared systems, the military satellite communication programs, the global positioning system, and other emerging transformational space programs.
Prior to his current assignment he commanded the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers and was responsible for all of the US Air Force space forces and operations.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the Commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center and our military host for this event, Lieutenant General Mike Hamel.
[Applause].
General Mike Hamel: Good morning to everybody, and thank you very much for a very nice introduction.
We are once again very privileged to be able to bring together a distinguished industry panel here to speak a bit about where we are in the space development and acquisition business and maybe take a bit of a look into the future.
I do want to start off by expressing my personal appreciation to the Air Force Association. This particular forum here that we do every year at the end of the calendar year has come to be a real high spot for all of us in the space community. Bringing together all of the industry, military players, senior leadership, truly is a great service that AFA plays for us.
Indeed, this is a particularly important year that we have just kicked off. Our recognition of the 60th Anniversary of the formation of the Air Force as an independent service, and to be able to look forward over the coming year to remembrance of a whole series of things and ultimately culminating in next year’s AFA, both in Washington DC as well as here, we think it’s a great opportunity to reflect back, as General Chilton said, on 25 years of Air Force Space Command and a whole variety of other accomplishments.
What I’d like to do is take a minute or two here and set the stage for this particular panel and then introduce the members on the pane. Quite frankly, we are truly at an inflection point, a dramatic point in the history of the nation in terms of our place in the world and world affairs. Maybe picking up a bit on General Chilton’s theme and kind of a view of the time and the passage of history, let me recollect back particularly from the standpoint of space development and acquisition.
Obviously space was a critical element in how it was we fought and ultimately won the Cold War, and obviously in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union we saw some tremendous changes that occurred in our business. Frankly, we saw reductions in personnel, budgets, but at the same time, the growth in demand for space didn’t abate. If anything, it actually went up. So in the decade of the ‘90s, as many of you in this room know and were a part of it, we had to figure out how it was we were going to meet that demand with ever-shrinking resources. We did what now I think has been referred to as some by we entered into the grand experiment in acquisition reform. That is we thought there was going to be and there was projected growth in commercial space capabilities, and that we in the government side of the business could simply become a customer of a very robust marketplace.
Obviously much of that did not come to pass. Many of the practices that were implemented in terms of what we now have called the total system performance responsibility, laying upon industry responsibility for ultimately delivery and accountability obviously proved to have many flaws in it. There was obviously also a number of impacts on the government’s ability to actually actively manage and be a partner in the business overall.
That brings us to the point of where are we today. Quite frankly, if you read the popular press you’d be convinced that indeed, everything is going wrong in the space development and acquisition business, and as has been noted, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s been very concerted efforts over many years now to truly get acquisition back on track. It’s been following a pretty consistent recipe that we have now started to refer to as a back to basics, or simply using the recipe that for the first four decades in the military space business proved to be so effective.
That particular back to basics strategy involves getting our people back up on the skill level, getting them to be active players and participants in the engineering development process. Likewise, putting processes back in place that really do guarantee and assure that we have mission assurance and success.
Ours is a business where you don’t get two chances to do it right and you better do it right the first time, so the exacting attention to detail, ensuring that all engineering practices are ruthlessly enforced is a key part of our overall strategy.
Ultimately another part is the partnerships. That is, nothing that we do in space could be accomplished without close, active, every day, day in and day out partnership with industry, other government agencies, and with the operators of these space capabilities.
We had a wakeup call a few years ago with a whole spat of launch failures that occurred in the late decade of the ‘90s. That reinforced and gave great motive to all of our efforts in this back to basics strategy, and we’ve seen a lot of changes and improvements that have come. If you take a look at the deliveries that are occurring today, many of them have been noted. So we believe truly that we have made substantial progress in terms of getting ourselves on track.
Part of the testament to that is you take a look at what now has become the all time launch success rate. We today have had 47 major military space launches in a row without a failure, and hopefully here within a couple of hours we’ll be able to announce yet another success as a GPS 2R is awaiting launch as we speak here today. That has now set the record, eclipsing that which was established back in the 1970s.
Likewise we’re delivering satellite systems and capabilities with some degree of predictability.
The other thing we’re doing in addition to those efforts to reinvigorate the processes and the people part of the equation, and that is to redouble our culture, and that is to reinstill a sense of accountability and commitment to delivering what we promise.
Recently we’ve had the opportunity as the Space and Missile Center with all of our program offices as well as with our industry partners, to review what it is that we have planned for 2007. It’s a pretty broad and impressive array of capabilities, some of which General Chilton talked about this morning. All the way from the inaugural launch of the first wideband global SatCom system to a series of TacSats, first time launches of a variety of other systems. It truly is impressive, the set of capabilities we anticipate accomplishing over the next 12 months. We have all taken the pledge – industry and government – at SMC and in conjunction with Air Force Space Command, to pledge that we are going to deliver on those commitments.
Having said that, what is the question at hand?
One of the things we’re going to do with our panel here today is investigate the question: After several years of having tried to reinvigorate, improve the performance in our programs, get our work force operating at a higher level, the question I think that really is posed today is are we turning the corner? If you read the press you’d probably be more captured by the stories of issues and problems that have occurred, largely which are looking backwards, but we think it’s important to look forward. That is, do we think we’re turning the corner?
What I’m going to be asking all of our panel members today is to from their vantage point, from their business sector, from their product lines, from their processes, and from the activities that they’ve undertaken, where do they think we are? Do they think we are turning the corner? Have we turned the corner? How will we know when we have turned the corner?
The reason this question is so important is because what lies ahead is yet more challenges. We think it’s absolutely critical to reestablish our credibility and confidence with the Congress, with the department, with the warfighter, that when we say we are going to deliver some capability, that indeed we can do that and that we’ve got a whole host of new capabilities all the way from transformational communications to, as General Kehler talked about, operational responses, space capabilities.
The key in my mind is that we have got to reinstill the trust, we have got to have the confidence of others that as they try to undertake these new capabilities, that what we propose to do, indeed we will deliver on that.
Let me turn to now introducing a great set of industry representatives here that really cut across most of the key actors at the prime contractor level in the sector today. A great group of colleagues, friends, and in some cases co-conspirators, if you will.
I’ll introduce each one of them and we’ll be asking each one to give us some remarks and share some charts and thoughts. Then obviously at the tail end of this we’ll have the opportunity to field some questions.
I’ll tell you, one of the great privileges of being the moderator is you get to set the Rules of engagement. So anybody who thinks they’re going to address a question to the moderator, they’re immediately going to get deflected to the panel members here. [Laughter].
Hard questions are absolutely welcomed, if you will.
Let me introduce each and every one, and we’ll just go down the line for their remarks. First of all, to my immediate left we’ll have Mr. Roger Krone who is the President of the Network and Space Systems for the Boeing Company. After Roger we’ll have Lieutenant General (Ret) Brian Arnold, who is Vice President and General Manager with the Strategic Systems for Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. Next we’ll have Mr. Jeff Grant who is responsible for business development for the Space Technology Group within Northrop Grumman Corporation. And batting cleanup we’ll have Brigadier General (Ret) Leonard Kwiatkowski who is the Vice President and General Manager for Military Space Programs with Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Again, a great panel. Hopefully we’ll hear some thought provoking questions and we’ll be able to preserve some time at the tail end for some dialogue between the panel members to answer your questions.
With that, Roger, if I might turn over the podium and the mike.
Mr. Krone: Thanks. If you can pull the charts up, please.
Let me answer the question up front, and then I’ve got about four or five charts and I’ll try to keep my comments brief so we have ample time for questions and answers.
The question was, are we turning the corner on space acquisition. I think we would say yes, we believe we’re turning the corner, but we have a lot to do in ’07, and probably how we perform in the collective partnership between, if you will, SMC and industry will prove to a lot of the doubters that we have turned that corner.
Those of us who have spent our careers in the defense industry know that we run a 12 to 18 month time constant. So what that means is if we change a process or management or earned value management or however we run the programs, often you won’t actually see the results for 12, 18, sometimes 24 months. So by the time the industry and frankly our detractors will acknowledge that we have turned the corner, we will have already turned the corner, if you will, some significant time before that.
Let me go through a couple of the charts I’ve got and talk about why I think we’ve turned the corner, certainly why that’s important. And as I said, I’ll keep my comments brief and we’ll let Brian talk.
I picked this chart as a place to start because although there's been a lot of criticism about what we’ve done in space acquisition, clearly we’re more characterized by a string of successes and a string of increasing capability that we’ve been able to put in space. On this chart we show a communications platform, a navigations platform, and a sensing platform. Around the perimeter I put some of the systems that have grown to be enabled by those space assets.
I also want to mention my personal experience relative to space. I started on the F-16 program in the mid ‘70s and I remember working on something called ECP-350 which led to the Block 25 F-16. If you go back in history you’ll find the F-16 was not designed to take advantage of any space assets, and if you look at the chart that’s up, those six systems around the perimeter, none of those were inherently designed, if you will, to take advantage of the space capability and the space capability were all added as an afterthought or as an overlay, as the GPS system was part of ECP-350 which led to some capabilities in Block 25.
Next chart, please.
What we see now though, is as we have come to grow accustomed, if you will, to the space capability, space capability being a given, we are designing whole new weapons systems that are inherently connected to and rely upon space assets. In fact you go so far as to say mission success is impossible for some of these new systems without a robust, persistent, protected space capability. I picked two. The first one is the missile defense, if you will, system that we’ve deployed, specifically the ground-based mid-course program, which uses space assets to detect and assess the threat to track, discriminate and target, and then to communicate and operate its command and control network through a terrestrial and a space-based network.
The second program that I show on the slide is the Army’s Future Combat System which really is going to bring network operations, if you will, on the move to the brigade. There we use space assets for broadband coms, navigation, ISR, Blue Force Tracking, and again for that multi-echelon battle command.
Both of these systems designed from the beginning with an assumption that we would be successful in space acquisition and field those space capabilities on time, on cost, and on schedule.
By the way, both of these systems, interestingly enough, because of the use of space assets, are truly joint and truly global in their scale and reach.
Next chart, please.
So turning the corner, what’s different? What has happened? What gives us a degree of confidence that we’ll perform better in the future than we have in the past?
First of all, I agree with General Hamel that we’ve moved away from, if you will, the revolution in business affairs, the acquisition model, the TSPER type program, one where I would argue we put technical and capability first and schedule and cost second. We moved into a new environment where there is a balance between technical capability, the schedule and cost with an overlay of risk management.
The three areas, at least on some of the Boeing programs where we think we’ve gotten into some performance issues are baseline management, if you will. Second is understanding the interactions between the industry and that suppliers have to be our partners. And if you simply look at the dais up here between, if you will, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and Lockheed, we are unbelievably interdependent on a variety of programs. I’m prime on some programs, I’m a supplier, frankly, to all three of these gentlemen on other programs, and the interdependencies and the reliabilities across the industry, if you do the VEN chart, the permutations and commutations, it would make your head spin. So we have to manage our relationships across the board not only with SMC but through the industry in a partnership fashion.
The third area where I think we’ve had issues is in the amount of technical risk that we’ve signed up for in the program which I think has driven to a level of concurrent design, development, and production which has led us to push some things into the production mode before we had reduced the risk sufficiently.
So what I’ve listed on this chart are six areas which frankly we’ve taken out of the SMC benchmarking program that we work collaboratively with General Hamel on a yearly basis, assessing our critical programs in these six areas. I’ll just spend a minute or two on each of the points.
First, is program management. It’s true within Boeing, I know it’s true within the other contractors represented up here, we have doubled and tripled the effort to grow and to provide our program managers with the best practices available throughout the industry.
Subcontract management. Again, I grew up in this industry in the ‘70s where we simply took a purchase order, we threw it over the fence, and we expected our suppliers to perform. That’s not the way we work today. We’re going to have to work collaboratively because we understand that the performance at the prime level is heavily dependent upon the other companies in the value stream.
Systems engineering; Frankly, I think a renewed effort across the industry. How do you disaggregate requirements? How do you do verification and validation? We’ve actually put in a program to teach and to grow systems engineers. We’ve also built some partnerships with colleges and universities where systems engineering is now an available curriculum.
Schedule management and cost management, we tend to refer to that as earned value management. We’ve driven into all of our space programs what we call weekly earned value management. So we know where we are on cost and schedule at the end of every week and it reduces the cycle time for us to fix problems as they arise.
The last one, executive management accountability; My program managers, my business unit leaders and myself absolutely accountable for performance of the programs and we do that in several ways. One, by maintaining a great relationship with our customer and frankly as most of you would expect, how I measure which is on award fees, and we’ve seen award fees used more and more to drive accountability into the contractors, and certainly we’ve seen that happen with Boeing in the last year.
The bottom line, though, I like to talk about it as restoring the space culture, where program success and mission success have to be our number one metric, and if we do that we believe we’ll execute well in the future on our programs and we’ll have what we call a high degree of mission assurance.
Next chart, please.
How are we doing? I’ll talk a little bit about what happened in 2006, and oh by the way, General Hamel, I think in about five minutes we’ll be able to add another launch to the string of 47 consecutive successful launches as we hopefully launch GPS 2R-16 on a Delta 2. The launch window opened at about 12 after. I think we’ve got 15 minutes available, and as I check my Blackberry up here, the weather looks good.
We did launch. That’s great. Let’s call it 48 in a row. Thank you for that.
This year we will expect four on the chart. We just launched five. We’ve got one more to go this year. Six hopefully successful Delta 2 launches.
Delta 3 launches, three this year including the first heavy launch from Vandenberg. TSAT demos. The FABT, if you will, restructure and rebaseline where we actually applied a lot of the principles I had on the prior chart to FABT by setting a new baseline that had lower technical risk and increased our probability to execute that program.
So how will we know if we’ve turned the corner?
Next chart, please.
We have a lot of things that we have to get done in 2007 from the Boeing Company. We have 14 Delta 2’s and three Delta 4’s including the DSP launch. That’s twice the number of launches in ’07 as we had in ’06. We’ll deliver the first wideband, I think the chart says gap filler, on my chart it says global. Wideband global satellite. We’ll deliver the first GPS 2F. We’ll complete the risk reduction portion of the TSAT. Hopefully we’ll see an RFP and a contractor selection. We’ll complete the SBSS sensor payload and assembly integration and test. We will launch hopefully early next year the orbital express payload in cooperation with DARPA and we’ll complete some upgrades on Minuteman 3 guidance system.
A long list of things that we have to do at Boeing. I know the other three companies have an equal list. At the end of 0-7 we will look back and judge whether we’ve turned the corner by whether we’ve had terrific mission success against those objectives in 2007.
So the question was, are we turning the corner on space acquisition? I would tell you by going back to basics we believe we have, and the proof will be in the pudding depending on how we do against our commitments in ’07.
Thank you.
[Applause].
General Arnold: Congratulations, Roger, on another great launch there.
If we can bring up the next set of slides.
Thank you, General Hamel, for inviting me to speak on this industry panel, and of course what great speakers we had this morning – General Chilton General Kehler, Willie Shelton. We’ve got some of the greatest leaders here, Mike Hamel running SMC now. I will tell you, I think this is the best core of leaders that we’ve had in a long, long time, and I can tell you, having just left the Air Force, I think we’re in great hands out there as I see the young crop of officers and enlisted coming into our Air Force. So it’s kind of neat to sit here wearing a different uniform now and can look back with a different perspective, perhaps, than General Hamel does.
I was recently talking to Under Secretary Teets, and he said what’s the best thing about your new job? I said having not to testify every year with you shoulder to shoulder. [Laughter].
So I too have lived through that last five or six years as General Chilton remarked, and we in industry have struggled, I will tell you, more in the gestation period than in the actual operations.
If you think about it during that period of time we actually have changed a lot of the ground rules, the processes. A lot has happened. But during that period of time and actually since the year 2000, we haven’t lost a rocket. Just five minutes ago, another great example. But during that entire period, 100 percent success.
Another one that I think Dr. Ballhouse, from the Aerospace Corporation, would tell you, during that period of time we had not one single failure of a system on orbit. So our satellites that do take a long time to build and do overrun and do go through certain processes like Nunn/McCurdy’s, once they get on orbit, by God they work and they work sometimes two to three times the design life, providing that great combat capability to our forces.
So when you get into these kinds of discussions you’ve got to balance it out. We know what we have to fix on our side, but for sure we are providing that great capability.
We procure modern military equipment for one reason – because of the efficiencies gained in the prosecution of war, and for no other reason. We expend a lot of money, a lot of our rich resources go into the development, and keeping that leading edge, as General Chilton said. So we keep pushing that edge and in many cases asking for five, six times the gain in capability over the previous system.
Let’s go to the first slide here, and I’ll tell you what we see at the Raytheon Corporation along with my other partners here in actually turning that corner. I would see the sun actually rising. So I would tell you, having lived through that acquisition reform, we’ve kind of pulled out of the dive and now we’re cresting the ridge and we can begin to see that sun rising on the other side, and I do see a lot of the initiatives.
The acquisition reform itself was put in place for all the right reasons, we just didn’t understand the unintended consequences. So we made that course correction. So I do say that it truly is behind us, TSPER and other things, for sure.
I am very encouraged by recent performances and I can cite many many programs where I see us turning around. But I will tell you the idea, to focus on continuing that combat capability and increasing it – for example, the wideband global satellite that Boeing will soon launch will give us, that first wideband, will give you about five times the capability of all your other communication satellites short of the MilStar satellite on orbit. Just a single satellite. So that’s a leap in capability and what it provides in terms of adding the capability to deploy the air tasking order. When we put the last MilStar on orbit you went from delivering the ATO to the theater and out to the carrier battle groups from about 59 minutes down to about 5.9 seconds.
The so what is, it’s all that extra bandwidth that now is available to give more information to the warfighter. So those are just a couple of small examples.
But I do believe if you measure things by facts that we are meeting our milestones, we’re delivering on our handshake, and that we have metrics to prove it.
If we go to the next slide here, when I meet my young program managers I like to ask them, so, how are you doing? They always say great, Brian. The next question is, how do you know? What’s your scorecard right now? What’s your little elevator speech to tell me what you’re doing right now to manage by facts? If you can’t do that, it’s an interesting discussion but it doesn’t prove anything because until you can display your metrics to your primes or your government customer or to your other subs, then your argument really isn’t worth a hoot.
So we do that. We do that with a thing called a very deliberate program scorecard, and it’s very simple. What was your planned versus your actual tasks for that week? What was your planned versus your actual hit count for the week? What was your planned versus your actual spin rate for that week? What is your TPMs, your boil-down of the risk and your risk chart? And another thing we use is called critical chain. Forever I’ve been looking for a forward-looking metric, and Bill Ballhouse and I will tell you, I think I finally discovered it. It’s called the critical chain.
You build in a little bit of buffer, read that as margin, and you manage every day. You get a junkyard dog as your head scheduler, and that person drives that schedule. It’s an integrated master schedule, integrated master plan. So you have inch stones and you know how much you’re accomplishing and when you don’t, you know the right resources to bring to bear to accomplish that task to get back on track. These are not hard things, but you’ve got to manage them. I truly believe that critical chain is a really, really good element of our processes.
Other things in the war chest there. Of course the good dash board to tell you the cost and the program execution, how are you doing on odd time deliveries, the staff quality, the parts and suppliers, your lab, and then your special test equipment. Nothing can hold up a program worse than having a failure of the test equipment and not the piece of equipment that you’re actually testing, for example, on a thermal vac.
Finally, going out and asking your customers, how are we doing? The benchmarking session that Roger mentioned is an excellent tool that SMC uses. We also send a scorecard out to all of our primes and all of our subs to give feedback on how we’re doing in various areas. We take that into account and we make those changes.
Also it’s good to have peer reviews, independent reviews, so that you’re not drinking your own bathwater there. A weekly review by the leadership, as Roger mentioned, so that we hold ourselves accountable and the corporation in turn holds us accountable to make sure that we are delivering on our handshake, and then applying those lessons learned from the act reform period as we go forward, because nothing would be worse than to go back and repeat those same mistakes.
So what are the challenges? Let’s go to the next slide here.
The challenges are A, to listen to your customer; be responsive; act accordingly; and follow up.
The other one is to go out and recruit and retain those technologists and managers and leaders and train them, mentor them, and really focus on the mission assurance.
I’m really worried about the delivery of new engineers to our industry. I know General Chilton wants to have them all come to Space and Missile Systems Center here. We want them to come to Raytheon, and I’m sure that Boeing, Lockheed, and so we’re all going to compete for those young engineers. What we do at Raytheon, I know that all of us build on this, is we have a program led by Bill Swanson, our CEO, called Math Moves You. It’s focused at the fifth, sixth, seventh grade level to keep that excitement in the hard sciences, the maths, so that when they become a senior in high school they do have that core background that they can then enter the university and become an engineer. It’s not going to happen when they graduate from high school if they don’t have that background.
So we are all worried about that and we all need to focus on that.
The other one is going back to basics. It just goes without saying, the block approach is smart, apply right systems engineering, and then measure how well you do for improvement.
So what are the results? Go to the next slide and talk a little bit about that.
We are meeting our milestones, I will tell you, in delivering and internal development on schedule. I base that on award fees also, and I’ve seen a marked improvement across the board on our space programs. That’s an indication that we’re starting to turn that corner.
Better control of the program, the requirements baseline. Both the operational requirements and on our side the technical requirements. If you can balance that and measure those and trade those and then deliver the right kinds of capabilities, it may be an 85 percent solution, but you can get it there and get it to the warfighter on time. That’s what you want.
More disciplined management in terms of the technical risk, in the closure of the design. Unless you can close that design early, you’re going to be spending an awful lot of time later on we’re finding. So we spend an extraordinary amount of time out front now to close the design, both the drawings, completed the drawings and then well before you start bending metal which a lot of people like to get right into because that’s the fun part.
Aggressively attack the risk and opportunities. And the earlier you can reduce the risks on the program, again, spend that time up front, the better off you’re going to be, versus getting into a regression testing, particularly in software in the middle of a program that holds everything else up in a large standing army.
Collaborative versus combative resolution of technical and contractual issues between the prime and the sub and between the prime and the sub and the government contractor. The better we can do that, the better the entire program will mature and the better off you’re going to be moving forward.
Finally, delivering on responsive space instruments at a fraction of the traditional costs and I will tell you, we have a good example at Raytheon. It’s called the Artimus program from authority to proceed to out the door next month is 15 months on a full system, and if that’s not responsive then I don’t really know what it is. So that’s one example, the TacSat 3. I believe if we can start doing this and demonstrating that, then if you’ll turn to the next chart, we can start providing that kind of capabilities for these young soldiers out there that are the end customer. I have personal knowledge of these folks. I have several sons that fly jets for the Air Force, and I know a lot of young soldiers, and they’re great people. A lot of them not very old – 18, 19, 20 years old. They’re good young folks, they are very dedicated, they’re all volunteers. They may not be old enough to drink in most states, they can certainly vote in most states, but by God they are old enough to die for our country. So every one of us at this table takes that very very straightforward, and our ability to provide the increased combat capability for those soldiers is what it’s all about.
Thank you.
[Applause].
Mr. Grant: Thank you very much, Mike, for the opportunity to join the panel today and thank you very much to AFA for hosting as session like this.
When I was asked to speak on the subject I wanted to take a little bit of a different perspective perhaps than our industry normally does. I start with a chart that I thought was novel and unique, but I find out I’m the 8th or 10th person to say this. Clearly, the dependency on space is widely known and growing. That’s an important feature. It’s even more important. So when we ask the question, have we turned the corner on space acquisition, my perspective is yes, and I’ll speak to that directly, but I’m worried there’s more than one corner out there.
So what I wanted to do was take a second and look at some other relevant industries that have, I believe, turned the corner and how they’ve inserted technologies in turning the corner, and look at it from a user perspective. Has the space acquisition industry turned the corner from a user perspective through the eyes of perhaps these other industries?
If I go to the first chart and say look at personal communications. And I’ve been alive long enough to use both phone booths and phone operators, and if those ROTC folks look carefully in that phone booth, there’s a rotary dial in there. I call that the old way. It’s not very user friendly, and bring a lot of dimes.
So if you look at an industry that I think has turned the corner, look what’s happened in our lifetime. In recent times, inserting extraordinary technologies. What do they do? They brought to the user affordable, reliable, ubiquitous, easy to use systems that have changed in fact the way we communicate.
Let’s look at another industry. Shopping. Lines, shopping centers, cars, getting on the 101 or the 105 or the 405, and we all know this. The same thing. Today we have the opportunity to shop at our leisure because of an extraordinary network, extraordinary communication capabilities that make stores open 24 hours a day. I can shop when I want to. I go to Amazon and I hit one click and I have books arriving three days later, or faster. It is truly a game changer. I would argue this industry turned the corner with this selective insertion of technology.
Movie viewings. Drive-in theaters. And again, an industry that we’re witnessing turned the corner with extraordinary technologies. Giving to users the services they want, cost effectively, the times they want, the locations they want, and reliably.
Photography, video. We all here probably have 35mm cameras hiding in a closet somewhere, boxes of slides and pictures we never see any more. Now of course we’re all in the digital era. We’ve got lots of external hard drives full of our pictures. We take lots of them at great rate. Why? I think this industry in fact turned a corner focused on users, consumers.
What does it say about our business? Do we always get it right? I think there have been some detours. And I will get to space, by the way, so bear with me.
There’s information delivery, broadcast to us on the schedule they wanted in the format they wanted and the topics they wanted. And of course we have the ability to pull that data now with insertions of technology.
If we think of ourselves as servicing an individual who wants water — let me give you an example here. We’re in the bucket industry. We could look at inserting technology perhaps to improve the delivery of water to this individual. I might look at an early model, a wood model with metal bands similar to what was built thousands of years ago. Our industry might have said let’s make them longer lived, and think that we’re doing that customer a big favor. We might have taken the approach and said they need a faster bucket and built them one that dropped down there even quicker. There are some who would argue, let’s give them a light weight bucket. [Laughter]. If we thought we were in the bucket industry. Lastly, of course, there’s the gold-plated bucket that some of us may have tried to approach that customer with.
But you know what? At the end of the day we would have been in the bucket business and I would submit there’s no corner turn with this particular user.
Here’s a corner that’s been turned, though. What the user wanted was water. They wanted it ubiquitously, cost affordably, they wanted it filtered and clean and useable. The network that’s behind it in all those sources, that’s transparent to them.
The space industry should take a cue from this, and I think we have. So the networkcentric programs we all hear about in fact they’re success models. I believe this is one, and we should seek the same.
If I look at our industry, and I thin GPS is just the poster child for bringing affordable, ubiquitous, reliable systems to the user. It’s amazing to me looking back over a quarter of a century how this happened not by accident but by the result of some extraordinarily smart people who are at the inception of this program.
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