08 March 2007
Too Big To Hide
You will forgive me, or not, that I am longing for warmth and a warm breeze from the Gulf. I had the chill of the security apparatus wash over me yesterday with flurries of snow. A twenty-something special agent came to visit me at the frigid poolside unit at Big Pink to run over the last thirty years of my life to see if I had gone over to the jihadis, or turned Chinese.
It has been so long since I filed the paperwork that there was a lot of updating to be covered. At the end of this part of the process, I felt a little soiled. Not as bad as a polygraph, which is like appearing before a Grand Jury sealed in a zip-lock bag.
I am sympathetic to the need for security, but having been investigated so many times it gets tiresome. Having done this in 2001, I wondered why they wanted to talk- again- about that unpleasant evening in Arapahoe County in 1977.
It makes me think sometimes that the government thinks the past might be mutable, and subject to change. Certainly the Japanese seem to think so. They are reinventing parts of World War Two, and denying what the Imperial Army did to the young women of Asia in forcing them into sordid slavery.
It would be nice to be able to walk backward into time and reconstruct things, but that is simply not the case. The only thing you can hope to do is reinvent the present, which would be a useful thing to do, since we are going so swiftly and decisively off the tracks and into the abyss.
The new National Counterintelligence Executive, or NCIX, is someone who would like to do that. His position was set up to try to remedy the hemorrhage of information out of the Department of Energy weapons labs in the late 1990s. There was the general suspicion that secrets were walking away from the government in all the departments.
The Office was established as an entity reporting to the Director of Central Intelligence, and with some fits and starts, now resides in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Joel Brenner is the newest NCIX, and he is concerned. He held a news conference last week to alert us that the Chinese intelligence services are the most active in the United States, aggressively targeting advanced technology. Next in line are the Cubans, Russians and Iranians, though you could find spooks from all over working this town, and major industrial concerns all over the country.
I sure wish we could go back and re-think the Walmart. Old Sam Walton figured he could provide the loss-leading price to drag the consumers into his stores, if only he could make some third world country produce goods to a guaranteed standard of quality. There was nothing new there, just awesome energy that stitched W. Edward Deming's “14 Points for quality” to rapacious capitalism and transformed China from poverty to economic titan.
It would have been worth a discussion at the time, about whether cheaper tube-socks and hand-tools were really worth eliminating the American manufacturing capability, destroying the Unions and shit-canning the lower half of the middle-class. But you cannot go back, and that was only a part of it.
In 1997, I was looking for an elective concentration to take at War College. I like loud noises fireworks, and was happy to be selected to study the Space Launch Industry. The future was up there, then, and I had a glorious romp through the mysteries of how we throw things into orbit, and what we put on top of the rockets.
It is an expensive business, since the best insulation in space is pure gold. It was so prohibitive that at the beginning only the government could do it. By the 1990s that was not the case.
The telecom bust had not yet occurred, and the most exciting continuing projects were two competing satellite communications programs. One approach favored a small number of highly capable satellites in geo-stationary orbit. Those needed to be way out there, so far that their orbits kept them above the same piece of real estate on the face of the earth.
There are pluses and minuses to that; all the value placed in something very expensive and impossible to reach once put in place. The other approach was one devised by the Motorola Corporation, the American land-mobile radio monolith. Their approach was breathtaking, and it glittered like gold in the heavens.
It involved a system of sixty-six active communication satellites and spares in low earth orbit, permitting worldwide voice and data communications using handheld devices. It was way cool. The cross-talk between the little orbiting birds would permit conversations around the whole earth, deserts, ocean, mountain and fruited plain.
You can imagine how exciting it was. And expensive. Motorola was into the program for around $6 billion dollars, which is enough to put some governments out of business. Putting that number of satellites in precision orbit took some unique multiple deployment technology that was developed for something else altogether- the precision delivery of weapons of mass destruction.
The launch business is one of those funny crossroads of government and industry. As part of the industry study, my class toured the satellite construction facility of one of the major contractors. We were looking at commercial payloads, but my attention wandered from the guides earnest words to a gigantic machine under assembly that had once been one of the tightest secrets in the heavens. The guide did not talk about it, but it was too big to hide.
Because of the number of satellites required, Motorola called the project called 'Iridium,' after the initial design requirement for that number of satellites. It matched the shiny platinum-like element “77” in the periodic table. They could have named it “unobtanium,” since money was drying up, and the busy beavers in the wireless communications world had figured out that terrestrial cell towers could be constructed where people actually lived, and more powerful line-of-sight networks permitted small handsets and communications inside buildings.
The Iridium phones were heavy, due to the batteries, and had long bulbous antennas. Because they needed to “see” the satellites, really only worked in the parking lot.
Panic began to set in, though the company put a good face on things publicly. There was far too much money invested to walk away from it, and eventually the entire constellation was on orbit, and the ground-stations build and billing system established. On the roll out in 1998, the company proudly announced that you could take your brick-like phone out in the parking lot and call your accountant for only a couple bucks a minute.
The history of the world is paved with great ideas that did not work out, and Iridium was a concept whose time just missed. The system is still up there, but when Motorola decided to cut their losses, the fire-sale price to a group of private investors was around $25 million, or pennies on the dollar for what was invested.
The primary user is the Department of Defense, who has a requirement for that sort of global capability. You would think that the Government finally got a good deal, for once, but here is the real deal, too big to hide.
The first group of Iridium satellites were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base by a US company. The next seven were launched by the Russians out of Baikonur in Kazakhstan, because it was cheaper.
In order to save costs and complete the constellation, the last two flights were launched in 1997 from Taiyuan, in China. They went up on the multi-purpose Long March rocket. It was a net savings, even if you include the one that failed and wiped out a village near the launch site.
In order to save costs, Motorola provided the Chinese with the multiple-ejection deployment technology that had originally cost the Air Force billions to develop for the most modern ICBM delivery vehicles.
That is just one tiny part of what was going on at the time, and had continued unabated. I thought that was sort of stupid back then, almost a criminal violation of technology transfer. But business is business, after all, to big to hide.
Besides, you can't go back in time. I wonder if we can even deal with the present.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com