Monthly Archives: July 2020

George Whitesides of Virgin Galactic believes that a new wave of human space flight innovation will capture the attention of the international public.

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While Earth-bound citizens grapple with quarantines, a new era of space exploration is blasting off. After years of only gradual expansion, emerging players and new technologies have reignited the space race in the 21st century.

While the Cold War spurred major scientific and commercial achievements, progress tapered off dramatically as government enthusiasm and funding for space exploration waned. But dramatic technological advances and lucrative business models changed the conversation, and private companies are making up for lost time. New investments and fresh private-public partnerships mean that booking a berth in space could happen sooner than we think. Countries like Japan, China, India and the United Arab Emirates are jumping in, too, expanding the borders of geopolitics.

George Whitesides, the chief space officer and former CEO of Virgin Galactic, a company founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2004 to develop commercial vehicles for space tourism, joined the Altamar podcast team of Peter Schechter and Muni Jensen to discuss the future of space travel.

The interview came on the heels of a major announcement: Virgin Galactic, in conjunction with NASA, is opening a private astronaut program with public accessibility. Previously, Whitesides served as NASAs chief of staff after working on President Barack Obamas transition team for the agency. Hes also served as the executive director of the National Space Society and is a sought-after adviser for companies and organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administrations Commercial Space Transportation division, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, the Space Generation Foundation and the Zero Gravity Corporation, among others.

According to Whitesides, Virgin Galactic seeks to expand space access to everyone, so that its not just the province of professional astronauts; it becomes the province of you and I, and the benefits of space accrue to everyone. Whitesides explained that partnerships between NASA and the private sector reignited public interest in space to levels unseen since the Apollo moon landing.

He said he predicts that theres going to be this wave of human space flight innovation coming up, and thats something that really captures the attention of the American public and the international public.

Whitesides explains the partnership between NASA and the private sector.

According to Whitesides, companies are taking advantage of great technical trends that are driving innovation and playing out in the commercial interest, such as developments that allow spacecrafts to be reused.

As he pointed out, travel to Europe would be pretty expensive if every time you got on a 747, you threw away the 747 on the other side in London. In turn, Whitesides believes that passenger travel to space could soon be a reality: I think its on the order of months and its not years, so thats really the main headline.

It could expand rapidly after that: Were going through this weird, interesting and inspiring transitional moment where, in the past, very few people will have known an astronaut, or have known somebody who has gone to space, whereas going forward, most people will know someone who has been to space, and thats an interesting transitional hallmark, he said.

Whitesides explains that the number of people who have traveled to space could soon significantly increase.

Until recently, only a handful of companies and countries were large enough to invest in space. This is the kind of thing that takes not just months, or even years; it takes decades sometimes to do these programs, Whitesides said. But lower costs and more accessible technology are creating opportunities for new ventures.

Virgin Galactic and other private sector players are betting that space travel will pay off as people pay to realize lifelong dreams to visit space. Competition over customers for a rocket ship ticket is likely to be fierce: Marshalling the resources to maintain efforts over the course of a decade or more is really challenging and requires either strong billionaire backers, or government resources or others, he said.

The intermingling of private and government funding in space has become no stranger to geopolitics, either. Between the United States, India, China, the UAE and countless other government-sponsored programs, space is not just becoming closer and cheaper its also getting more crowded.

Although Whitesides thinks an actual space war is unlikely, he expressed caution over the potential for foul play. Different national entities are working at how they can do really serious negative stuff in orbit, he said. There is no doubt there are a lot of nefarious shenanigans going on in orbit today between the Great Powers, and that is something thats driving the creation of the Space Force and other kinds of governmental responses.

Whitesides explains concern about government operations in space.

Whitesides remains optimistic about the prospects of space travels impact on the world. I think that what weve seen is that nations can retain friendly relations in space, even when theyre having pretty challenging relationships on the ground, he said. I think its good that humanity has these programs they can work together on, even through challenging times.

Altamar is a global politics podcast hosted by former Atlantic Council senior vice president Peter Schechter and award-winning journalist Muni Jensen. To listen to the full episode, click here.

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Is Commercial Space Travel Finally Taking Off? BRINK News and Insights on Global Risk - BRINK

The Smithsonian Institution announced today that the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center and the National Zoo will both reopen July 24 following months of closure as a public health precaution due to COVID-19. The two facilities will greet visitors with new health and safety precautions, including timed-entry passes, hand-sanitizing stations, mask requirements for ages six and up, and limited numbers of visitors. But the massive Udvar-Hazy indoor complex, located in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport, should have no problem offering plenty of space for maintaining social distancing. The 17-acre aviation and aerospace museum, which opened in 2003 as an adjunct to the popular National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. houses in its huge hangars thousands of notable artifacts that could never have fit inside the much smaller museum on the National Mall.

Together, the Udvar-Hazy, along with the museum on the National Mall (currently undergoing a massive renovation) showcase the largest collection of space and aviation artifacts on Earth. Of the 6 million visitors to both last year, 1.3 million of them came out to the Virginia site.

When Hazy's doors reopen Friday, visitors will encounter partially visible artifacts drapped with plastic sheeting in the facilitys Boeing Aviation Hangar due to a two-year roof repair project currently under way. That will preclude full viewings of big planes like the Lockheed SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft. And public tours, rides and exhibition interactives won't be available or operable. But there are still more than enough remarkable artifacts to warrant attentionnot the least of which is the still-controversial Enola Gay. August marks the 75th anniversary of its fateful mission to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

With fewer visitors, this will be a time for a more intimate opportunity to check out some of the museum's singular and memorable items. They include the kind of colossal things that you cant quite avoid seeing and would never expect to see indoors, from the elegant curves of the supersonic Concorde to the battered exterior of the Space Shuttle Discovery. As well as thousands of smaller, sometimes personal items crucial to key moments in space flight, from a Mission Control pocket stopwatch to a map marker from the Mercury Project. And even more surprisingly, is the carcass of one of the smallest involuntary space fliersa spider from a Skylab experiment suggested by a high school student.

Here we present a dozen of our picks not to be missed.

Millions may have just tasted their first quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, but astronauts returning from the moon had to shelter in place as well, lest they spread any unknown lunar germs. Equipped with elaborate air ventilation and filtration systems, the Mobile Quarantine Facility was used by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins after their historic trip to the moon in July 1969. The retrofitted Airstream trailer with living and sleeping quarters and a kitchen was sealed but in motion for their first 88 hours back. First aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, it was transferred to the Pearl Harbor Naval base in Hawaii and eventually the cargo hold of a C-141 aircraft taking the trio to Houston, where a more spacious quarantine facility awaited them at the Johnson Space Center. Crews from Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 also quarantined but by July 1971, following the Apollo 15 lunar landing mission, the practice had been abandoned.

Its fitting that one of the earliest A-Series rockets from Robert H. Goddard is in the Smithsonian. It was the Smithsonian Institution that funded the man who would become known as the father of rocketry, leading to his declaration in 1920 that a liquid fueled rocket could reach the moon, a notion much ridiculed at the time. In 1935, Goddard tried to demonstrate the possibilities of such a rocket in Roswell, N.M. to a pair of big-name supporters, Charles Lindberg and Harry Guggenheim. A technical glitch prevented its launch that day but Lindbergh made sure the 15-foot rocket would be donated to the Smithsonian. It became the first liquid-fuel rocket in the collection.

Early rocketry could be surprisingly primitive, as seen in the jerry-rigged two-foot wooden sled Robert F. Goddard devised in the early 1920s to convey flasks of super-cold liquid oxygen that were much too chilly to touch. Goddard had first started experimenting with solid propellant rockets in 1915, switching to more powerful liquid propellants in 1921. The rudimentary sled, of pine, nails and twine, providing high contrast to the steely sleekness of the all the other objects in the Udvar-Hazy Center, was donated to the Smithsonian in 1959 by the scientists widow, Esther C. Goddard.

One of the smallest items at the Udvar-Hazy Center is the carcass of a Cross spider named Anita, who, with a companion named Arabella, became involuntary space travelers on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973. They were there as part of an experiment to test how weightlessness affected their web building. The idea came from a 17-year-old student from Lexington, Massachusetts, Judith Miles, who responded to a NASA initiative for student experiment ideas. It turns out the arachnid astronauts spun webs in space using a finer thread in response to the weightless environment. Neither Anita nor Arabella survived the nearly two months in space. But they were placed in glass bottles with their names on them. (Arabella is on loan to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.)

As the lunar module of Apollo 11 was fast approaching its historic target on July 20, 1969, it was also running low on propellant. Neil Armstrong approached Tranquility Base searching for a clear patch to land, as Charles Duke at Mission Control in Houston barked out the minutes remaining before the fuel ran out60 seconds, 30 Seconds, he said in those tense final minutes. Duke based his count on a handheld Swiss-made Heuer stopwatch. When Armstrong announced The Eagle has landed. Mission control responded: We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. Were breathing again. Thanks. The item was donated to the museum by the NASA in 1978.

The alien mother ship that spectacularly lands at Devils Mountain at the end of the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was lit like the kind of disco ball youd expect from a ship equipped with such a massive sound (and, as it turned out, communication) system. Without lights it looks more like a death star a much smaller one. But the model, 63 inches round and 38 inches wide, is a surprising find in the Udvar-Hazy Center. Conceived by Steven Spielberg but made by a team led by Gregory Jein, it was built using parts from model trains and other kits. But its makers had a little fun with the parts of it that werent seen on camera, such that its affixed with the model of a Volkswagen bus, a submarine, World War II planes, and R2-D2 from Star Wars one of the modelers had just come from that production. Theres also a mailbox in there and a cemetery plot.

There are not many items in the massive space and aviation collection that are as simply drawn and so brightly painted. But the six-inch, red plastic device had an important job: Showing where the capsules of the Mercury Project were at any time of their flights. It was moved across a world map indicating international tracking stations by a pair of wires. The crude map dominated the wall at Mission Control on Cape Canaveral, Florida, for all six of the manned flights from the Mercury program from 1961 to 1963. The actual Mercury capsules themselves, that gave flight to Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter, were uniformly gun barrel gray with a touch of Army green. But definitely not pink.

The impossibly cute Aurogiro may look like a character from Pixars Cars sequel Planes, but the idea was to build an aerial Model T that could take off from driveways and fly around, or, with the above rotor wings folded back, drive leisurely down the street at 25 mph. Test pilot James G. Ray did just that when he landed it in a downtown Washington D.C. park in 1936, folded back the wings and drove down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Commerce Department which commissioned the project. The precursor to the helicopter performed well, but with an estimated cost of $12,500, it was too expensive for the average suburbanite for whom it was intended. Only one was built.

Sometimes space explorers come from other walks of life. Take 34-year-old New Jersey truck driver and skydiving enthusiast Nick Piantanida, a skydiver who wanted to set a new record for highest jump, in his case from a balloon. His first attempt in 1965 was the victim of a wind shear; he landed in a city dump in St. Paul, MN. His second attempt in February 1966 set a world altitude record of 123,500 feet, but a mishap with an onboard oxygen supply forced controllers to cut the gondola loose. For Strato-Jump III, three months later, Piantanida reached 57,600 feet when disaster struck and the gondola had to be cut loose again. He may have accidentally depressurized his helmet; he never gained consciousness and died four months later in August 1966 at 34.

This French-made two-seat ultralight from 1992 lived up to its name it only weighed about 360 pounds empty but with its 34-foot aluminum tube and sailcloth wingspan this model was used by the conservationist group Operation Migration to help guide endangered flocks of Whooping cranes and other bird species to new migratory routes from Canada to the American South. Flying about 31 mph, it also broadcast crane calls during the flights. It was also featured in the 1996 family film Fly Away Home with Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin.

Discovery was the third Space Shuttle orbiter in space, and racked up the most miles in its 27 years, traveling almost 150 million miles from its 39 Earth-orbital missions from 1984 to 2011. It carried 184 crew members (including John Glenn who returned to space at 77 in 1998). Among its many missions was launching the Hubble Space Telescopeand a couple of its repair missions. Discovery represented the Return to Flight in missions following the loss of the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia disaster in 2003. In all, it clocked 365 days in spacemore than any other orbiters. When it finally retired, it was flown to Virginia in April 2012 after first taking a victory lap over the Nations Capital. It was the first operational shuttle to be retired, followed by the Endeavour and the Atlantis a few months later.

The biggest thing by far in the Udvar-Hazy Center and maybe in all of the Smithsonian museums is the 202-foot-long Concorde from Air France. In its day, the supersonic airliner cut in half travel time across the Atlantic Ocean, but ultimately couldnt maintain its first-class service because of high operating costs. A sleek, international creation by Arospatiale of France and the British Aviation Corporation, Concorde flew at a maximum causing altitude speed of 1,354more than twice the speed of sound. Air France agreed to donate a Concorde to the Smithsonian in 1989 and lived up to the bargain in 2003, providing the Concorde F-BVFA that had been the first Concorde to open service to Rio de Janeiro, New York and Washington D.C.

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Twelve Must-Sees When the Smithsonian Reopens Udvar-Hazy Center July 24 - Smithsonian Magazine

As of mid-July, the average flight only carries about 60 people, flying at an average of about 50 percent capacity, according to the trade group Airlines for America, making it easier for the more generous airlines to guarantee open space.

Rather than blocking seats, American and United are offering rebooking for travelers on crowded flights through pre-flight notifications, though some fliers have complained that changing plans at the last minute is inconvenient. Joy Gonzalez of Seattle, a recent flier on American, said the options shed been given to change involved long trips with two or three layovers.

We have multiple layers of protection in place for those who fly with us, including required face coverings, enhanced cleaning procedures and a pre-flight Covid-19 symptom checklist and were providing additional flexibility for customers to change their travel plans, as well, wrote Ross Feinstein, an American spokesman, in an email.

A United spokesman, Charles Hobart, wrote in an email that the overwhelming majority of our flights continue to depart with multiple empty seats.

On airlines that arent blocking seats, carriers say they allow passengers, once boarded, to move to an empty seat within their ticketed cabin, even if that seat is a premium seat, assuming there isnt an issue with balance and weight distribution.

But there have been some incidents on American planes in which passengers complained that they were not allowed to move to premium seats. They made it very clear that if you are trying to sit in empty seats to socially distance, you are still not permitted to sit in exit row seats because you have to pay for them, commented John Schmidt, a Times reader, on July 8, about an American flight from Austin to Los Angeles. This was a public announcement. Is definitely their policy, he wrote.

On July 10, American said it sent a reminder to its flight attendants that read, For now, its OK for customers to move to different seats in the same cabin.

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Worried About Crowded Planes? Know Where Your Airline Stands - The New York Times

Executive Summary

CEOs such as Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and Twitters Jack Dorsey have announced plans to scale their remote-work initiatives. But, as Microsofts Satya Nadella warns, we may be at risk of replacing one dogma with another if we make a big move toward permanent remote work.

The real issue is not whose predictions turn out to be right or wrong (no one has a crystal ball), but whether those leaders are thinking deeply enough about what they want their new work paradigm to achieve and whether they can architect and construct systems that will allow them to meet their objectives.

To think through those complexities, the authors suggest using Future-back thinking, a process for developing a vision of your best possible future and a clearly laid-out strategy to achieve it. This includes (1) Articulating your grand purpose and aspirational objective (your reason for designing the new system) and envisioning the system and what it looks like; (2) considering each of the assumptions; (3) testing those assumptions; and (4) using the learnings from these experiments to adjust or pivot your systems components, but also your vision itself.

Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebooks 50,000 employees would be working from home. We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale, he declared in a follow-up interview. A few days before, Jack Dorsey had announced that Twitter and Squares employees would be allowed to work where[ever] they feel most creative and productiveeven once offices begin to reopen.

After spending the last two decades building amenity-filled campuses that maximize the collisionability of talent and ideas while enticing their workers to stay in the office for as much time as they can, Covid-19 has shown these leading-edge technology companies that their workers can be just as productive or in some cases, even more so when they stay at home.Its not just tech. Executives in traditional industries who spent days and weeks on the road are discovering that a well-managed Zoom meeting can be as effective as a face-to-face and a lot easier (and less expensive) to organize.

Will Apples new $5 billion HQ, aka The Spaceship, turn out to be a white elephant? Will Google abandon its Googleplex? Will corporations empty out their office buildings everywhere and shrink their physical footprints? Are we on the brink of a new paradigm for work? Microsofts Satya Nadella isnt so sure. Switching from all offices to all remote is replacing one dogma with another, he said in a conversation with The New York Times. One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. Whats the measure for that?

We suspect that the workforces of Twitter and Facebook will be less remote in 10 years than their leaders are predicting today, but much more remote than they could have imagined six months ago. The real issue, however, is not whose predictions turn out to be right or wrong (no one has a crystal ball), but whether those leaders are thinking deeply enough about what they want their new work paradigm to achieve and whether they can architect and construct systems that will allow them to meet their objectives.

WFH is helping them muddle through the immediate crisis, but what do they want from it in the long run? Higher productivity? Savings on office space, travel, and cost-of-living adjusted salaries for workers in cheaper locations? Better morale and higher retention rates?

To know whats best for your organizations future when it comes to remote work, you have to put it in the context of all the things that you are looking achieve. In other words, you have to have a conscious aspiration. Then you need to envision the workforce system that will make those things possible.

Having more or less remote work is not a point change in an otherwise stable system work from home is a system in and of itself, with many interfaces and interdependencies, both human and technological. These include:

While you can model such a system up to a point, its design specs will inevitably need to be revised as they come into contact with reality; as such, experimentation and learning will be key you cannot expect to have a one-time rollout.

For all of this to be developed and managed in the right way, a different innovation approach is needed.

At Innosight, where both of us work, weve developed a way of thinking and planning that we call Future-back. We cover this in detail in our new book, Lead from the Future, but heres the gist: Future-back is designed to help business leaders develop a vision of their best possible future and a clearly laid-out strategy to achieve it.

Thinking and planning from the future back allows you to fully articulate what you hope to achieve with your new work system and then design its major components from a clean sheet, unencumbered by how things work today or how they worked in the past. Once you have developed your vision, you need to consider all the things that would have to be true for that vision to be achievable, and then test those assumptions with initiatives you can begin today.

The process unfolds in four distinct stages.

You are doing two things in this stage: Articulating your grand purpose and aspiration (your reason for designing the new system) and envisioning the system and what it looks like.

To determine your grand objective your reason for re-imagining your existing system think about what you have learned from the Covid-19 emergency that led you down this path. Your initial aim is simply to develop clarity about your intended future, not achieve analytic certainty.

As you begin to sketch out your workforce system of the future, frame it as a purpose- and objective-driven narrative. This is your vision. As such, it should include: your Purpose (your ultimate inspirational why); your objectives and metrics (your tangible why); and a concise description of the components of your system and how they fit together (your what). For example:

In order to expand our talent base to the four corners of the world and ensure that they are fully-motivated by 2022, 50% of our creative workforce will work remotely for up to 50% of their time. Employees will be fully reimbursed for the costs of their home offices and work-related travel; salaries will reflect local costs of living.

Moving on to the system itself, ask yourself a series of questions about its resources and assets. What kinds of people will make up your system and where will they will be located? How will you organize your different functions and ensure that they work? What will your physical footprint look like? What remote technologies and tools will you need, and how will you combine them with in-person tools and technologies to ensure individual productivity and effective virtual collaborations?

Then you need to ask similar questions about policies and processes, and norms, and metrics.

As Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, there are known knowns and known unknowns, and also unknown unknowns that you must take account of. Work through each of them, surfacing as many of those known and unknown unknowns as you can. Each will need to be proven or disproven:that virtually-convened teams can problem-solve as well as teams that meet in person; that executive development can be carried out online as well as in-person meetings or not, as the case may be.

What do you need to learn and how can you best do it? To answer these questions, walk your vision and its key assumptions back to the present in the form of experiments. You will need more than one if there are different circumstances or contexts in which the system would work for example, if your company includes geographic locations with different societal norms or government regulations, or business units that are fundamentally different from one another (e.g., one that is more service- and manufacturing-oriented versus others that focus on knowledge work and design). People are different, too. WFH makes tremendous sense for some roles and personality types; less for others.

If you are a multinational and want to learn if WFH can work within one of your geographies, carve out a business function or small business unit; systematically apply the WFH technologies, practices, and rules and norms that you wish to use; run it in parallel for a short time; and then carefully measure its results against those of the larger unit.

Through this iterative process of exploring, envisioning, and testing, you will ultimately discover your best way forward. This learning will be an ongoing process, not a discrete event, unfolding over time as your assumptions are converted to knowledge.

Inevitably, there will be tradeoffs that must be negotiated. While you may be able to tap more talent and save money by not requiring your new hires to move, it is also likely that your creative ecosystem will become more diffuse. Some teams may need to meet in person as frequently as several days a week, so they wont have the luxury of living wherever they wish. You will likely have to beef up your technical and human capabilities before you can fully apply your new knowledge across your organization; significant investments may be required to provide sufficient bandwidth for your employees homes, reducing some of your expected savings. You may find, per those early experiments, that your new system wont work in every business unit or geography.

You will likely have to grapple with the pitfalls of causal ambiguity (the fact that what drives good results in one context may very well not in another). Any organization has constraints on its absorptive capacity; you must be prepared for systemic incompatibilities and rejection, which can stem from poor communication between units, the lack of a shared language, or longstanding rivalries and resentments.

At all times, its important to remember that your aspirational whats best should be about more than your bottom line. Back in August 2019, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation from one that solely serves its shareholders financial interests to delivering value to all of its stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and communities . Ideally, a companys vision of its future workforce system or systems should reflect its leaders deepest thinking about its why, not just its what and how.

Even if remote work turns out to be less productive on some metrics than others, reducing carbon-based emissions or the improving work-life balancecould make up for it. Or not. Its possible that what works for Twitter and Facebook wont work for you, at least initially. Your struggles with it may point the way towards deeper changes that you have to make.

Future-back thinking doesnt reveal a future that is written in stone it gives you a way to shape it and own it, ensuring your organizations long-term viability. As Satya Nadella suggested, trading one dogma for another is rarely your best solution; in most cases, those dogmas themselves are your biggest problem. At the end of the day, the organizations that can develop the clearest, most inspiring visions, learn the fastest, and pivot the most capably, are the ones that win.

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Does Your Company Have a Long-Term Plan for Remote Work? - Harvard Business Review