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Sky-High Goals, Lower Costs

In the December 2010 issue of Scientific American magazine (www.ScientificAmerican.com), David Freedman discusses “Jump-starting the orbital economy” – turning space travel from a costly government-financed research venture into a profitable business.

Unmanned geostationary satellites have already made that leap, of course: that strange orbit at 35,800 kilometres up, around the equator, is thickly populated with squat but profitable boxes of communications equipment, doing everything from monitoring the weather to providing television to far-flung islands.

Manned space flight is another matter. NASA’s last space shuttle is due to launch next summer: after that, the funding, like the enthusiasm for costly adventures with no sight of a financial return, dries up. President Obama has cancelled NASA’s Constellation launcher, the costly agency-funded replacement for the shuttle. According to Freedman, most of the $9 billion of R&D effort so far spent will be written off.

But NASA is not giving up the ghost...

By Ian Alexander - Click to read the full article!

HFS: Human Flesh Search

For a system to produce purposive results, it has to have been specified, designed, and tested against its requirements; it has to be commissioned and deployed prior to use; and it inevitably stays the same until it is deliberately changed, whether by redesign, “maintenance” software coding, or the updating of business rules if table-driven.

Only – all these laws are false, in the case of systems built on social networks and making use of the combined power of the Internet and human capabilities.

The International Council on Systems Engineering, INCOSE, has of course long defined a system as “a construct or collection of different elements that together produce results not obtainable by the elements alone. The elements, or parts, can include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies and documents…” (Eberhardt Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting, 2nd Ed., 2000).

It should be no surprise that the “parts” of an aircraft, or a bank, include both people and policies as well as hardware and software: these systems couldn’t work without rules to govern them and people to maintain them.

But these sober, Systems Engineering thoughts pale into insignificance beside the lurid accounts of Human Flesh Search that have appeared recently in the Western press. Western, for HFS stems from China – perhaps the first of many significant innovations from that dynamic economy and its many scientists and engineers. ...

By Ian Alexander - Click to read the full article!