The Invisible War

Back in the 1960’s, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its height. Many people felt that global thermonuclear war was inevitable and imminent. Both superpowers had enough nuclear bombs to incinerate the planet many times over. To avoid that lose-lose situation, they elected to compete with each other in two ways, the highly visible space race, culminating in the dramatic landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, and the largely invisible practice of spying and espionage.

During those years, I was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I lived in a house off campus with about 20 other guys, in a non-Greek fraternal organization named Minawa Lodge. Minawa was an organization of Christian young men, who presented a Christian witness on campus.

One of my fellow students living at Minawa was Kwang Yuan. Yuan was from Malaysia, although he was an ethnic Chinese person. He was an enigmatic guy. I never quite knew where he stood on anything.

At that time we had a student organization on campus named the Model UN. The idea was to familiarize interested students with international issues and relations. Participating students would pick a country and act as the ambassador to the Model UN from that country. Yuan became the ambassador for one of the communist countries and convinced me that it would be a good idea for me to become the ambassador for one of the others. I became the ambassador for Albania, a country that was so hard-core, it made the Soviet Union look like a democracy in comparison.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, the ambassador from that country was a Russian student in the USA on an exchange program. I was later told that she was also a KGB agent. This did not surprise me, based on the way she conducted the meetings of the ambassadors from the communist block countries.

At campuses across the country, the KGB agents were gathering deep background information on American culture and potential weaknesses. A secondary objective of the Soviets was to influence impressionable American youth through such organizations as the Model UN.

Aside from on-campus activities, influencing American youth was not particularly easy, because it was illegal for Americans to subscribe to magazines published anywhere in the communist block. Any letters from those countries were subject to being opened and read by the government. Fear of the communist menace was palpable. I didn’t realize it at the time, but meeting with KGB agents on a regular basis just might affect my ability to get an engineering job after graduation.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that hard to get around the government publication embargo. I subscribed to a Russian language weekly chess newspaper named 64 by having it transshipped through Canada. (There are 64 squares on a standard chessboard.) I couldn’t read the Russian text, but was able to follow the moves in the games. I guess I was lucky that the CIA didn’t identify me as a communist sympathizer, considering my interest in Russian chess, and my participation on the Model UN. I know they didn’t identify me as such, because after graduation, I did get an engineering job. It was even in the defense industry and I was given a top secret security clearance from the CIA.

At that defense contractor, there were things that I dealt with that, 40 years later, I still can’t talk about, beyond saying they had something to do with intelligence gathering, in other words, spying.

Every now and then I have wondered what happened to my old friend Yuan. Had he continued to walk a political tightrope? Until recently, I had no clue.

Not long ago, I contacted an old Minawa buddy who was also a friend of Yuan. This friend works for USAID, the federal agency that provides foreign aid to developing countries.

He told me that he had run into Yuan in Malaysia about 20 years ago, and that Yuan had died of a heart attack shortly after that meeting.

A heart attack in his mid-forties? That’s not unheard of, I guess, but it is unusual, particularly for a rail-thin Chinese person.

I just wonder, whether Yuan continued to walk the political tightrope, and finally fell off.

A Stagnant Industry Ripe for Disruptive Change

Recently, Elon Musk of SpaceX gave some insight into his business philosophy. He noted that many people considered the space industry to be moribund. The United States has been using essentially the same rocket technology for decades. This past week NASA sent its Curiosity rover to Mars on an Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V and the Delta IV are the most capable launchers we have and they are both almost old enough to collect Social Security benefits. I can vividly remember walking through the Atlas factory in the 1960s in San Diego, which was the building next to the one that housed my cubicle. There was a row of gleaming metal rockets in varying degrees of completion.

Sure, the Atlas V of today is an improved version of the one that we were building in the 1960s, but it is the result of a series of incremental improvements, nothing radically different. All the traditional space companies are doing essentially the same thing they have done since Yuri Gagarin woke up the USA by flying over our airspace without asking for clearance. They are depending on cost plus fixed fee contracts from the US government. For decades there has been no incentive to make radical improvements in the way things are done or to cut costs. After all, the government would pay whatever was charged, and cost overruns had come to be expected as normal.

In a word, the space industry had become stagnant. Musk cited such an industry as one ripe for disruptive change. He founded SpaceX and set about designing rockets from scratch, with no preconceived notions and no ties to legacy launchers which had started life as nuclear bomb-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

SpaceX has become a powerful disruptive force in the launch business, despite efforts by the old guard and their allies in government to keep on doing business as usual. SpaceX is severely undercutting the competition in launch costs, and is working aggressively on cutting costs even more, by developing fully reusable boosters.

SpaceX is only one of a number of new companies, headed by visionary leaders, which are finding new ways to reach and operate in space. This so-called NewSpace movement is causing a major disruption in the way the space business is done, and it is about time. Forty three years ago, NASA sent Apollo 8 to the Moon. Six of the subsequent Apollo missions landed on the Moon, the last one returning thirty nine years ago. Since then, no American has gone beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). It’s about time to break out of the doldrums and start reaching high again. Private companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Bigelow Aerospace are the catalysts to an industry that will get us out there. The Federal bureaucracy and Congress would serve us best by getting out of their way, rather than handing down mandates of how things should be done.

Let the disruption happen. If that means laying off engineers who have obsolete skills, so be it. It’s good to move out of your comfort zone anyway. Learn something new and then start to make a real contribution.

View from the South

I’m back from South Africa, where I visited the only operating radio astronomy observatory in the Southern Hemisphere. Photos at http://wp.me/1xYFi

The Road to Africa

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour made a series of “Road” pictures to exotic locales, such as The Road to Bali, The Road to Zanzibar, and The Road to Singapore. An unlikely set of circumstances would put them on the road and they would end up in the exotic place mentioned in the title of the film.

Two days ago, I returned home after a month in a place I never thought I would ever visit. It’s indeed an exotic locale. You might be wondering what road could have possibly taken me there. Would it surprise you to discover that right now you may also be on the road to an exotic place yourself? You always have the option of stepping off the road, and staying where you are, but by seizing opportunities when they’re presented to you, you could follow the road to a surprising destination.

As a pre-teen, I didn’t realize that I was on the road to anywhere in particular, but I was. I received a short wave radio for Christmas one year and used it to listen to radio stations from different places around the world. At night I could pick up WLS from faraway Chicago, Deutsche Wellen from Germany, and even Radio Moscow from the other side of the world. My body was stuck in New Jersey, but my mind was on the road to exotic places.

A little later I became a ham radio operator and communicated with fellow hams in countries around the world. I built amplifiers, radio transmitters, and receivers from the odd assortment of components that I found around the house. My father was an electrical engineer, so there was always an ample supply of resistors, capacitors, and vacuum tubes for me to experiment with.

I went on to become an electrical engineer myself, which was another step along the road.

The road hasn’t always been straight. After becoming a digital design engineer, I moved to software developer, then to technology manager, sales manager, and marketing manager. Along the way I became an author and a college instructor.

Eighteen years ago I joined the Oregon City Toastmasters Club and became a Toastmaster. The steps from newbie Toastmaster to Distinguished Toastmaster took me further along the road. At that point I had no idea where the road might be leading, but had faith that it was going in a good direction.

My Toastmaster training gave me the confidence to believe that I could be an effective speaker to just about any audience on just about any topic. When I discovered that I could go on cruises to exotic places absolutely free, just for giving talks on the ship, I applied to do just that. Over the past five years, I’ve visited 25 countries on cruise ships, most of them more than once. However, none of those visits were to countries on the most exotic continent of all, Africa.

Africa, considered dangerous and politically unstable, is not on the itinerary of many cruise ships. I figured it would undoubtably be the last continent that I would ever visit, if I ever visited it at all. However, that was before the cruise I lectured on this past summer. I lectured on astronomy on two legs of an around the world cruise, starting in London and ending in Los Angeles.

On that cruise, I delivered 17 lectures, almost the equivalent of a full quarter course in astronomy. In one of those lectures I described the transit method for detecting planets orbiting other stars. That lecture turned out to be a key step along the road, because after the lecture, a man in the audience, Bill Young, came up and told me that what I had described reminded him of how his business worked.

In the transit method, the light from a distant star is blocked slightly by a planet passing between the star and the observer. Bill’s business was to detect small amounts of metal on the body of a human being. A human body has a characteristic signature when it passes through a magnetic field. This signature is altered slightly if the person is carrying metal. Thus metal on a person can be detected in a similar way to the way astronomers detect a planet orbiting a distant star.

I was fascinated and expressed a strong interest in Bill’s business. He was from South Africa, where there are a lot of gold mines, and where people sneaking small quantities of gold out of the mines are a real problem. His business is to deter such thefts by making it impossible for a person to get out with gold, without being detected.

Bill made me an offer. He invited me to come to South Africa for a month to learn about his business and to learn if it was something I wanted to do. I had several things going for me, thanks to the strange, twisted road that I had been following.

* I was located in America, a market that Bill was trying to break into, and I understood American business.

* I was an electrical engineer, and Bill’s product was electrical.

* I had sales and marketing experience, and sales and marketing were the two areas where Bill needed the most help.

* I was a persuasive speaker.

* I had the ability to learn a new topic quickly.

* I knew how to teach others what I had learned.

I went to South Africa for a month, and learned a lot about gold mining and gold theft. I learned about metal detection and access control. I learned that Bill’s company, Saflec, builds the most sensitive metal detector on the market, and that there was a huge opportunity for it in the Americas.

I left Africa with Saflec’s support in starting up my own company to market Saflec’s metal detectors and access control systems in North, Central, and South America. Bill will join me in my booth at the annual mining engineering show in Seattle in February, and I’ll be presenting a paper on our metal detection technology at the show. I expect my new company, Goldfinger Global, LLC to be successful and I expect to have a lot of fun along with a lot of hard work in making it successful. I also expect that I’ll be hiring some people along the way, and thus helping in a small way with America’s unemployment problem.

Who would’ve thought that a short wave radio received as a Christmas present would have set me on the road to Africa, and after Africa, back to the Americas? I certainly would never have imagined it. What about your road? There’s no telling where the road will take you, if you are bold enough to keep walking along it.

Journey to a Near Earth Object (NEO)

Over 6,000 NEOs (asteroids and comets whose path crosses that of Earth) have been found so far, and it is estimated that 95% of those out there have yet to be found. Several of the 6,000 are reachable with current hardware, while it is certain that some that will be even easier to get to will be discovered soon. The best current candidate is 1999 AO10. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!

The K-Prize

People love to win prizes. At carnivals, accurate aim in the shooting gallery could win you a kewpie doll, and lots of people take a shot at it. The most famous prize in recent years was the Ansari X Prize, offered by the X Prize Foundation, which was a $10 million prize awarded to the first team to launch a ship into space twice within a two week period.

Space Ship One, now hanging in the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, next to the Wright Flyer, won the prize. Designed and built by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and funded by Paul Allen, Space Ship One actually cost more than the $10 million prize that it won. However, it proved out a novel technology that has since gone into Space Ship Two, a fleet of five spacecraft that will ferry passengers to the edge of space for $200,000 per passenger.

Going for the prize turned out to be a good investment for the prize winners. The $10 million prize was just enough incentive to encourage a race that accelerated development in spacecraft technology. Other competitors for the Ansari X Prize developed new technology also, and are solid competitors in the new, emerging commercial space business.

Now the X Prize Foundation has a whole host of new X prizes for the solutions of a wide variety of technical challenges. A multi-million dollar prize has already been awarded to a team that built a vehicle which negotiated a tough desert course, driven by a computer. The Lunar X Prize will be awarded to the first team to land a rover on the Moon, drive around there, and send video back to Earth. Another X prize will be awarded for developing a Star Trek style tricorder for medical diagnosis.

Offering prizes for accomplishments is a proven method of challenging people to rise above the ordinary and do something extraordinary. This brings us to the K Prize. The K stands for Kickstarter, which can be found at www.kickstarter.com. Just as the Ansari X Prize provided a kickstart to the commercial space business, the Kickstarter Web site provides funding for creative projects of all kinds. The basic idea is simple, but the way it takes advantage of the allure of prizes is ingenious.

Suppose you want to create an ambitious creative project. Perhaps you are a musician who wants to produce a CD of your original songs. Maybe you are a composer who would like to write a symphony, but you need to eat and pay rent while you are doing it. Or possibly you might be a motion picture director who wants to produce a feature film.

Here’s what you do:

Decide how much money you need to bring your project to completion.

Set up a kickstarter project for that amount of money.

For a fee, kickstarter.com will allow you to post information about your project along with incentives for people to pledge to donate cash. Larger donations qualify for larger incentives.

Whatever amount you specify, it must be raised within 60 days. If pledges exceed your goal, you get the money, less kickstarter’s fee. If pledges do not reach the goal, you get nothing, and your potential donors are not charged.

This is a win-win-win situation.

Kickstarter gets to collect a fee for every successful project.

Creative people get funding for their projects.

Donors get the warm feeling of helping a struggling artist and at the same time helping to bring about the creation of a work of art.

My son Rob currently has a Kickstarter project that is trying to raise $10,000 to complete the feature film he started working on seven years ago. He is 88% of the way to reaching the goal, with 6 days left.

Go to www.kickstarter.com and in the search box type: The Mad Scientist. This will bring up a description of the project, including the film trailer. You could become a co-producer of a major motion picture, with a small pledge. You might even want to qualify for one of those nifty incentive prizes. Prizes are great.

64% of the way Home, with 25 Days to Go

The creative project funding site kickstarter.com is currently hosting a funding campaign for the feature film The Mad Scientist, the second feature film from Portland, Oregon-based Taylor Twin Pictures. Shot with a Canon EOS D7 DSLR, The Mad Scientist is a science fiction time travel story set in the future. Back this project for a film credit as well as a host of other film-related goodies.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1008341264/the-mad-scientist-a-feature-film