Tag: editorial

Here are a few things about your colleagues that perhaps you did not know: they are a quite colorful, varied, and shall we even say motley crew. Hidden backgrounds came to light during the magazine’s Leadership event in Nashville, during a game called “Guess Who’s Spoofing the Dinner?” One person at each table, secretly recruited in advance, lied freely in response to three questions, while everyone else was bound to tell the strict truth. The table then had to identify the spoofer in their midst.

The truths turned out to be stranger than the fictions. As ever. This is what’s known, appropriately, as a truism.

The questions posed:

• What is the farthest from your birthplace that you have traveled?
• What was the shortest time you ever held a job? What job?
• Who is the most famous person you have met?

One person had met Hillary Clinton, another the first lady of China, and two people had met the Queen.

One met Janis Joplin (throwing that table into a total tizzy), another had an audience with two popes, Benedict and John Paul II (not simultaneously), while yet another had met John Paul II and Sophia Loren (again, presumably, not on the same occasion).

But the most elevated encounter was described by a soft-spoken gentleman who taught the Dalai Lama to play frisbee. His Holiness had never done, and evinced some curiosity as to how it worked.

Janis Joplin’s crony claimed his shortest employment was installing fire alarms at a Catholic home for girls in a delicate way in the early Sixties. His table declared him the spoofer. But they were wrong. They were wrong.

The shortest employment for one engineer at the dinner was also his longest, not to mention his most current: 30 years. He has never held another job.

One young researcher worked briefly as a shepherdess, until getting trampled by a flock of sheep. Imagine your lab-coated colleague in a long white frock, ruffled cap, and crook stick.

In their travels, folks had reached Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Everest Base Camp, China (and conversely, Nashville from China by a select few), and Capetown, South Africa, but the furthest flung had landed on Antarctic ice in a Hercules C-130, on skis.

Ironically, one travel tale was challenged not because of the furthest destination but the start point. A well known GNSS scientist vowed that he came from Texas, but a gentleman from the European Commission — the same who had met John Paul and Ms. Loren — doubted this severely, because the teller did not sport cowboy boots nor a big belt buckle. Worse, he could not recall what Sam Houston’s boys cried out as they went into the Battle of San Jacinto, winning glory and Texas independence.

Italians, it seems, are quite well versed in Texan history.

There is a lesson in this for all of us, though our scientist claims it’s all just an invention of  the movies.

Remember the Alamo!

We have reached our tipping point, say the seven U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff in a January 14 letter to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services.

“We are on the brink of creating a hollow force,” they continue. By this they mean that the military of the size that they are required to maintain may be incapable of performing the duties for which it is relied upon.

This sounds a great deal like the scenario forecast in Don Jewell’s “2C or Not 2C” column in this magazine. Five GPS satellites currently on orbit have the capability of broadcasting new signals essential to security and economic growth. But that capability is hollow because of a lack of — what? money? resolve? back-up? — to turn it on and use it. Those satellites could actually die in a couple of decades without ever performing the function for which they were designed.

The hollow-force concept as applied to the GPS constellation reverberates eerily through John Lavrakas’ “BeiDou, How Things Have Changed” piece in this issue. If GNSS matters continue developing along the same paths they follow now, the hierarchy of satnav systems, by user numbers, market share, health, robustness, economic viability, yea even unto military prowess, may well shift.

The uncertain fiscal year 2013 funding caused by the combined effects of a possible year-long Continuing Resolution in the U.S. Congress and radical budget surgery known as sequestration currently has military chiefs directing severe reductions to operation and maintenance spending.
Operations and maintenance keep satellites flying.

“Our proposed near-term actions,” write the civilian Secretary of the Air Force and the U.S.A.F. General Chief of Staff, “include . . . defer[ring] non-emergency Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization  (FSRM) projects, resulting in a reduction of roughly 50 percent in FSRM spending; where practical, de-obligat[ing]/incrementally fund[ing] contracts to encompass only FY13.”

Modernization will (or would) keep GPS apace with user requirements, growing security needs, and an increasingly digital world. Incremental funding has delayed new signals and new capabilities time and again; sounds like it’s set to do more.

“For now, and to the extent possible, any actions taken must be reversible at a later date in the event that Congress acts to remove the risks I have described,” writes Ashton Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense, to nearly every one under the sun connected with the military and money.

When is decay reversible? The notion of a tipping point is that, once passed, it cannot be re-crossed again in the opposite direction. Neither the status quo nor stability can be restored.

Many of us in the private sector have gone through successive rounds of cutbacks and lay-offs. Such measures first trim away the fat. This can be healthy, to some extent, although fat stores energy for later use. Then they start slicing into muscle. This reduces the ability to function. Finally, in many cases, they take a hacksaw to the bones. This not only cripples the organism, it effectively destroys it.

We either continue to totter at the brink of a global financial precipice, or we sit crumpled on the canyon floor far below, peering skyward, wondering what might have been, and resolving to pick up what pieces we can and carry on.

It is impossible to tell as this magazine goes to press in December just where we may find ourselves, and in what shape, come the early days of January 2013. Those elected parties with responsibility for the state of our fiscal affairs, who in the best of all possible worlds would  possess some sort of vision for the future, continue to posture, prevaricate, pander, and generally excuse themselves from worrying about what may happen to the rest of us. After all, they will still be in office and drawing good salaries come the New Year, come what may.

The GNSS industry has pulled through the last half-decade of worldwide recession as well as most, better than many. There have been some casualties along the way, and almost universal belt-tightening. But we keep moving onward and upward, blessed with a technology that continues to find new and profit-bearing applications, and encouraged by researchers further out in front of us, who discover and develop yet newer possibilities at an astonishing rate.

Now we face new uncertainty. The domino-paths of the global economy wend this way and that, curving, intertwining, doubling back, snaking everywhere. A toppled piece here can lead to a cascaded pile-up way over on the other side of the board, and vice versa.

It all comes down to end-user ability to buy, to upgrade, to invest in the future — as opposed to holding tight to whatever can be preserved in the present.
If characterizing GNSS end-users could be done by naming off surveyors, farmers, fishermen, and other outdoor enthusiasts, then determining the economic outlook for this industry would be easier to do, though the picture might not necessarily be any more optimistic. But the GNSS end-user community has swelled almost immeasurably to include the automotive industry, the telecommunications industry (in both its infrastructure and its own end-user equipment), utilities, airlines and the aircraft industry, militaries around the world, and even governments themselves — municipal, state, and national. Every one of these entities has a budget and acutely feels the chills — and in more delayed fashion, the warnings — of national and global economies.

Should the United States Congress, in full possession of all its political wisdom, drive the country over the fiscal precipice, reverberations of the crash in the chasm below will propagate far and wide — and into the very marrow of our bones.

We have overcome before. With science and technology as our co-pilots (or are they our engines?), we shall overcome again. We may and should speak out, attempting to influence the political process, but we cannot control its outcomes.

We can do our own jobs, and we will.  Accept change, keep calm, carry on.