Sunday, October 20, 2019

WELL INTO THE PAIN

Which is interesting because it was fading away quite nicely.

We went out to dinner at Blazing Bill's and it was good. 45 minutes to get a table. Weekend not planned well but good company and then we went to their home to play games. I was married and I remember going out to a PEO night almost into the mountains of San Diego where we had a really good time with all. My distaff half preferred the billionaire set of PEO and so we partied with them too. Oddly, they were equally nice if a little distant. I prefered the other group. Nobody was asking my preferences. She decided to go with the billionaire crowd.

As we played tonight our host got a pad and pencil for which to keep score. I noticed that after the first hand the score card fled and nobody discussed who was winning, because. That I think is the best way to play card games after 2200. Nobody keeps score and you laugh at card disasters.

The moon was huge in it's half-lit state just over the horizon just above the high school. And so tonight I read about the shame that is NASA and just now wish it would go away.

I used to work with the Navy labs and they were a sad herd. Ask them to do anything and they'd stovepipe it so just one guy could help you and they always asked for funding first and then if there was any reason at all to spend the money they had maybe they'd do that. I got invited to meet the D3 at SPAWAR after I wrote a STATEMENTS OF WORK for the lab that contained the language used in all of our statements of work for industry and told them to submit monthly reports and give an accounting of monies spent. The D3 told me I would be on my way to see Captain Valdez next and I told him to bring it on. I was fed up. More to the point, I was also a captain and not any sort of 'aquisition professional' and I had my congresman's address right there with me. Admittedly, my congresscritter was Randy Cunningham so really, no stick in the bag after all.

Valdez went down later that month for cheating on the physical fitness test. I was out of the country that day. Talk about lame. If you are out of town on the day of the PFT, or the wizz quiz, oh well. You pass. He was the CO, he could have just been 'out.' Still and all, I didn't work for the CO of SPAWARSYSCEN, I worked for the big cahunna. And to be honest, I didn't really work for him either. That's what made life so interesting. We were like Russians. We pretended to work and they pretended to pay us. We worked for codes in the Pentagon and they were all at war with each other. Plus, like girls, they renamed themselves every other month.

Oh, the girls, they were the GURLS, general unrestricted line GURL. Then they figured that out, ha ha and the GURLS picked another name, I forget. They then renamed themselves a couple of dozen times. We stopped paying attention.

NASA is worse. They are the complete losers of space travel. It is almost like Space Cowboys was the death knell for an agency looking for someplace to die. It will take them 4 years to build a rocket. Right. I could build one in the garage in no more than 3 years.

4 comments:

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

After all we were promised in the late '60's and early '70's, I feel like NASA has betrayed, and cheated me. We should have had a functioning Moonbase decades ago. Mars should have an American flag somewhere on it, planted by a person.

capt fast said...

you need to recall the mantra"funding makes rockets fly". blame nasa if you must, but look to your congress critters also. space programs are neat but risky. obamaphones get you re-elected.

HMS Defiant said...

With NASA we got the hat. All hat and no cowboy. An enormous bureaucracy that only grows larger and it's kind of, no offense, like the air force. A requirement for a zillion pilots and half a dozen planes. If we ran armies lke that we'd have whole divisions of infantry standbys.....oh wait, that's how we won wwii ...

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

Unfortunately, you are correct.