The first few months were extremely tight financially, but after settling in, I found enough time to explore the social and political scene, paying particular attention to the space advocacy community and non-space humanistic organizations. I visited the headquarters of several humanistic organizations, and had offers for intern-like starving artist jobs, but I kept my patent office job.
At that point in time, I was pretty open minded about what I was willing to do in the world. I was fishing, though I did have an agenda of my own if nothing more meaningful came up.
To find people in Washington DC who care about the world and the future, you must go to the right places. There are many of them, but they are still a very small percentage, and you must find them. (In 1985, the Internet didn't exist, so it required considerably more research and legwork.)
Random people in Washington DC in general are like people everywhere else -- they just seek a good paying job, and don't have much ambition in the world, except maybe achieving relative social status in society. It's not as if any of your neighbors are likely to be of much interest besides small chit-chat. More commonly, they will be the kinds of people who value a comfortable career as a government bureaucrat or with a big and well connected contractor.
It was clearly going to take some time to get to know the professional, political and social landscapes, and to become known by others, for people-networking and information research purposes.
Washington, D.C., itself is only about 5 miles by 10 miles, and most of that is old residential areas, with the government and central business district being a small slice near the river bordering Virginia. When you talk about "Washington, D.C.", you usually mean a much larger region including "northern Virginia" and the surrounding part of Maryland, where most people live and work. In fact, the Pentagon itself is in Virginia, not Washington DC. The contractors are fairly spread out. There are few highrise buildings, and in fact it's illegal to build higher than about 20 levels in Washington DC.
My first job was in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C., but it was an expensive area and I didn't think I'd stick in the Patent Office job for long anyway. I was expecting to find and switch over to a NASA contracting job, or to work for some humanistic organization unrelated to space. Anyway, after driving around a city I didn't know, and getting very turned off by some dirty, run down and seemingly dangerous parts, I took a place on the Maryland side near the subway.
The main benefit of the patent office job was the Patent Academy -- learning about patents and patent law, as well as trademarks and copyrights. I thought it could prove useful later if I applied for patents myself, or helped others to get patents, or had to deal with patents already owned by third parties.
Soon after taking the job and the first period in the academy, I was given my first patent applications to research, judge and, if approved, to refine as necessary. I was a Patent Examiner.
In the 9 months I was there, I processed countless applications from start to finish, and went thru almost the entire Academy training process. After phase 1, a Patent Examiner immediately starts taking several cases per week (or biweek, as it's measured). After a few weeks of experience, the new Examiner goes back to the Academy for phase 2 of training (approx. a couple of weeks), with a lot of historical case law, grey area cases, and so on. Then it's back to work. By this time, you can see how careless some of the patent lawyers are, and why some people are better off learning how to write up their patent applications themselves. (Just before I left, I went thru phase 3 of the Academy, which seemed somewhat esoteric.)
I never thought I'd be at the Patent Office for a year, given the low pay. I also resented that engineers were paid a whopping 50% more than I was, since physics is a more rigorous discipline and seemingly more applicable to understanding state of the art patent applications. The small annual pay increases offered no incentive to me. It was a ridiculous system with menial incentives from the start. I stuck around just to learn how to patent things myself and how it works.
Here are some general things I learned from the patent office:
Just because you are granted a patent, that doesn't mean you will make money if anyone uses your patented process. It only gives you a license to take someone else to court. First, you must find out if someone is infringing on your patent. (Of course, all patents are publicly published for people to use.) Then you must collect and legally organize information to prove that they are infringing on your patent (not easy if it's a manufacturing process in a restricted area of their property, rather than a product). Even if you prove they are infringing on your patent, it is possible that your patent could be overturned in court as invalid. Why? Because the official patent examiners at the U.S. Patent Office are not given much time to research each patent case, and had nothing except previous patents to research. If Acme company shows that something similar and "obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art" existed publicly before your patent application was filed, and perhaps the patent examiner just missed it (which is usually the case) or had bad judgement, then your patent can be struck down. If Acme company has a patent lawyer, then they are almost sure to make their case against you if they think they can.
There are a lot of other things I learned, too, not just what is patentable, but also how best to patent it (which some patent lawyers are neglectful of, and patent examiners may not lead you about), how to prosecute a patent, international treaties, and of course the laws and a lot of case law. For many patents, the issue of patentability is very clear cut. For others, it starts to get into grey areas. Sometimes you may not want to patent a process but only publicize it in some esoteric place so that others cannot patent it, but it's still not published as openly as in the patent registry. Proving infringement ... and prosecuting ... can be difficult, time consuming and expensive.
Soon after I got settled into a routine, I started writing up and circulating my CV. During nonworking hours -- and sometimes sneaking off during core business hours -- I visited a lot of Washington, D.C., based humanistic organizations, explored what jobs were available in the space sector (NASA and DoD), and did some people networking.
Over time, I interviewed at various companies who did NASA and Defense Department work, and talked to some government bureaucrats in NASA.
First of all, there was no work at all related to space resources (lunar or asteroidal) in the Washington DC region, and no interest in anything outside the presently funded programs. Most of the interesting jobs are spread outside the Washington DC region, in places like California, Texas, Alabama and Florida. However, there was only a trickle of space resources work, and that was given out in Texas by a small group at the Johnson Space Center. This I somewhat expected.
The best jobs in Washington DC circles were said to be available only to established friends and associates, and not advertised. Practically all NASA work that is advertised is highly specialized technical work, not policy or high level analysis work.
Even just talking about where the space program should be going was enough to kill a conversation. NASA is a technocracy with little vision. It takes years to get new projects considered, and too many projects compete for too little money. Relative newcomers are dismissed as unrealistic.
The largest number of jobs by far were in defense, and they paid best. Most defense jobs required a security clearance, which of course I did not have as a newcomer, but to get a security clearance you first needed a defense job. It was a chicken or egg situation, and I was locked out of the cycle. It was not a big deal because I wasn't particularly interested in defense jobs, but it did narrow my choices. To accept a job, the employer would expect me to be committed to it, as I'd be on the payroll yet unable to do much for the first six months or so until my security clearance was completed.
In many interviews, it was clear that my personal agenda would be seen in a negative light, in that I probably would get restless and not stick around long. I was disappointed that few contractors took interest in my self-starting independent initiative and research, and were only interested in my government contracting "work experience". I would be starting way down in the trenches, "entry level", in jobs not in great demand by their friends and associates, and the topic areas were rather uninteresting, so I held out.
It became very clear to me that very few professionals in the space business were interested in PERMANENT, or interested in much beyond their jobs, which was looking to NASA for leadership in the form of "requests for proposals" (i.e., money leadership). I was very disappointed at what a small percentage of space professionals were interested in much beyond their jobs, and thought that post-Apollo resources utilization was not interesting.
On occasion, I got to talk with NASA officials in the "leadership", such as at conferences. Again, I was very disappointed about how technocratic and narrow their "pack mentality" groupthink was.
Through sheer perseverance, I eventually hit a great job where I least expected it -- with a think tank which did appreciate my creativity and proactive initiative. More on that below.
Before I talk about my first professional, fulltime space job, I must first cover a different realm -- the space advocacy organizations and the nonprofit research and development groups. These are private groups which do not depend at all on government money, but support all their work from private donations and subscriptions. In some ways, they have more flexibility in what work they pursue.
During my first year in the D.C. region, I also explored the political side of space which I had read about from afar, and sought out to meet certain people involved, who I had read or heard about.
Most of the political operatives were very turf-oriented and not helpful or interested in what I could do, except as a pion licking stamps and envelopes for their political fundraising opportunities, and things like that. They had very strong agendas themselves, and enormous egos, but for most of them, I couldn't see how they could be successful beyond their own clique, given their lack of some social and political skills. Eventually, this proved true for most of them.
The only two organizations that I found worth dealing with were the Space Studies Institute (SSI) and the L-5 Society. I had already been helping SSI since my university years, and I tried to contribute to both.
SSI had very good and nice people at the top in Princeton, though I ran into a turfy brick wall with some in their group (who were gone a few years later, wonder why). SSI had many space professionals associated with them, unlike the political action space organizations at the time.
SSI didn't want to get involved at all in Washington DC politics. Their focus was only technical research, trying to do things that NASA wouldn't fund, by soliciting donations. SSI had given up on NASA and Congress after their most distinguished people had mostly failed after trying many years.
Notably, SSI had already been making pitches to the private sector, and was years ahead of me in concluding that government efforts were probably a waste of effort and not sustainable.
SSI had made pitches to private sector investors. The problem with SSI was they were too academic and unrealistic., e.g., depending on a high risk Mass Driver on the Moon, and worshiping high technology over the mundane achievable. They were academics going a little beyond academia, and still based in Princeton. Apollo was achieve with the motto "Better is the enemy of good enough."
I had a difficult time cracking into SSI's inner circle in a meaningful way. The outer circle was nice, but everyone overly worshiped its founder, Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, they were way too committed to the cool but risky Mass Driver which they had invested years in developing in the lab, and I didn't fit into their current projects so that I needed to propose my own way to contribute.
I volunteered to SSI in two ways:
(1) I had a technical papers & people database, and it became clear to me that there was a lot of relevant research and development which SSI was not aware of, and could use in several ways such as outreach, and for its own library. SSI sponsored its own conference every two years, but it wasn't aware of a lot of published work and researchers beyond its own conferences and its own associates. I volunteered to prepare this database in a format useful for SSI's operations.
(2) I offered to create an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) for them for colleagues to work together in-between conferences, because many people kind've lost touch in the two years between conferences so that time, energy, and potential contributions were lost.
Everyone I presented this to said that I must go thru one particular man who was in charge of operations, including this kind of thing, so I did just that. I don't want to mention this Executive Vice President (EVP) by name.
My proposal was neglected and when I pushed, I was rebuffed by this EVP. Indeed, this EVP who rebuffed me quietly turned around and asked someone else to help him create a BBS for him. He was technically illiterate and the BBS was poorly designed in both user friendliness and practical usefulness. He also created a space bibliography which was just a few popular books and papers, nothing near the depth, breadth and professionality of my database.
At that point, I asked why I'm waiting for and depending on other people, and so I decided to create PERMANENT, and just called it the PERMANENT database and the PERMANENT BBS. PERMANENT is an acronym for Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term.
Almost instantly, the big egos elsewhere took notice. Indeed, they were rather hostile to my independent work in PERMANENT whereby I presented my own visions of development of space resources.
The SSI people thought that only Dr. O'Neill and SSI should be pitching lunar and asteroidal materials utilization, but some of the core people at SSI were also encouraging and helpful, particularly Dr. O'Neill to me personally. Unfortunately, Dr. O'Neill had leukemia and was essentially on sabbatical leave. The organization ran on a skeleton crew administratively, and the money went into engineering research and development.
Dr. O'Neill was himself frustrated by lack of progress at times. Many people who were closely associated with and/or most supportive of SSI conceded that SSI was "too academic" in its core leadership team.
At the time, Dr. O'Neill had patented a GPS satellite system, and a lot of core SSI people were pouring their money, time and effort into that, creating a private company called Geostar. They thought it would make a lot of money, and that money would be reinvested into lunar and asteroidal materials utilization, enabling them -- the private sector -- to fulfill the mission, rather than NASA or anyone else.
The first two Geostar satellites were eventually built and launched but both failed technically. This allowed a competitor using much simpler technology get to the market first and bring in the money. Geostar went bankrupt. (The competitor later emailed me and stated that Geostar failed because it was made up of academics who went too high tech and too risky. He said this without my prompting him, but it fit my earlier experience. "Better is the enemy of good enough.")
I considered SSI to be the best organization to help at the time, but it's worth mentioning the leading sociopolitical organization for space resources -- the L-5 Society. What I write below happened concurrently to my volunteering to SSI.
The L-5 Society was founded at an SSI conference in the mid-1970s with the stated purpose of lunar and asteroidal materials utilization for space industrialization and colonization. I'd first started keeping up with them in the early 1980s when I was at the university, but started meeting people only when I arrived in the Washington DC region.
The L-5 Society had a monthly magazine, a few tens of thousands of members worldwide but mostly in the USA, and a local chapter system, some of the chapters state-wide and other chapters city-wide, numbering approximately 100. The membership had a lot of very good people.
The L-5 Society was technically founded by Keith Henson and Carolyn Meinel in Arizona, and it spread nationwide and worldwide from there. While they did great things, they failed to prepare the L-5 Society's bylaws to protect the organization after their departure.
After those two founders left (Ms. Meinel became a scientist for a DC area contractor, and continued to contribute technically), some egotistical people took over the L-5 headquarters in Arizona and proceeded to alienate their chapters following as they pursued their own self-aggrandizing power goals in Washington DC in an anti-democratic process.
Most of the SSI advocates parted ways with the L-5 advocates, but I tried to keep involved with both.
As I had been attending a lot of professional space conferences and talking to space professionals in search of work, in addition to job interviews, I had talked about space advocacy in the Washington DC region, too.
There were other space professionals who had tried to get to know the L-5 Society's political action end. They were either ignored or turned off by the L-5 Society's new leadership. The L-5 Society had become dominated by some overbearing space enthusiasts who were not inclusive and were rather narrowminded.
On the L-5 Society side, in talking with the new officials of the organization, I also felt that they saw me as a threat to their turf. The L-5 national leadership rejected my offers of help, and my materials. They didn't want me around, full stop. One guy wanted my database materials, but without introducing me around to his colleagues or otherwise assuring that I would stay involved or get credit in any way.
L-5 was already an abysmal failure at getting anything significant done in Washington along the lines of its purpose.
Now, the L-5 Society was in revolt by its chapters, as the new administrators were pressing forward with the destruction of the organizations purpose. In an undemocratic and very unpopular move, the L-5 executives merged with a general space advocacy organization which had more money, got themselves a better salary, got promised positions in Washington DC in the new organization, ... and the L-5 agenda was completely lost.
The new organization still exists up to the time of this writing, almost 20 years later, though at practically the same low effectiveness level and membership numbers. It is now called the National Space Society (NSS). The name L-5 is gone altogether, just the word Society at the end now. The other organization was previously called the National Space Institute (NSI). There was also haggling over the name, as L-5 members overwhelmingly wanted "International", not "National". They lost on that little point, too.
The L-5 Society had a chapter structure nationwide and overseas, which NSI saw as a potential revenue source for its magazine subscription base (both organizations published a monthly magazine, until they merged and it became one), as well as donations and political action. However, the undemocratic legal structure of L-5 was its demise, and the new people in power used their power in their own self-righteous ways, ignoring the leaders and members down the ranks, resulting in widespread disillusionment among its intelligencia.
As predicted, the focus of L-5 was lost, relegated to lip service on the fringes of the new agenda.
Before that happened, I was elected President of the Washington, D.C., local chapter (not the cliquish national organization, but the local chapter for the DC-Maryland-Virginia region), called DC L5. This was a chapter election, independent of the national headquarters. The national leadership's reaction to my election was negative. The L-5 magazine listed all the chapters and the point of contact, but they always left out my name and phone number, as well as some other regional leaders who questioned the conditions of the impending merger.
This event, combined with the SSI rebuff, convinced me to create PERMANENT.
From that point onward, I realized that what's needed is a broadly inclusive organization.
Overall, I was very frustrated with the lack of political and business progress by most of the leadership in the space sector.
Sometime in late 1985, while I was still working at the Patent Office, I got onto a subway train one morning and asked myself what I could accomplish during this ride. My mind is most creative and energetic in the morning. I had come to the conclusion that we needed a space company that would promote the development of asteroidal and lunar resources in the ways that others weren't -- do Washington, D.C., region public relations and political action, be inclusive to people, and develop a business plan for the purely private sector.
The first step was a name for the organization or company. It was on that subway ride that I came up with the acronym and name PERMANENT.
At the Academy, I also paid keen attention to trademark and copyright law. I subsequently registered the trademark for PERMANENT, and of course didn't use a lawyer.
In my job interviews, one interviewer was interested in my Mass Driver research because they were doing analysis of "railgun" electromagnetic launchers for defense purposes, but they seemed even more impressed by my independent and proactive research. They were in the defense field, but they were an elite "think tank". Further, their work was at a high advisory level, and they had very nice office space by the Pentagon. It was Anser, www.anser.org (Anser = ANalytic SERvices).
None of the other jobs had even come close in the combination of level and relevancy to my interests, so I took this one. I'd also had enough of the Patent Office. They were willing to get a security clearance for me, indeed, a very high one! If by chance I wanted to switch jobs later, I'd have a lot of options.
The high priority of SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) given by the Reagan Administration meant expansion and room for new ideas and new projects. It was the most creative part of the space program, and I was in the advanced planning part, located right by the Pentagon, performing analysis and advising officials at the top.
Once in the job, it was interesting at first, and great experience.
Humorously, as I didn't even have an office, they put me into someone else's office who wasn't there -- the office of Michael Collins, the real Apollo 11 moon shot astronaut (the one who flew the module in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin went down to the moon). My first experience in the office included people walking in thru the door with a face of great expectations of seeing Michael Collins, which then turned to disappointment when they saw me. Maybe you had to be there to laugh...
Because I came with no security clearance (which took about 6 months), my first assignments were limited, but still interesting. The very first one was writing part of a high profile, Congressionally mandated analysis of how our work would affect military stability and deterrance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. My part was the political debate.
Let me tell you, it's one thing to be an outsider expressing your opinions in university papers and discussion forums, and a whole different matter sitting down in an official job at that level and actually writing things that officially matter, and being part of a responsible team where everyone else was well into their careers. "Where you stand on a matter depends on where you sit." I was the youngest on that team by about 20 years.
In other ways, I saw my work counting -- influencing decisions on the direction of programs, and thus how vast sums of money were allocated.
(This made no difference in my status in the space advocacy community, though I did get some derogatory comments of envy in trying to downplay my position.)
After my security clearance went thru, things picked up technically but weren't all that much different in essence.
The reality of the "inside" was not what I expected. There was much more uncertainty about a lot of things, and I got to understand the full meaning of the job description "analyst".
Much to my surprise, project managers in the Pentagon with high responsibility were often political appointees who understood little about what they were managing, not Ph.D. scientists with a background in the field who had worked their way up thru levels of experience. It was often the job of our company to lead them, rather than vice versa.
There were all kinds of people. Few had strong opinions. For most of them, it was just a good job. Some were technically brilliant, others politically skilled, and so on. You didn't have to agree politically with what we were working on, and we were supposed to provide objective and thorough analysis, which we usually did.
I was put into the technical track, not the management track.
Officially, our contract (which was a "black contract" at the time) was to help manage two upcoming space experiments, Delta 180 and Delta 181 (named after the Delta rocket which launched them into space), designed to test state-of-the-art sensors vs. targets and decoys, and a space based interception.
However, tagged onto that contract was also a lot of wide open analysis unrelated to management of those two experiments, or loosely related to them. Ideas were coming in and someone needed to analyze their merits. New ideas and solutions were sought. That constituted much of my work.
Indeed, my second assignment (before my security clearance was ready) was to make a case that the Delta 180 experiment didn't violate the ABM Treaty. It performed an intercept in orbit. The best argument I made, based on "capability", was the one argument used most forcefully, and was made in the way I presented it, though I most probably wasn't the only person in the only think tank to come up with it and trickle it up the ranks. However, some of the basic numbers put forward were the same as I suggested.
Most of the programs are managed in a very honest way. However, in some of them, there is a major disconnect between technical reality and top management politics.
In public publications, there was considerable disinformation and misinformation planted around, I think for political reasons to promote funding of projects, though I could not stand up and say "No, that's not true" because the real information was classified. It was also quite an experience being an expert in a politically hot field and seeing inaccurate information being reported in "reputable" media outlets, and then being quoted and repeated many times until it became an urban legend. However, I couldn't go out and say anything in public about it.
One of the most popular magazines, Aviation Week and Space Technology, we jokingly called "Aviation LEAK and Space Mythology".
I came to the conclusion that Congress, the White House, and other decisionmakers are often misled, by layers of bureaucracy and managers who don't really have a good grip on what's really going on, and some who purposely mislead. There were political appointees making their case for more money to go in certain ways, like True Believers.
It's a lot like the spokesperson in front of the cameras -- they must believe what they are saying, in order for those watching them on TV to believe them. People can tell when someone's lying, and it's more difficult to lie on camera to millions of people than it is in private. Therefore, the spokespeople are often misled -- fed false information by their handlers -- so that they will wholeheartedly believe things that aren't really so.
I've occasionally seen this kind of thing both inside and outside of official circles. However, this was the first time I'd seen these things unfold in front of me while I was in an official position.
What bothered me far more, however, was the billions of dollars per year going into SDI when practically zero was going into developing PERMANENT concepts. I went about my day feeling as if SDI was a colossus waste of government money, as well as my time, efforts and talents as I continued working on SDI.
In the evenings, with what energy I had left over, I would chip away at PERMANENT, reading the technical literature, updating the database, and trying to put it all together by writing a cohesive vision.
It was clear to me that the main problem was not technical, it was sociopolitical on the government side, and a business plan on the private sector side. I saw few efforts along both of these lines, and of the few efforts I did see, I didn't see any leaders who seemed likely to succeed much beyond their current support group. They were unable to reach out to the vast majority of people who were not already space enthusiasts, and/or they didn't really have a realistic, sustainable program to pitch.
I wrote many "PERMANENT Briefs" which were tailored to be presentable to different audiences. There was a dumbed down version for journalists, another for government insiders, another for people associated with politicians, and various technical ones for engineers with skills in things like mining and mineral processing who may be willing to help out in creating real engineering designs and cost analyses for business proposals.
There was also a one-for-all. You'll never find one presentation which is best for everyone, but there's got to be a default one.
I incorporated PERMANENT, got a modem and created the PERMANENT BBS, which really got going in 1986. From this BBS, I offered my materials for anyone and everyone to use freely.
I had touched my first computer shortly before I got my space job. Before that, I had hand written everything and gone to typists. I had never used a PC before. I had to learn how to use a computer, then a word processor, and then how to type with more than 2 fingers.
Not long after I had started my space job, a guy named Steve Moyer, a struggling volunteer-cum-cheap-consultant for ISCOS (Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space), was instrumental in helping me get started, helping me for free. Steve helped me put my PERMANENT materials on-line, by setting me up with a BBS (Bulletin Board System) program, and I got a dedicated telephone line.
I was not only learning computers for the first time, I was getting onto the cutting edge of computer applications, and finding out that I needed to learn a lot about the guts of how it all worked in a Do-It-Yourself way if I was going to be successful.
Steve had set me up with a system called T-Comm (Total Communications). I felt it was not user friendly enough for BBS visitors, so I switched to a competing system called RBBS which Steve wasn't enthusiastic about, but it was the most customizable. Unfortunately, no volunteers proved reliable, and I started to learn the more advanced aspects of computer software out of necessity.
I did my own young and naive efforts in the press, going to the offices of major magazines and newspapers like Newsweek, Time, Washington Post, etc., to speak with the journalists whose names I saw as the reporter on space topics, as well as any journalists in the region who wrote on technology and human affairs.
Because I was talking to the press, I would usually go out of the office and make the call from a phone booth in the Crystal City underground.
I found that the only times they would ever consider meeting me at their office was when they were actually writing a space story. However, if PERMANENT wasn't relevant to what they were writing about, then they weren't interested. I tried different tactics, including different ways of introducing myself.
What worked best was that I had an official job in SDI advanced planning and I didn't want to talk over the phone, but I was at a subway stop near them (leaving it as a mystery), and I could visit them after getting a quick meal (but really taking the subway to their stop).
In person, when they saw my Pentagon badge plus the exceptional Top Secret color code, they'd get seriously interested. But no, I wasn't there to tell them any secrets at all, absolutely (and besides, I could get thrown in jail and fined maximally for that!). I told them about PERMANENT. Some were interested, but it was difficult to keep their focus. There was no official work in NASA or the Pentagon on anything related to PERMANENT. A bunch of engineers and scientists writing technical publications was not interesting to them. Again and again, I had to say that I was not interested in talking about SDI and I didn't have anything significant to say that other pro-SDI and anti-SDI organizations hadn't already said, but aren't they interested in space industrialization and colonization. The response was usually that they would call me in the future when something came up. They never did.
I also expressed my opinions in comparing the benefits and costs of PERMANENT as compared to SDI. Also, PERMANENT would work because the asteroids and the Moon were not against us, unlike our adversaries. PERMANENT was about positive solutions. (If I was quoted, it could have created a stir at my employer's, especially if my employer's name was mentioned, so I had to make clear this had nothing to do with my employer, either.)
None of those meetings amounted to much of anything in the press. They didn't see my stature as high enough to quote, that was for sure. I gave them the names and phone numbers of Dr. O'Neill at SSI and some people at the NASA Johnson Space Center who did research into space resources, and follow-up calls did reveal that some journalists did call around to some of these people, but nothing made it into the press.
I realized that I needed to have my own established organization of substance in order to do public relations. Being elected President of D.C. L-5 didn't work, I doubted if any other organizations would be willing to make me their official Washington public relations person, and being just another employee of a government contractor (who I definitely was NOT speaking on behalf of) was clearly not enough.
Meanwhile, I had been sneaking away from official work to do these things, and also distracted from my official work.
In my "think tank" company of about 500, I was the only person I knew of who did anything significant outside of their job, as I was doing. Nobody else had a vision of where the space program should be going which they were also moonlighting on. Nobody. Just doing their job.
Once, I went to a conference to present a paper, which was a technical analysis. Again, this was a first in my company, to the best of my knowledge, and people were surprised. Why would I do that? Nobody was paying me to?
Everyone else went home and enjoyed the fruits of their salaries. I went home and spent my salary and free time on PERMANENT (and what remaining energy I had).
The more I worked officially in the space program, the more I became convinced that no government, including the U.S. government's NASA, would lead us into space development using the Moon and asteroids. I had come to change my views, switching to the other school of thought, and quite strongly.
I made the radical decision that I would start a consulting business of my own, and force myself to learn how to do purely private sector business, so that later I would be skilled to help lead in the space development sector independently of government.
The contract which our division was completely dependent on was scheduled to end within a year, at which time who knows what would happen to us (despite all the reassurances of reassignment, possible contract extension, etc.), and I was not enthusiastic about continuing in government contracting with anyone.
One day, a superior mentioned the end of the contract and asked if I had any ideas, especially as a possible follow-on mission to the Delta 180 and 181 space experiments which we had gotten our current contract on. I jumped at this floated idea, and this was vaguely accepted on a see-how-it-goes.
In view of the very short lead time before our contract ended, I looked for flight-ready or nearly flight-ready hardware and existing research programs which could switch horses for funding. The core of this research included the Space Test Program (STP) which had about 100 R&D projects which were candidates for testing in space.
It turned out to be the most interesting assignment I ever did, in that I learned about diverse technologies, projects, and the leaders behind each.
Quite a number of the STP projects had considerable commercial potential. Precious few of the people working on these projects were seriously interested in potential commercial applications, indeed most not at all. Their complete focus was on money from the government. This was understandable as in most cases, only government funding was realistic for the initial R&D, but some had considerable potential, and lacked mainly the mentality.
This was actually the theme of space development at that time. People were either techies thinking that what we needed was more funding into the technology, or political animals pushing for government funding, but few were looking into business applications.
Nonetheless, I did have a job responsibility, so going thru the STP, I came up with my own "short list" of recommended hardware which would be significantly useful for the goals of SDI and which needed testing in space.
It also turned out to be the last of my projects. The first scheduled presentation of my research & results to people within my division was cancelled, as the rest of the division continued to react to the daily demand coming from the Pentagon chiefs and other daily stuff, more or less. Nobody was interested in my presentation, and the meeting was cancelled at nearly the last minute.
I took it as partly my fault. I had become too disconnected from the rest of the division. They had little awareness of what I was doing by that point in time, and I had little interest in what remained in the rest of the contract.
Backing up a year, I was also the only analyst in my division who had a computer on my desk in 1986. That was a portable computer which I had bought with my own money and brought into the office. Back then, PCs were rare, and only secretaries had PCs, except programmers. I started creating some of my own viewgraphs and other work, instead of handwriting and giving to the secretary and art department. Back then, it was considered weird and nerdy.
Also, there was a perception that people who had modems were often perverts trading x-rated photos, because that's what the sensational news often focused on.
I saw the potential of the PC and especially communications, and I had started helping others do the same. Remember, these were the first years of the PC clones. I had co-authored a PERMANENT-related proposal with a guy in California which we had independently submitted to a Defense Department "Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)" funding office, and started to help organizations network their best minds around the country and the world. I was converting people from faxes and secretaries to PCs and modems.
(The SBIR passed the first cut but not the second cut of projects considered for funding. I think it failed because we had no established company or organization, but it was a good first exercise in trying to get funding.)
At first, I helped other people with PC applications for free, as still more on-the-side projects. In the Washington, D.C., region, a lot of people saw what I had done for their associates and friends, and especially that I was going to every extra effort to make the PC to be user friendly.
I had already learned how to build clones myself, in order to make high quality and reliable computers (though I needed more experience in troubleshooting).
I was asking myself WHY I was working in military space in an 8 to 5 job, Monday thru Friday, driving thru rush hour traffic every day, and returning home tired. I'm a morning person.
I could be a consultant. Work 3 days a week. Work afternoons and evenings. Do PERMANENT in the morning.
I could be meeting a greater variety of people, helping diverse businesses and organizations, and getting a whole lot more exposure to the world than my current specialization. I could be learning about how to do business in the purely private sector.
I had many interesting kinds of people calling me, asking if I could help them at their office or home. Journalists, advocates, lawyers, ... and it was spreading into businesses.
At an opportune moment, I decided to resign my space job and make the plunge into the purely private sector.
Since that time, I have never had another fulltime job, but have been 100% self-employed as a consultant and running my own businesses, since 1987.