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Other authorities are far less sure. Most of the projects run by aerospace companies were taken on in an attempt to diversify against a slowdown in their main activity. As many balance sheets now attest, the companies did not secure insurance against such a turn of events. A. Scheffer Lang, head of the transportation division of M.I.T.'s department of civil engineering, recalls a transportation study undertaken several years ago by planners at North American Aviation. "They demonstrated very clearly that they didn't understand the problems," he notes. "Technology per se is the easiest part. They couldn't get their heads around to understanding the situation within which one has to market."
Dollar Overkill
The trouble is that aerospace men have been trained to be much more concerned about technical excellence than about costs. Often, when a bug developed in a large federal project, the industry's solution has been to pour on more research, more analysis, more management—and charge it all to the Government on a cost-plus basis. Lang calls that technique "dollar overkill." Unless the prevailing mentality in the industry changes, it will not be well suited to handle environmental problems. At present there simply are not enough zeroes attached to existing research funds. "You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year compared with billions for defense and space," Lang says. Dean Albert J. Kelley of Boston College's school of management believes that the aerospace industry is simply not geared to any market but the monolithic one offered by the Government, which is "about an inch wide and a mile deep." In commercial business, he observes, "you tend to have more of a horizontal market. You have a lot more little sales. Making this transition is the companies' greatest problem."
Perhaps the most intriguing objection to conversion of the industry comes from the industry itself. Many men in aerospace chose their careers at least partly for the romance of exploring "the last frontier." Chris Kraft, deputy director of Houston's Manned Space Center, remarks: "If you think I'm going to sit around for ten years worrying about car exhaust and property rights for new roads, you're full of crap."
Even so, those who are wedded to aerospace as both job and life-style are fewer in number than the workers who would be only too happy to find new employment. The industry's decline has presented the nation with an elite corps of unemployed whose average education and skills far outrank those of the jobless at large. "If I were in this Administration," says Economist Robert Nathan, "I would have top experts flying out to Seattle right now to find out what talents this group offers and where the men can be put to work."