Technology invades the modern world

Chapter 411 The New NASA
If time and space don't get entangled, Lin Ran coming to become a bridge between the new NASA and the old NASA is even stranger than Lei Jun waking up to see global media coverage of Xiaomi.

"Professor, I know what I'm saying sounds amazing to you, but this is what we really think."

What was ineffective in the old NASA was its bureaucratic part.

However, we hope to preserve, rather than destroy, the engineering capabilities, technological patents, and massive industrial base of those corporate entities.

We need to completely restructure it.

"We hope to be like China," Jonathan said.

"In China, the main body of the space industry is your National Space Administration, and core entities like the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation."

One brain, several strong arms, efficient and unified.

In America, we only need two.

Jonathan drew two circles on the laptop's architecture diagram.

SpaceX and General Aerospace.

SpaceX is responsible for all vehicles, from launch to transportation, building a highway to the moon at the lowest possible cost.

General Aerospace, on the other hand, will be responsible for everything else: lunar rovers, life support systems, space station modules, and communication networks. It will integrate the space operations of all traditional NASA contractors, becoming an unprecedented behemoth focused solely on the spacecraft itself.

For NASA, I only need to oversee these two companies, instead of facing hundreds of suppliers who are passing the buck and whose interests are intertwined.

For businesses, layoffs and business restructuring in the private sector are much simpler than layoffs in the federal government.

A crazy yet logically consistent plan.

Most importantly, there are huge profits involved.

The restructuring, layoffs, and mergers of so many companies represent enormous profits, and General Aerospace is a publicly listed company; how much of this pie can be divided among them?

Isn't this exactly the kind of big deal that Big T loves?
“In the past, this would not have been possible.”

Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon would not allow such a monster to exist.

But now, under the dual pressure from China and the VIPER scandal, it's possible.

As for why Elon didn't talk to John Morgan himself? The answer is obvious: their relationship was bad, and there was no basis for mutual trust.

To undertake something this big, the interests involved must be enormous.

To some extent, Lin Ran is currently the only intermediary that both sides trust.

Big T is the same, but he's too old to personally handle such a big trade.

The room fell silent.

Lin Ran knew that this was a massive plan that could completely change NASA, and that they needed him, their adversary, to act as a messenger and guarantor.

What magical realism?

"What can I gain?" Lin Ran finally spoke. "I am no longer the director of NASA or the secretary-general of the United Nations. I help you integrate America's domestic aerospace industry and complete this grand feast. What can I and my country gain?"
Don't talk to me about NIL; that's just a bargaining chip to tell you how to get to the lunar north pole. It's far from enough to drive a deal of this magnitude.

I'm not the NASA administrator now. What do I get in return for helping you with this big project?
Jonathan said, "Non-discriminatory access to the supply chain."

For general aerospace, we will persuade the White House to open its procurement list to Chinese suppliers for all the non-strategic general industrial components it needs, from specialty bearings to high-end sensors.

You will become an indispensable part of this new behemoth's supply chain.

Lin Ran shook his head: "First of all, the probability of you being able to persuade Congress to abolish the Wolf Clause is very low. Secondly, this is not a preferential condition. It is that you need China's manufactured goods, not that China needs your market, especially in the field of aerospace."

Jonathan quickly replied, "Professor, you're absolutely right. Yes, we cannot abolish the Wolf Clause."

But you seem to have forgotten that General Aerospace is a private company, not NASA.

If the Wolf Clause is valid, why would General Aerospace possibly purchase F-2 engines from you?

We will find a hundred ways to place orders with China under the guise of commercial procurement through our subsidiaries in Singapore or Switzerland.

These orders will fully comply with local laws and international trade rules.

The Wolf Amendment restricts NASA, a federal agency, but it cannot prevent a private company from purchasing the world’s best, non-strategic industrial components.

This is a legal loophole, and also a characteristic of America.

Lin Ran asked, "How is what you're doing different from NASA's past practices? They import complete vehicles from China, while you import parts from China and then assemble them yourself?"

Jonathan explained, “Professor, we never thought we could keep it a secret forever. It was only because the great president wanted to bring manufacturing back to America that we had the perfect reason to do so.”

These officials from Washington, they'll use every good adjective imaginable to describe T.

Jonathan wasn't even an official yet, and he'd already been infected.

He continued, "What does bringing manufacturing back to America mean? It means we don't have manufacturing now. If we don't have manufacturing, then we can only buy it. China is the only country with a base on the moon, and your manufacturing industry has been tested in the harsh lunar environment."

This is the best reason why we don't buy products from traditional allies like Germany and Japan. At the hearing, we only need to ask: Have their products been verified?
This allows you to perfectly avoid all attacks.

Mr. Elon even intends to reveal all this himself; he will disclose how many of our components currently come from China.

Lin Ran added, "What percentage is published every year, how much has America's production percentage increased, as part of his performance under NASA's leadership, right?"

Jonathan wasn't embarrassed at all: "But, Professor, Chinese companies will gain a lot of orders and profits in this process. NASA controls a trillion-dollar lunar fund."

It can also bring vitality and momentum to China's aerospace industry.

Lin Ran shook his head: "Not enough, this is far from enough. The development of China's aerospace industry has little to do with me."

Jonathan went on to say, “Ansys, Dassault Systems, Synopsys, and Cadence—the latest versions of all these software are on our Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security’s most stringent export list.”

Each upgrade authorization requires a lengthy review process.

In return, Mr. Musk will use all his political influence to ensure that any application from Chinese supply chain companies providing services to the General Aerospace civilian project will receive expedited export licenses for these cutting-edge industrial software programs.

Lin Ran laughed: "Jonathan, it seems you still have some misconceptions. These are certainly important, but the current China does not want you to open up the export market."

Even in industrial design software and simulation software, we must support Chinese companies; we cannot rely on the software ecosystem of the European and American camp.

In my opinion, it is not a benefit at all, but rather a poison, a slow poison.

So let me tell you, the only reason I'm pushing this for you is this: I want America to become a real rival, instead of NASA, which is just all talk and no action, and is actually in a state of decline and internal stagnation.

To be honest, I'm very disappointed with NASA now.

That wasn't a great organization that once sent humans to the moon; it was a zombie that had lost its soul.

Playing chess with a zombie is very boring.

Musk's purge and his crazy yet efficient new system have given us, for the first time, a glimpse of a rival whose fighting spirit has been rekindled.

This is good.

Don't worry, I will communicate with the Morgans.

Lin Ran waved his hand, thinking to himself that this was the last thing he could do for NASA.

Jonathan stood up and saluted before leaving as a sign of respect.

He wondered if NASA would have ended up in this situation if it hadn't lost a rival like the Soviet space agency.
I doubt they could ever have fallen this low, could they?

Jonathan recalled his former direct superiors at Aerospace Corporation, the two generations of Roberts, father and son, vice presidents who had no faith whatsoever and were only interested in how to make money.

He clearly remembered that Robert was not like this when he first joined the company. Back then, everyone was focused on restarting the Apollo moon landing and, after restarting, on building a base on the moon. When did Robert begin to change? Jonathan recalled that it seemed to have started in 1991.

Jonathan looked back at the tightly closed door, and he could vaguely see the flames of idealism burning brightly. Could we really win this time? Jonathan had come full of confidence, but after arriving, he felt that there was no chance of winning.

The reason Lin Ran agreed was simply because, driven by enormous profits, the old NASA, represented by General Aerospace, and the new NASA, represented by Musk, would eventually come together.

He was just going with the flow, doing a favor with a single sentence.

This is determined by enormous interests. Musk dares to kick out the NASA system, but he cannot and has no way to offend the military-industrial complex and the congressmen behind it.

If Musk dares to bypass the proper procedures and announce the termination of a Lockheed Martin contract for a space station module that is severely behind schedule, more than a dozen senators and representatives from Alabama, Florida, and Colorado will immediately hold a joint press conference to strongly condemn the new NASA administrator's reckless behavior, saying it will lead to the loss of thousands of high-tech jobs and threatening to conduct the most rigorous review of NASA's next year's total budget.

If Musk continues down this path, the pressure will quickly reach the White House, and the president will have to come out and call a halt.

If he persists, a gunman might suddenly appear out of nowhere and send him to meet his maker.

Musk will inevitably be dragged into the quagmire of Washington.

He has only temporarily left the swamp, but he will eventually have to negotiate and cooperate with it.

No matter how much you want to work, you still have to fill the stomachs of the swamp creatures.

This is not as simple as the original timeline, where the annual budget was only two or three hundred billion dollars. NASA's annual budget has increased to $500 billion, and there is also the trillion-dollar lunar fund left by the former president.

Such a huge pie cannot be eaten by Musk alone.

Musk has to reach a compromise with old money like Morgan.

The compromises here include dividing the pie, as well as deciding which Smiths in the entire NASA system should be eliminated, that not all Smiths deserve a share of the money, that not all Smiths can be removed, and how NASA's suppliers can improve their efficiency and shift from simply receiving money without doing any work to receiving money for doing work.

So Musk's exposé of the lunar rover scandal and the live-streamed meeting were just the beginning; the real drama was yet to come.

As for why Lin Ran was chosen, the president could have personally intervened, but Lin Ran had an additional advantage: he could use the production capacity of Industrial Cthulhu to guarantee that their reforms would yield results and could be continuously promoted, something the president couldn't do.

Whether Lin Ran would agree or not, Musk didn't know. He could calculate all the other steps, but for this one, he relied purely on his intuition, and it turned out that his intuition was correct.

"We've put in so much effort and finally gained a window of opportunity for them in the space field."

Why should we turn around and help an opponent we've beaten senseless, consolidate his strength, and allow him to rise again and become an even more powerful enemy?

"You're right."

If we look at it from a purely zero-sum game perspective, it does indeed seem like we are funding our opponent.

However, we are facing a situation more complex than a zero-sum game. The ultimate goal of our current strategy towards America is not to defeat America, but to surpass her.

To overthrow a chaotic, declining empire that possesses six thousand nuclear warheads would be an unbearable catastrophe for ourselves and for the entire world.

What we need to do is build a system that is more efficient, more advanced, and more attractive, so that it will naturally relinquish its top position in the course of history.

What we want is a peaceful and civilized transfer of power.

To achieve this goal, we must avoid engaging in a heated battle with a cornered, hysterical America halfway through, especially before we have fully mastered our own inner strength.

What is the current situation in America? It is a country gripped by strategic panic due to our technological breakthrough.

This panic is giving rise to an extremely dangerous irrational emotion.

Their military-industrial complex and conservative lawmakers are loudly proclaiming our threat and are even discussing whether to launch a preventative strike against us while we are still developing.

And what do Musk and Morgan represent?
They are the purest and most rational embodiment of American capitalism.

They may be arrogant, they may be greedy, but they are definitely not stupid.

They believe in commercial competition and technological superiority, not suicidal military adventures.

So, by helping them integrate America's domestic aerospace industry, we are, on the surface, making our rival stronger.

But in reality, we are helping the rational people in America to defeat the fanatics who are being blinded by panic and hatred.

It is far safer for us to hand over a strong, unified new NASA to Musk and Morgan, two businessmen, than to let an out-of-control old NASA, hijacked by the military-industrial complex, continue to stir up trouble on Capitol Hill.

This will at least buy us another five to ten years of strategic development.

More importantly, we didn't give anything in return.

Musk and Morgan would naturally come together. Our aerospace-related companies, which were also meant to develop, could unexpectedly get a slice of the trillion-dollar pie. What we helped them land was the lunar north pole, which is an obligation that must be fulfilled in the deal.

So they got something for nothing, and so did we.

All we need is time, and that's all we're lacking.

Just as Musk promised, he made NASA transparent.

In late October, he fulfilled his promise made during his live stream on the X platform.

NASA's official website has undergone a complete redesign, with the homepage now serving as a 24/7 live streaming platform called "NASA LIVE".

Here, you can see live construction footage of Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, the assembly of robotic rover prototypes in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and of course, the most eye-catching and terrifying of all: the weekly engineering review meetings of the Artemis Acceleration Council.

Initially, the entire United States and even the world cheered for this unprecedented level of transparency.

Although Apollo Technology is currently the world's leading space agency, it is not open source. Musk, on the other hand, has made NASA even more open source.

So much so that Simplified Chinese netizens are saying that it's a good thing Apollo Technology built a base on the moon first, otherwise they would have seen on social media that Ma Shengyi's open source project was being launched and that Chinese rockets were being sent to the moon one after another.

For the first time, the people of America felt that this mysterious institution, which had cost them countless taxes, had finally opened its doors to them.

But soon most of America's people stopped liking to watch it.

Because this isn't a heartwarming science documentary; it's a workplace horror game.

Musk is always ready to utter his famous quote: "You're fired!"

Who wants to come home from get off work and have to experience Musk's gloomy atmosphere?

Take the most recent Wednesday progress meeting livestream as an example.

The live stream feed was static, an unedited wide-angle lens pointed at an ordinary conference room.

Musk sat at the head of the long table, surrounded by longtime NASA employees.

“Next topic,” Musk said, quickly swiping the tablet in front of him, “the heat-resistant tiles for the lunar version of Starship.”

We need to complete the first high-altitude reentry test of the prototype tile in the first quarter of next year.

Steven—no, I'm sorry, Dr. Steven is no longer here.

So, Dr. Williams, you are now the acting head of the Materials Science Department.

Tell me how it goes.

The camera then turned to a Black woman named Elsa Williams.

She is a senior scientist who has worked at NASA for over two decades and made outstanding contributions to the Space Shuttle thermal insulation project.

“Mr. Director,” Dr. Williams replied, “based on our assessment last week, the new carbon-carbon composite prototype performed stably in wind tunnel testing at a simulated 1100 degrees Celsius.”

However, to proceed with flight testing, according to the NESC-STD-2023 safety protocol, we also need to conduct at least six months of ground fatigue testing on the propagation of microcracks under multiple thermal cycles.”

Musk impatiently interrupted her: “I’m not asking you about the agreement. Agreements are written by bureaucrats to absolve themselves of responsibility. I’m asking about physics.” His speech quickened, and questions rained down.

"What is the theoretical thermodynamic limit of this new material? What is its specific heat capacity? What is its coefficient of thermal expansion? What is its brittle fracture threshold at a temperature of -170 degrees Celsius on a lunar night? Have you built a mathematical model? How many simulations have you run? Where is the data?"

Dr. Williams had seen many of her colleagues struggle with such questioning, but when it was her turn, she was clearly caught off guard by this disruptive, technically-driven approach.

Having spent a full twenty years in the NASA system, she was already used to the thorough preparation and hierarchical reporting model.

"Director, I need to check these specific data with my team."

They were scattered across different testing groups.

According to procedure, we will compile all the data into a complete report at the end of the quarter and submit it to [the relevant authority/organization].

"So you don't know now?" Musk interrupted her.

"I cannot immediately give a number accurate to three decimal places," Dr. Williams tried to explain.

“I don’t need a decimal point, I need an order of magnitude, an order of magnitude that should be etched in your head as a department head.” Musk looked at her quietly and remained silent for five seconds.

Then he turned to his assistant, Evelyn Reed, who was sitting next to him.

“Evelyn,” he said, “find me one person by five o’clock this afternoon who can answer all the questions I just asked. Just one.”

He then turned his gaze to Dr. Williams and uttered the words that had struck fear into the hearts of the entire NASA over the past two months: "Dr. Williams, thank you for your service to this country over the past twenty years. Your service has come to an end. The Human Resources Department will contact you regarding follow-up matters. Meeting adjourned."

After saying that, he closed his laptop, stood up, and left the conference room.

The live stream came to an abrupt end at that moment.

This is neither the first nor the last time.

In the short 60 days since Musk launched NASA's live-streaming era, a total of 37 mid-to-senior level managers and senior experts at NASA have been fired on the spot in these public or semi-public settings.

Data compiled by a New York Times reporter reveals a trend that angers Donald Party supporters: of the 37 people fired, 28 were women, minorities, or openly LGBTQ+ members.

The proportion of Black female scientists is disproportionately high.

More than 80% of those promoted to fill these vacancies are young white or Asian male engineers from private aerospace companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Orbital Rocket.

NASA's live stream was less a live conference broadcast and more a live layoff broadcast, quickly triggering a violent rift in American society.

Liberal media and progressive groups angrily accused Musk of turning NASA into a Silicon Valley garage filled with a toxic fraternity culture.

Silicon Valley garages are full of white men, all like brothers, frequenting all sorts of glamorous and decadent places.

They believe that Musk's so-called first principles and results-oriented approach is nothing more than an excuse to destroy NASA's decades-long efforts to build diversity and inclusion policies.

They believe that Musk is using efficiency as a pretext for discrimination.

Conservative media and supporters hailed Musk as a hero who "fights against political correctness and reinvents the spirit of America."

A Fox News commentator passionately defended the move: "Musk doesn't care about your skin color, gender, or who you love! He only cares about one thing: whether you can build the best rockets as quickly as possible to defeat our enemies! Those who were fired weren't fired because of their identities, but because of their incompetence! They just hid behind thick procedural manuals and the umbrella of diversity, wasting taxpayers' money!"

The president is Musk's biggest supporter, and he thinks Musk's actions are simply fantastic.

In this timeline without DOGE, Musk is busy at NASA helping the president build the T-shaped lunar base, and he's also taking action against diversity and the Washington Swamp. Both his actions and the targets he targets have greatly pleased the president, which is a major reason why he has been able to succeed so successfully.

To elaborate further, most NASA employees are federal civil servants, who are protected by extremely stringent laws such as the Civil Service Reform Act.

Dismissing a federal employee involves a lengthy and complex legal process, including performance reviews, written warnings, and appeal hearings.

Firing someone on the spot during a live broadcast is an absolute and complete violation of the law.

The next day, NASA's unions could directly sue Musk in court and would almost certainly win.

Therefore, when Musk said during his live stream that someone had been fired, it could only apply to employees in senior positions, because most senior positions at NASA require high-level security clearances.

The granting and revocation of security clearances are the absolute powers of the executive branch of the president, and Congress and the courts have little power to intervene.

Musk can submit a report to the White House claiming that a certain manager is no longer suitable for the position.

The White House can then legally suspend or revoke the security clearance of this official.

Once security clearance is lost, the supervisor is unable to access any classified projects and is legally disqualified from continuing in their original position.

At this point, it would be logical to transfer him to a sinecure such as an advisor.

By then, will it still matter whether the other party is at NASA or not?

Both Musk and the president are masters at circumventing rules and regulations.

In this environment, many long-term employees who could not adapt to the high-pressure culture, especially women and ethnic minorities, began to quietly submit their resumes to universities, research institutions, and even the European Space Agency.

This also indirectly improves the problems existing within NASA.

Lin Ran, who was thousands of miles away, found it very interesting when he saw it on the news: Could this be considered that I indirectly accomplished something that I originally wanted to do in this time and space but was unable to do?

(End of this chapter)