Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: employment

By Bill D’Zio March 24, 2020 (Originally posted on www.westeastspace.com)

WestEastSpace mapped out NASA locations on a map of COVID19 impacted areas of USA from www.usafacts.org as of March 23rd, 2020With the launch window for NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover opening in a little less than four months, there are nearly daily pre-launch milestones to complete the rover pre flight activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Tight schedules on complex missions usually do not mix well. Now NASA has to contend with another challenge. COVID19.

NASA Leadership Assessing Mission Impacts of Coronavirus

The world has come to a standstill and is in the grasps of the COVID-19. The world stock markets have come crashing down 30% as supply chains and companies attempt to deal with government response and public fear. Airlines and hotels have had to contend with decreased travel and lodging requirements. Logistics is impacted as factories in various countries deal with increased difficulty and requirements to obtain goods. Factories are closed leading to shortages for truckers, material movers, cargo agents, and other occupations directly involved in moving goods. Companies shift to working remotely in an attempt to comply with government guidance in attempts to minimize the impact of the virus. One Mars mission has already been sidelined because of COVID19. NASA also needs to contend with these challenges.

NASA has made several statements regarding the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Like many American companies, NASA leadership has stated employees will work from home.

“We are going to take care of our people. That’s our first priority,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

NASA has implemented what they call NASA Response Framework. The framework starts at Stage 1(least severe) and increases to Stage 4(most severe). Although most of the NASA remains under a Stage 3 status, with mandatory telework for all employees with limited exceptions for on-site work. Ames, Michoud, and Stennis are at Stage 4 with personnel on-site to protect life and critical infrastructure only. As a result, much of NASA is working from home. Contract employees in many cases will be also working from home when their activities are non-essential but are being coordinated with their contracting officer’s representative. NASA Facilities are closed, except to protect life and critical infrastructure.

“NASA leadership is determined to make the health and safety of its workforce its top priority as we navigate the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation. To that end, the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility and Stennis Space Center are moving to Stage 4 of the NASA Response Framework, effective Friday, March 20.

The closure of these facilities to has a major impact on NASA missions. NASA leadership is reviewing options to keep work underway across all missions, projects, and programs. NASA’s goal is to identify tasks into groups:

  1. Can be done remotely by employees at home
  2. Mission-essential work that must be performed on-site
  3. On-site work that will be paused

The agency has defined mission-essential work as that which must be performed to maintain critical mission operations to ensure the schedule of time-sensitive mission-critical launches, or work to protect life and critical infrastructure.What Kills Space Projects — a quick history review

With over fifty years of experience in space missions, NASA has seen what works and what doesn’t work. For example, there is a long list of missions to Mars that have failed completely or partially. Some missions have failed from what would seem like issues that could have been predicted or stopped easily. Usually, those types of failures are predictable and preventable.

The relationship between complexity, risk and cost for space missions has been well documented with the lessons learned from past spaceflight successes and failures. A good book that touches on these risks is Douglas Hubbard and his book The Failure of Risk Management. In the book covers an evaluation of the NASA risk framework was completed and showed some very interesting relationships.

Mars (1998) Polar Lander was planed to set down on the frigid terrain near the edge of Mars’ south polar cap and dig for water ice with a robotic arm. Piggybacking on the lander were two small probes called Deep Space 2 designed to impact the Martian surface to test new technologies. The Mars (1998) Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 were both lost at arrival December 3, 1999. CREDIT NASA

A plot of mission complexity against schedule distribution showed that all of the partial or complete failures occur in the bottom third of the distribution indicating a strong correlation. (a partial failure means that the mission was able to continue or complete some of the original objectives)

Establishment of a ‘‘no-fly zone’’ can be done defining criteria where based on the complexity of the project the sufficient time or money to develop a system was not allocated. In short, when NASA… (Click here to read full article)

At least five downtown Denver hotels have closed temporarily to stem the coronavirus spread, and the statewide industry is bracing for a hit that could lead to as many as 72,000 job losses in a sector that produces a $13.4 billion annual gross domestic product statewide.

While only a handful of mountain resorts had shut down by early this week, that number has ballooned in recent days as hotels across the metro region are reporting vacancy levels below 10% during a month many had predicted would be record-setting, Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association President/CEO Amie Mayhew said. Among those that have announced they will shutter until May 11 or 12 are the Grand Hyatt Denver, the Oxford Hotel, the Crawford Hotel and The Maven Hotel at Dairy Block.

All of those except for the Grand Hyatt are operated by Sage Hospitality Group of Denver, whose CEO, Walter Isenberg, issued a letter Thursday saying he’d made “the very difficult decision to temporarily suspend business operations at a portion of our hotels and restaurants in order to protect the health and safety of our guests, our associates and our communities.”

Read more | >

Ogba Educational Clinic

Theoretically, workers have been on the fast track to obsolescence since the Luddites took sledgehammers to industrial looms in the early 1800s.

In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent. Did those jobs disappear? Not exactly. The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now into the information economy.

Automation produces job substitution far more than it does job obliteration. And even when automation takes hold of a range of professional roles, this doesn’t always create the dire results we expect.

Read more | >

While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.

Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.

Lilac Nachum

Read more | >

#Israeli-made transportation app Moovit is continuing its global expansion and now provides its #urban mobility service in a total of 100 countries.

Moovit uses up to six billion anonymous data points daily, the company says, “to add to the world’s largest repository of transit and urban mobility data.” In addition to its popular app, the Ness Ziona-headquartered company also provides analytics platforms to cities, transit authorities and businesses, enabling optimized planning and operations for residents and employees.

“Urban mobility is the lifeline to jobs, healthcare, and education, so we are so proud that in just a few years Moovit is now providing service to millions of users in 100 countries, helping them get from A to B with confidence and convenience,” said Moovit co-founder and CEO Nir Erez.

“We have grown drastically, from offering a consumer app, to also now licensing a multitude of MaaS solutions to cities, governments, and transit agencies. We are also glad to see the likes of Uber, Microsoft, and Cubic choosing Moovit’s high-quality MaaS platform to power their mobility offering.

Moovit also announced the appointment of Uli Gal-Oz as the company’s new vice-president of business development. Gal-Oz, who most recently served as vice-president of business development at Magisto prior to its $200 million acquisition by Vimeo, will be tasked with overseeing Moovit’s initiatives with strategic partners and customers — including Uber, Microsoft and Cubic.

Read more | >

Robots are replacing human manufacturing workers in France, and making companies more productive in the process.

Daron Acemoglu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues analysed more than 55,000 French manufacturing firms, noting which ones bought robots between 2010 and 2015 and what impacts the purchases had.

Read more | >

Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.

But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).

Exceptionalism once stood for the idea that Americans served as an example of progressive values (democracy, justice and humanity), control over their destiny; could tame the environment, extract resources (oil, coal) without limit, and provide jobs for everyone through capitalism. For our successors, what they look like and what they believe in will go beyond change wrought by anything imaginable, today.

Read more | >