What is it about this guy that allows him to make such claims and not be laughed out of the room? It's an amazing an useful talent that, oddly, I first witnessed as a young engineer on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope project.
The head of the servicing missions was a boisterous, outrageous, personality (some told me it was what held him from higher positions within NASA). He was the kind of guy who brought in a sales guy for a rapid prototyping machine (a 3D printer starting at $1 million), walked in half way through the presentation, and then promptly kicked the salesman out for not having a $200k offering.
He was also the kind of guy who demanded composite structures yielding 10X the mechanical properties of the current state of the art materials. But with no research projects, development, or anything even close to it. Just "get it done".
Of course, we didn't get it done (because it was impossible), but what we did get done was a major leap forward. We used materials without, gasp, flight heritage. We used the absolute state of the art in some cases. We got it done, it's just that it wasn't what was asked for, at least not directly.
This smells of the same thing. But don't underestimate the shear force of personality it takes to make such outrageous claims, and still have people follow you to something remarkable, yet more realistic.
The head of the servicing missions was a boisterous, outrageous, personality (some told me it was what held him from higher positions within NASA). He was the kind of guy who brought in a sales guy for a rapid prototyping machine (a 3D printer starting at $1 million), walked in half way through the presentation, and then promptly kicked the salesman out for not having a $200k offering.
He was also the kind of guy who demanded composite structures yielding 10X the mechanical properties of the current state of the art materials. But with no research projects, development, or anything even close to it. Just "get it done".
Of course, we didn't get it done (because it was impossible), but what we did get done was a major leap forward. We used materials without, gasp, flight heritage. We used the absolute state of the art in some cases. We got it done, it's just that it wasn't what was asked for, at least not directly.
This smells of the same thing. But don't underestimate the shear force of personality it takes to make such outrageous claims, and still have people follow you to something remarkable, yet more realistic.