When we see newspaper or industry newsletter reports about a Federal contract in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) airship which somehow never gets finished, it really starts the rusty neurons of my financial brain (not really well-oiled to begin with ) wondering .
What did they spend the money on ?
We heard of one instance where, after they ran out of money, one firm had nothing to show for it but an enormous hangar , which someone should name Moby Dick, after the great White Whale of Herman Melville's novel, which must have downed millions of tons of krill (look that up in your Funk & Wagnall's or OED) during its lifetime. We understand that they had trouble disposing of that huge, almost-useless structure, because the only purpose it could serve was as ... the hangar for a gigantic airship that did not exist.
It reminds us of the stories we had heard of high technology start-up firms during the great dot-com bubble. The youngsters who ran them ("beardless striplings", one would have called them in the Age of Chivalry, sadly long gone) received millions of dollars in investment funding from hopeful Venture Capitalists. When the inevitable lawyers tried to clean up the inevitable mess of the inevitable bankruptcy proceedings, they found that the hopeful corporate officers had squandered the money they had raised on top-of-the-line designer furniture, leases of entire floors of luxury Class A real estate now lying unused and empty, Lamborghinis, and world travel by First Class Air .
Really, folks, where did the money go ?
We picture the early Henry Ford OR the early Wright Brothers, scraping along in their garages and their bicycle shops, actually building something .. something that actually moved or flew ! It may not have been perfect, it may have had many problems and faults, but the world had a new, innovative product that one could see, and that was available for inspection and improvemnt by the inventors themselves or other manufacturers and experimenters.
There exist several classes of LTA-inventor-builders, as we see it. Among them are the Good Guys like hard-working Daniel Geery in the U.S.A. and the owner of Mini-Zepp, in Switzerland, who actually have produced constructs that exist, that fly, that they can demonstrate, and that they built with a minimum of funding and a maximum of sweat equity (remember that wonderful descriptive term?) . Mini-Zepp has actually sold their real-world products to such tough, demanding no-nonsense buyers as Cambridge University, in the UK, and the Israeli security forces... and they've accomplished this with a minimum of waste and a maximum of good design and real-world product. Ask them what they have accomplished and they can show you !
... and then there are the Mega-LTA design-and-build folks, who receive obscene amounts from various government sources and produce ... Tah-Dah! ... Vaporware.
We do understand that some of this non-productive spending and effort has been the result of Mission Creep and unrealistic specifications (... 'Well, as long as you're doing that, why don't we add on the ability to reach the Planet Saturn ? ) or initial too-hopeful, too-stringent, or politically-correct conditions and requirements imposed by an unrealistic Pentagon or Congress.
Still, how could they run out of money ??? We may never know; certainly there are some of us finance-challenged market-watchers who stare in stunned amazement at the hundreds of millions that are consumed, as if by a dollar- and pound-sterling-munching monster .
Where did the money go ?
