Legal considerations and cooperative opportunities for space commercial activities

It is a national policy to make the capabilities of the Space Transportation System available to a wide range of potential users. This includes its availability as a space manufacturing facility for commercial activities, which may be carried out on a reimbursable basis or as a joint endeavor with NASA, but with substantial private investment. In any high risk, long lead-time research and development activity directed towards commercialization, the protection afforded the results of the research and development under the laws relating to intellectual property rights may provide an important incentive for private investment. The policies and practices of NASA directed towards the protection of privately-established intellectual property rights involved in STS use are reviewed with particular emphasis on reimbursable launch agreements and joint endeavor agreements

A study of factors related to commercial space platform services

In the past four years, the issue of the commercial development of space has come to the forefront of the U. S. national space policy. Though the Administration, Congress and NASA have all shown strong support for encouraging the private sector to become more actively involved in the commercial utilization of space, the question remains whether they must do more to foster the creation and development of a viable U. S. commercial space industry. Marketing aspects, insurance and risk loss, tax related factors, space transportation, termination liability, institutional barriers, and procurement laws and regulations are discussed

Complexity Theory and Al-Qaeda: Examining Complex Leadership

Recent events in the world are forcing us to restructure our understanding of leadership and organization. The al- Qaeda organization and its pervasive presence in the world demonstrated first-hand the power of a flexible, moderately coupled network of individuals brought together by a common need and aligned behind an informal and emergent leader. Its structure, which resulted from bottom-up coordination of individuals who voluntarily came together based on common need rather than from top-down hierarchical control, clearly demonstrates the power of a networked system based on relationships and shared vision and mission. To understand this and other types of network organizations, traditional models of leadership and organizational theory may no longer be sufficient, and may perhaps even limit our ability to realize the capabilities and resilience of such organizational forms. To address such limitations, leadership theorists are exhibiting interest in new perspectives on organizing such as complexity theory (Boal et al., in press; Hunt & Ropo, in press; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; McKelvey, in press; Streatfield, 2001). Complexity theory proposes that organizations are complex systems composed of a diversity of agents who interact with and mutually affect one another, leading to spontaneous “bottom-up” emergence of novel behavior (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Regine & Lewin, 2000). Because of this, leadership in complex systems requires a shift in thinking from traditional “command-and-control” models that focus on control and stifle emergence (McKelvey, in press) to “complex leadership” models (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001) that enable interconnectivity and foster dynamic systems behavior and innovation. In this way, complexity theory helps explain organizational behavior relative to the “dynamic swirl” of social and organizational events that influence complex systems and their agents. The purpose of this article is to derive propositions regarding complexity and complex leadership (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001) and to illustrate them using the case of al-Qaeda. We will argue that the conditions that led to the emergence of al-Qaeda were conducive to complex leadership, and that complex leadership helps explain the success of this terrorist movement. Although detailed data of the sort needed for rigorous qualitative analysis are obviously unavailable, we believe that the al- Qaeda example is such a powerful illustration of complexity concepts that it merits a nontraditional format for presentation