The Hugo Awards were last weekend. It’s the annual award show for science fiction and fantasy creative works. The award show took place at DisCon III, a science fiction convention held in Washington, D.C. One of the sponsors for the event was Raytheon Intelligence & Space, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies located in Arlington, Virginia.
Evidently, this sponsorship irritated some people.
From Gizmodo:
Amongst the sci-fi author community, the backlash has been sharp. Most of the comments in the tweet above are pointing out the bleakness of war profiteers finding a way to profit off a celebration of the typically forward thinking speculative science fiction genre. Some have been quick to point out that it’s just one arm of the company that’s doing the sponsoring, but to many more, the fact that a company who specializes in missiles and drones has a space division in the first place is troubling all on its own.
I didn’t get the memo telling me to call defense contractors war profiteers. It sounds evil, foreboding, and highly biased.
I’m a science fiction fan who likes Raytheon.
I’m very familiar with Raytheon. In the Air Force, I worked on and maintained avionic electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment used on the old F-4E and F-4G Wild Weasel, and then on the B-52G.
I worked both on the flightline, directly on aircraft, and then in the shop on the electronic warfare line replaceable units (LRUs). Raytheon made some of the electronic warfare systems I worked on.
Believe it or not, we have a strong and capable military to act as a deterrent. You hope it’s never used. You prepare for war so you never have to go to war.
Don’t like war? Blame our elected leaders
It’s never the military that decides to go to war. That decision is always made by civilian leadership elected into office by the American voter. It’s funny that seemingly no one had a problem with the Hugo Awards being held in Washington, D.C. It’s our nation’s capital, and our elected leaders decide who our enemies are. They decide if and when to take military action against those enemies.
If you’ve got a problem with using military force against our enemies, blame our elected leaders in Washington, DC. Don’t blame our military or the corporations that manufacture the weapons our military needs.
Anyone who disagrees with Raytheon sponsoring the Hugo Awards should do the world a favor: delete their Twitter account and stop consuming science fiction content.
From its early days of manufacturing vacuum tubes to missiles, Raytheon is a pillar of American ingenuity. I, too, remember the days of maintaining ECM LRU’s. Unfortunately, Rick, the F-4G was a “funner” airframe than the B-52G. I never had the pleasure of working on the H model, but I was involved with OT&E for it when I was in the 513th Test Squadron.
I’ll never understand how you thought working on the F-4 was more fun than working on the B-52. When you were at Spangdahlem, you must have had a personal assistant that followed you around and did all the grunt work for you. Removing panels, reinstalling panels, etc.
I know you had more fun working on the B-52 because you got to do it with me. That automatically made it more fun!
Also, I hate to break it to you, but you did get to work on the H model. You don’t remember going out at zero dark thirty on the B-53H aircraft and swapping out our crappy ALT-32 cowling panels with their much nicer panels? It was some of my best work.
I enjoyed the grunt work on the F4-G, especially doing VSWR cable sweeps for the AN/APR-38 during phase maintenance. I always volunteered to crawl into the radome. To the best of my recollection, the 43d BW only had the G model before the inactivation, except for the D at the Arc Light Memorial. MSgt Leo Sarasol taught me that in flight line FTD.
The H models were only at Andersen for a day. They were heading somewhere else, and they stopped in Guam for a crew rest.
It must have been before your time.
I hated doing the VSWR tests because the cables were never bad. It was boring without the risk of the dreaded VSWR.
They had me doing VSWR tests on B-52s when I was sent back to Guam for DESERT SHIELD/STORM. I was the lone ECM puke in the phase depot for the B-52s in Diego Garcia. Guess what? I didn’t find any VSWR on the RF cables on the B-52 either. Maybe I just didn’t know how to properly use the VSWR test set.
My trainer at Spang was a fellow Clark AB alumni, Steve Heckman. He was a RHAW shop guru that blasted the Violent Femmes on the back shop stereo. Maybe that was the difference because we always found bad connections, or maybe we used the test set wrong and “red x’d” a lot of planes. I enjoyed anything that got me out of the frigid German weather and in the phase dock. The least favorite thing was uploading the missile well adapter for the ALQ-131 ECM pod. We always used the 3-man technique, kind of like loading the ALQ-155 “heavies.”
Thanks for sharing this! All the best!