Scanning the blogosphere and traditional media, I hear the sound of the blade being sharpened as we lead the usual suspects to the block; careerist bureaucrats, penny-pinchers in Congress, a public unwilling to bear the true cost of the space spectacle it seems to want.
Let me stake out a contrarian position.
First, I’m not a “Shit happens” kind of person. No one who has survived twenty years riding high-performance motorcycles without scars can be. My response to that is typically “Shit is what happens to people who say ‘Shit happens'”.
But we’re blaming participants – we’ll find some hapless administrator who OK’ed a new cost-saving procedure, or who ignored an engineer’s risk assessment, and hang the poor bastard – when we ought to blaming the system.
The reality is that a system like NASA’s is inevitably brittle. To expect that you can build an organization that employs tens of thousands of men and women and spends billions of dollars every year and expect it to be peopled and run by selfless, cooly rational altruists is to admit that you still believe in the Tooth Fairy.
While I’m sure the rose-colored rear view mirror suggests that NASA in the 60’s was such a place, I’m willing to bet that a view taken at that time would have disagreed. And, in truth, it was a smaller and simpler place, where people worked on larger, cruder systems.
The kind of bureaucratic boggling is inevitable in monolithic projects at the scale of the Shuttle program, and we should stop wasting our time making believe that the fault is with the individual flawed judgments we will doubtless find at the root of this tragedy, and recognize that we are dealing with “the warped wood of humanity”, and act accordingly.
I’m dealing with an infinitely simpler problem at a client’s where they have grown a bureaucratic, ineffective software development culture. My Sancho Panza – the young guy I’ve been given to work with – wants to burn it down and start over…to sweep it away in a revolution that will bring purity and clarity of purpose to the institution. I see myself twenty years ago in him, and I’ve seen enough failure…both of selling revolution, and of the revolutions themselves when I’ve won…that I’m looking for a different path.
We can sacrifice a few goats and keep going as we are, or we can sweep the buildings clean and repopulate the corridors of power with people who will, in short order, start acting like the people there today. Or we can do something truly revolutionary, and accept our limitations and find ways to meet our dreams while working within them.
Sounds like an interesting topic to work with for a while.
I dunno man.
A lot of management theory suggests that organizations are very different when they’re young, hungry, and focused than when they’re in place and well-established.
NASA was once a big bureaucracy, but all tightly focused on one specific mission (first get into space, then get into orbit, then get to the moon). Now we have a diffuse set of goals and a much larger bureaucracy.
NASA itself will never go away. It can’t. It’s a government bureaucracy, and they never die. However, we should start experimenting with NASA greenhouses or something, new projects that are completely outside the current system.
Sort of like IBM did when they invented the PC. Or Apple when they invented the Mac. Or the Skunkworks. Or…
But this whole question is a political issue. If you asked NASA what it’s job is, depending on if you got somebody at NASA/Ames, Goddard SFC, NASA/JPL, or the Kennedy Launch Center, you’d get 12 different answers. Some of which would probably surprize you with their novelty. If you asked a group of Americans what NASA’s purpose is, you’d get another set of answers, half of which were not in the first list. What the big difference between 2003 and 1963 is not that we lose astronauts now, as we were burning up Mercury and Apollo guys on the pad and nearly lost that Apollo flight that became the movie subject. The difference is that today we and NASA would have difficulty in saying precisely why did 6 Americans and an Israeli burn up over Texas.
>NASA itself will never go away. It can’t. It’s a
>government bureaucracy, and they never die.
Ever hear of the Horse cavalry?
The Coast Defense Artillery?
Strategic Air Command?
The Civil Aeronautics Board?
All of these were Federal government bureaucracies that were stood down or replaced by other bureacracies that did the same role.
It is the unique American trait that we destroy redundant government bureacracies.
The usual method is to create a new, hungry, bureaucracy to do the role that the first bureaucracy refuses to do. Over time the new bureaucracy grows at the expense of the old one and eventually absorbs it.
Other times we simply abolish the function entirely. This is the case when regulatory agencies are stood down after deregulation. This happened with Aviation and Trucking.
Hmmm…
I’m going to be seeing some JPL friends today; one of the questions I was going to ask was the overall size of the Shuttle program staff; even if you created a single-purpose agency around something like the Shuttle would it be huge?
I’m guessing so. And organizations behave differently when there is a ‘finish line’, like landing on the Moon, and when they are simply executing a process…painting the Golden Gate Bridge…that will go on forever.
A.L.
You are all fixated on the idea that space can nnly be done by the GOVERNMENT. Tinkering with bureaucracies is not the answer.
I blogged an alternative here
John, I’m with you. Look what happened with information technology. The more sophisticated, the cheaper. Then everybody and his brother got involved. Space exploration will follow the same path. The further into the future we go, the more sophisticated and cheaper it will get. At some point the pirates will get involved and then there will be no keeping folks out of space. We’ll probably be at the edge of the universe in four or five generations.
John –
I’m not fixating on the idea that it has to be done by government at all. In fact, your blogged example of the use of airmail as the lever to create the modern airline/aircraft industry is an excellent one. There are issues…there are always issues…but it’s certainly one direction we could go in…
A.L.
Actually I wasn’t referring to your post, A.L.; I was just joining the conversation in the comments department.
Sloppy of me. I think I’m more upset about this than I realize.
Jon, I don’t see the link. All you have to do is type the URL (no tags!) and it will go live – simplifies life for commenters.
Could you perhaps repost that URL of yours?
Here’s the link to the post:
http://jottings.blogspot.com/2003_01_26_jottings_archive.html#90264996
Or go to Random Jottings: http://jottings.blogspot.com/
and scroll down to Feb. 1.
Thanks.
John,
That’s a very interesting history of aviation in our country, but I’m not sure how well it applies to Space Exploration as an analogy. You say that the government recognized aviaton as a value both militarily and economically, and so they deployed programs to encourage development. What is the economic, military benefit of space exploration? Or more specifically, how would a company make money by going to space other than through the government incentives?
Why would people pay for some sort of access to or use of a shuttle? The main benefit seems to be science, but the price seems way too high for academics, filmakers or magazines.
Your thoughts?
P.S. Nice blog.
I’m not sure what a Sancho Panza is, but I do know a Sancho is the guy doing you wife.
Better keep you eye on him.
🙂
LOL…while I’m out tilting at windmills, I will…
c’mon dude(s) … i need your help … i’m doing research about space exploration …
what is(are) the benefit(s)of space exploration ??
answer me as soon as possible (if u could , give the url or where did u get the information)
thanks so much …
=)