Artemis Thinking in your Corporate IT Projects.
The biggest cliché in the business world happens daily. A conference room filled with engineers and businesspeople is arguing about an issue when someone says, "Why are we fighting. This can't be hard because it is not rocket science." After that, the argument quiets down, and people realize they are building a business instead of going to the moon. This week, the United States is going to the moon with the Artemis II launch. Today, I want to discuss the massive feat of project management, the return trip, and how it borrows ideas from Agile.
The most important word in software and startup culture is pivot. When your product does not meet market needs or the technology cannot measure up, you pivot to try something else. There is no shame in pivoting. In fact, it takes significant intellectual humility to realize that something is not working. The American economy's ability to pivot is one of its greatest strengths.
We can see how a pivot works when President Nixon slashed NASA's budget, effectively canceling the last three moon landings. It could have been the end, but the folks at Cape Kennedy decided to build the first space stations with the remaining rockets, and we had the Skylab project and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
While human spaceflight was put on hold robotic mission took priority. The Viking landers were the first successful missions to Mars, and Voyager gave us our first real pictures of the Outer planets. Finally, NASA began testing the space shuttle program. It was around this time that NASA learned to deal with the capricious nature of government funding. According to Eugene Krantz in his book "Tough and Competent," shuttle design meetings were always in flux because budget priorities were never fixed. They also struggled with elected officials who often questioned the value of the space program. Anyone who has worked in corporate IT has endured similar experiences.
The shuttle program looked routine until the Columbia mission and the Challenger accident made it clear that space travel was never going to look like a visit to the airport. As the shuttle program faded away, we created the International Space Station and advanced Robotic missions to Mars with rovers. We even probed the deepest regions of the solar system with the New Horizons probe, which returned the first images of the dwarf planet Pluto. At every step, NASA was learning how to send robots and humans farther and for longer.
The Artemis program was born during the Trump administration, when the president authorized the end of the shuttle program. It had two goals. The first was to improve human space flight and make it cheaper. The second was to establish public-private partnerships with the growing commercial space industry. NASA was instructed in a 2017 memo to put people on the moon. Five years later, Artemis I orbited the moon with a robotic dummy to test the systems. It also identified numerous flaws that needed to be fixed before humans could board the Orion capsule. The moon landing program combined space exploration and commercial mining.
It is easy to write a memo, but it is harder to put that vision into practice. NASA began with a clean sheet of paper and drew on elements from the shuttle program and the solid rocket boosters, combining them with impressive upgrades to the Saturn V rocket. Mindful of the failures of the Shuttle program, safety was placed front and center in the construction and launch preparations. Artemis was a different type of space program because it adopted an open-source ethos, sharing technical specifications with companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. Artemis also expanded the community of space-faring nations, with 72 countries joining the Artemis Accords, providing technology and scientists for the program. Soon, we will have a Kenyan astronaut thanks to Artemis.
It is not all sunshine and unicorns for Artemis. The email client on the Orion spacecraft is not working, and the plumbing will need to be improved for the next missions. I am also skeptical that SpaceX will be as interested in safety as NASA. Finally, the competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin might look like a gigantic ego stroke for the billionaires who want their hardware landed on the moon.
The benefits of the Artemis program look promising. It could be an opportunity to establish a permanent settlement on the moon if we can find water ice. The real gold rush would be finding rare Earth elements on the moon. It would provide an alternative source and be a potentially unlimited supply for the global tech industry. It is a more sustainable, sober, and long-term approach to space exploration, and I am happy to see it in my lifetime. Author Robert A. Heinlein wrote a book entitled "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." The amount of money, prestige, and scientific knowledge gained by returning to the moon makes it a worthy mistress to chase. It is nice to see Artemis leading the effort.
Until next time.
Follow
Comments ()