I was listening to the radio late last week when NASA, the US Space agency, made a rather startling admission. One that is sure to provoke all of the old conspiracy theories of space flight. It seems that no one at NASA can find any of the original tapes of the first lunar landing - the one we'll celebrate this week. Instead, NASA asked CBS to find its tapes and is using a digital enhancement firm to improve the quality of the tapes. Why doesn't NASA have any original tapes?
Well, if we leave beside the concept that it was all staged in Arizona, the reason that NASA provided is that all of the tapes were erased and reused. There are two interesting concepts or thought patterns within that statement we need to dissect. First, is the concept of scarcity. Historically storage mediums were scarce and optimized or reused. Remember the Y2K issue, brought on because in the not too distant past we wanted to save two digits in computer memory? Erasing and reusing tapes suggests a similar approach.
Second, I suspect there was another reason. While it was the "first" moon landing and moon walk, the engineers at NASA probably assumed that we'd be on the moon so frequently that it would become old hat. Who would need a video of the moon landing when soon everyone would be traveling to the moon? In case you aren't aware, the US within the next few years will have no significant "lift" capacity and will need to either create a new rocket program or will be reduced to asking Russia, China or France for a lift into space.
Forty years ago it was assumed we'd always have difficulty storing and managing information, and it was a reasonable assumption we'd be going to the moon on a regular basis. Today, an average person generates as much information at work and at home in a week as the entire visit to the moon. We have the capacity to generate and store tremendous amounts of information, thanks to Moore's law and the increasing capacity of transistors and computer memory. Over the last 40 years the computing power and storage capacity has increased at an accelerating rate. Yet until the late nineties we coded with two digits for the year and erased the moon shot tapes. The future will be much like the present, only moreso.
Forty years ago there was excitement about the moon landing, but NASA was a powerful agency backed by a popular mandate from a tragic presidency. The US was in a race to demonstrate its technical and military dominance over a different way of life and government, the USSR. Those of you born after 1990 may need to look that up. We were exceptionally confident in our spaceflight abilities and placed many men on the moon, and many more astronauts into orbit on the space shuttle. In the seventies the moon gave way to regular spaceflight on the shuttle, which has gradually given way to virtually no flights or meaning whatsoever. NASA today is adrift with no clear purpose and no compelling mission that it had in the 60s, and many people argue that the funds necessary for the big vision belong elsewhere. In forty years we've moved from the predominant leader in space to a point where we're becoming a secondary participant, soon with little or no ability to even reach space.
Why do I focus on these two anecdotes? Because I think we in government, in life and in business fall into the same fallacies. We assume in our planning and in our daily lives that the future will look the same as the present, only it will be slightly nicer and shinier. We fail to understand the dramatic upheavals that economies, nature, governments and populations have in store for us. We too often rely on the past and the present to determine what the future holds, rather than think critically about what the future might be. In the sixties and seventies, no one thought data storage and memory management were viable - they were simply too expensive. Bill Gates is famously quoted as saying no one needed more than 1MB of memory in a personal computer. I have thumb drives with 1GB of memory on my keychain! In the same period it was expected that the US would always have a significant lead in space, now we are at risk of becoming a bit player.
Two implications are clear. Freed up to work competitively, we have the insight, engineering capability and market forces to create new products. Moore's law suggested that computing capabilities would double on a regular basis, but it took engineering, research and market demand to make that happen. However, it would not have been difficult to suggest in the seventies that we'd shortly have all the computing power, memory and storage that we needed. People didn't respect the ability of science fueled by the market. Second, without a compelling vision or goal, even very important organizations can lose focus and lose their way. NASA was once filled with the best and brightest, and they were driven by impossible tasks. Now, NASA is still filled with very bright people, but they have no overarching goal. What is the purpose of space flight today? To get to orbit? Private firms can do that. To go to the moon? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. To go to Mars or explore deeper space? Possibly, but no one seems to have the stomach or budget for that. Without a clear, compelling goal, even the best engineers seem a bit lost.
What's a person like us to do, running a business or managing a process every day? Attract the best and brightest, give them a difficult but compelling goal to get the most out of them, and constantly dissect future scenarios, never assuming the future is just like today.
The proper purpose of NASA for the foreseeable future is research, not travel, but this does not stir the political heart. The Mars Rovers are probably their strongest model politically, for once you see the rovers in action it is almost impossible to resist anthropomorphizing the Brave Little Robots. (NB: very few people get what they deserve.)
Posted by: menelin | October 30, 2009 at 06:38 AM