Adults Have Choices

SPACEDAILY

Adults Have Choices

Herndon - January 28, 2000 -
It's in college that we first confront the tyranny of independence. We can and do stay up all night, so we look and feel awful. We can eat whatever we want, gain weight and learn the poor eating habits that we spend the rest of our lives trying (usually unsuccessfully) to suppress. We dress like homeless people if we want.

Such living to excess did not appeal to me -- I like to sleep, to eat right, to dress in clean clothes -- so I figured college life held no special release for me. But there's another side to free will. Some people who lived to excess, never studied and pushed all the boundaries do end up with the lives we'd expect -- less comfortable ones.

But some of them end up writing books about their experiences, or somehow get a great idea and get rich off it, and live better than us disciplined engineers. And some of us disciplined engineers die of diseases or in accidents not of our own making.

Some of them end up locked into marriage and family situations that make their lives very uncomfortable, or in well-paying but boring jobs. In the world of choice, there may be better and worse choices, but few "right" or "wrong" ones.

Can we look at the failure of the two latest Mars missions and condemn the choices that their planners made? Absolutely! And can we be exonerated by abandoning NASA's "Better-Faster-Cheaper" and going home to the straitjacket of rigid adherence to military and NASA specs? For a while. But when we get there, it's not going to be home anymore.

Here's a few reasons why:

It's not the '60s, and the American public is not willing to give NASA more money than we give the National Institutes of Health to cure cancer and transplant organs, just to go look for Mars rocks. If a Mars mission goes back to costing $2 billion, there will either be none of them, or so few that real science becomes virtually impossible to pursue.

Other countries and renegade companies will not make those same parochial choices, and -- unconstrained by them -- will outperform us.

And when reliance on our old rules fails us -- as we have now forgotten that it so often did -- what will we tell ourselves should be the remedy?

After we get over the shock of leaving Cleveland, Eden, or Military/NASA Specdom, it seems natural to go on a spree. But most societies and most people ultimately recoil from this, and go back to making responsible choices, and realizing that good and bad outcomes are not guaranteed, but are just made more likely through exercise of judgment.

NASA under "Better-Faster-Cheaper" has driven itself to excess -- not because it wanted to, but because of environmental pressures. Aerospace engineering's response to unremitting -- some might say inappropriate -- budget cuts was to leverage our choices by promising more and more with less and less.

This is the strategy of the farmer who sought to cut the cost of feeding his horse by feeding the animal a bit less each day. Costs went down and the plan appeared to be reaping great benefits -- until one unexpected consequence occurred: the horse died.

Congress, encouraged by our initial response to its budget cuts, reasoned that maybe a second budget cut would do even better, and that maybe raising the bar on what performance was necessary to retain our space budgets would do even better.

The short-term positive feedback that we provided kept that management style in place. But, more importantly, it induced us to do what aerospace engineers and managers do uniquely well: overpromise.

Engineers grow up believing that if they just work a bit harder, do a few more problem sets, forgo yet another beer and pizza bash in favor of the library and the lab, then they will reach goals otherwise unattainable.

They are both right and wrong -- such being the nature of a world of choice. Our society's expectations have grown right along with -- maybe even in excess of -- our actual achievements. And when a mission of vast complexity and unmitigated risk fails, the gap between our promise and our delivery is stunning.

Rick Fleeter, is President of AeroAstro Inc a Micro Satellite maker located in Herndon, Virginia.

Part Three Of A Fleeting World

DISASTER MANAGEMENT	CLIMATE SCIENCE
EARTH OBSERVATION	ENERGY TECH
EPIDEMICS	FLORA AND FAUNA
FROTH AND BUBBLE	ABOUT US