According to this cool article.
It is all very exciting… and long overdue. The Gen X-ers seem especially excited, as well they should be. Not only were they born too late to see the last moon landing, but at last, they may have found the great generational quest they've been longing and training (think computer games, robotic competitions, Star Wars/Trek, extreme sports, etc.) for their entire lives.
Some, like Elon Musk, couldn't wait for NASA. He took the millions he made founding PayPal and started Space Explorations Technology, the celebrated new rocket launch company. As it happens, Elon and I made a small side bet a couple years ago after he predicted to me that he would put a man on Mars within 15 years. It is a bet I sincerely hope to lose.
But the enthusiasm of Gen X-ers for space exploration should also be a warning. The more you ponder NASA's new plan the more you realize that it is fundamentally flawed. While the NASA lunar exploration plan is up-to-date on all of the new technologies invented over the last 50 years, philosophically and organizationally it is still trapped in the big business/big government paradigm of the '50s.
Like many established bureaucracies, NASA has largely failed to account for the generational — and attendant cultural — shift that has taken place outside of its walls. After my father retired from the Air Force, he went to work for NASA, and thus I spent a lot of the '60s hanging out (and eventually interning) at NASA's Ames Research Center. Looking at the old photos and memorabilia from that era, I am reminded that it was another country. NASA was the glorious culmination of an organizational culture that had its birth in the late 1930s at places like General Motors, was literally battle tested in World War II, and perfected in the corporate America of the 1950s.
The space program was the culmination of that culture, manned by the ex-GIs of the so-called "Greatest Generation" and led by the middle-aged men of the previous, arguably even greater, generation — those men and women born in the late 19th century, who came of age in the '20s. This group, the most extraordinary of any in American history, save the founders, included the likes of Eisenhower, Marshall, Dulles, Watson and Sloan.
It experienced more change than any generation that has ever lived. (My grandmother, who spent her infancy in a dugout cave on the Cherokee Strip, lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon). And they knew how to build and manage huge, bureaucratic organizations. They also had millions of WWII vets, with their unique combination of discipline, duty and independent thinking, to fill those organizations. Between them, they created the wealthiest society in history, defeated totalitarianism and reached the moon. It is a legacy that will resound through history.
Damn it, let's go, let's go...
Imbecilic Denial
Also known as 'Intelligent Design' *gag* faces its first court-trial.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania will hear arguments Monday in a lawsuit that both sides say could set the fundamental ground rules for how American students are taught the origins of life for years to come.
At issue is an alternative to the standard theory of evolution called “intelligent design.” Proponents argue that the structure of life on Earth is too complex to have evolved through natural selection, challenging a core principle of the biological theory launched by Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in 1859. Instead, contend adherents of intelligent design, life is probably the result of intervention by an intelligent agent.
Argh. There is no end to these monkey trials.
No comments:
Post a Comment