Private moon racers add prospecting to lunar goals

[Cross-posted from Kentucky Space and edited]

One of the competitors for the Google Lunar X-PRIZE (GLXP), Carnegie Mellon's Astrobotic, has added prospecting at the southern pole to its lunar goals. Another team, Moon Express, has made a similar announcement.

Astrobotic will fly aboard the private sector rocket Falcon 9 in 2015. Here's on board video from a 2010 launch of that rocket, which will soon resupply the International Space Station under commercial contract with NASA.

A total of $30 million in GLXP prize money is available to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video back to the Earth. To add to the "you are here" feel, cameras on the mast of the Astrobotic rover will shoot in 3-D.

Recent data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter strongly suggests the presence water ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. If confirmed by these privately-led moon teams, the find would offer refueling opportunities - the oxygen in the water ice can be used for rocket propellant - and an ideal jumping off point for future solar system exploration.

"Moonrush," posted here, describes Astrobotic's motivation: "We're not out to win the Google Lunar X-PRIZE. We're out to start a lunar commercialization company."

Wayne

What does doubt have to do with management?

Via Johnnie Moore, I like this quote from a blog "that draws on the natural and social sciences to enquire into stability and change in organisations."

I like it because it goes to an ability to live in the question long enough to draw meaningful conclusions, and is at odds, as the author points out, with a long standing preference for intellect over experience in philosophy. Not only might it prove useful to management, but a little less certainty - read: an appreciation for human limits - would be a welcome development in a talk-first culture that seems inured to boast and bombast.

Any creative act begins with uncertainty:

I have been arguing that the discomfort that people feel if something isn’t completely nailed down in advance often prevents them from dwelling long enough with experience to work experimentally. There is rush to define, to plan out in advance, to idealise and to make certain and this is likely to prevent innovative ways of working to which organisations aspire. I have been making an alternative argument that without improvisation, spontaneity and risk there can be no innovation.

[the philosopher John] Dewey was interested in experimentation and argued that traditions of thought, such as mainstream philosophy, have conventionally been suspicious of the bodily, the temporal and the experiential, instead preferring Plato’s fixed and pure forms. We are generally encouraged to discover pre-existing ‘truth’, rather than dwell in the messy reality of experience. However, he himself was much less interested in knowledge as a pure and static expression of truth, and more committed to knowing as a form of active enquiry, the idea of constantly opening up experience to further experience. I think this idea of constant doubt and enquiry is especially relevant to managers who are thinking about how to deal with the ever changing patterning of experience in organisations that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Read the rest.

Wayne

Don't look so close

When it comes to innovation, not only are truly original ideas rare, but even successful innovations sometimes aren't what they appear to be.

The Innovator's Perspective at The Creativity Post:

Fred Smith, while a student at Yale, came up with the concept of Federal Express, a national overnight delivery service. The U.S. Postal Service, UPS, his own business professor and, virtually every delivery expert in the U.S., doomed his enterprise to failure. Based on their experiences in the industry, no one, they said, will pay a fancy price for speed and reliability.

The first key to innovation is the ability to think beyond conventional paradigms and to examine traditional constraints using non-traditional thinking. You have to be able to go outside your own frame of reference and find another way of looking at the problem.

The second key to innovation is to be able to discern the important issues and to keep your goal in view. Fred Smith said he didn’t understand what his real goal was when he started Federal Express. He thought he was selling the transportation of goods. In fact, he discovered what they were really selling was 'peace of mind.' After he figured it out, he made it possible for customers to track packages right from their desktops.

The Postal Service and UPS got in trouble when they confused the means as an end. (emphasis supplied)

In the past decade or so, business schools have discovered that design and creative thinking complement the mechanics of business making. Like the example here, I think it's because the forensics aren't always straightforward. Design is not merely descriptive - as if it were clear what anything one thing is on its own - but brings human-readable language like elegance, tension, compactness, beauty and desire into view.

It's a start. And an understanding of overhead, capital expenses, cash flow and competing business models, is, of course, indispensable. But I have this fantasy that one day C-level suites will be filled with writers and sculptors, carpenters and clerics, engineers and philosophers, people who can account for old problems in new ways, who make the unexpected connection because the line from business model to sale is rarely direct, and, above all, who never confuse means and ends. Those margin-makers start with the spreadsheet.

Wayne

"The Voyagers," a love letter about humankind

The Voyagers from Penny Lane on Vimeo.

Comparing the relationship of Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan to the twin Voyagers, filmmaker Penny Lane records that the craft and their cargo, The Golden Records, are, as Sagan said, "remarkably hopeful expressions about human life on this planet." Agreed. And while our civilization has moved on - few people beside club DJs even use a phonograph anymore - Lane uses the symbolism of the Voyagers to great effect in the film.

It must have particularly moving for her. Marrying during the making of it, she dedicates the work on Vimeo to her "fellow traveler into the unknown."

I instantly recalled a Dennis Overbye review of the book "Flyby," which chronicled the history of the two spacecraft. Having flown outward for the past 24 years, they are now the furtherest human made objects in the cosmos and will, before long, pass into interstellar space. They still send letters home. Like Lane, "Flyby" meditates on what it means to explore. Like Lane, Flyby finds exploration central to our nature as humans. And like Lane, the book finds, in the form of those two machines, an appeal to our better selves. They take us metaphorically home.

This is beautiful - Dennis Overbye:

This book blooms with such glorious rushes of exalted prose that I was dog-earing almost every page until I gave up. Contrasting the mission with human explorations from earlier eras, for example, [the author] Pyne writes that Voyager was 'a modernist machine loosed onto the cosmos. The Voyagers would not be blinded by gold or the mirage of fame. They would not abandon wife or child, or enslave unwary indigenes. They could not despair, could not be crippled by loneliness, could not fight for the cross or suffer for science, would not know epiphanies or endure tropical fevers. They would lay no claims, issue no proclamations of sovereignty, raise no toasts to king or republic, sign no treaties of trade or military alliance, nor send out reconnaissance parties to lay out routes for folk migration. . . . The Voyagers confronted no Other, or even life.'

A brief question and answer with Lane has been posted at the Atlantic.

Wayne

"Revolutions happen fast, but dawn slowly"

Bell Labs created the things that ushered in the 20th century - the transistor, the first communications satellites, digital communications, the first cellular telephone systems and the basis for digital photography, the charge-coupled device.

It gave Silicon Valley its name.

But what made Bell Labs? Writing in the New York Times, Jon Gertner, author of the forthcoming book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation," lists the physical proximity of its investigators, a range of talent from diverse fields of expertise, and an emphasis on making things. It understood that unmoored from the physical world, abstractions can take us anywhere - or nowhere.

For IdeaFestival fans, it will sound quite familiar. If you read the blog you'll know that diversity in ideas, backgrounds and beliefs are regularly praised. Why? Because difference makes a difference. And given my own rather intense interiority - it's a polite way of saying I can go straight days at a time without talking - I appreciate time spent living in the question. So I was glad to see this concluding paragraph from Gertner, who suggests that worthwhile innovation, innovation that matters, doesn't simply target the next great consumer technology. It takes the long view.    

But to consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps. It also shows us that to always 'move fast and break things,' as Facebook is apparently doing, or to constantly pursue 'a gospel of speed' (as Google has described its philosophy) is not the only way to get where we are going. Perhaps it is not even the best way. Revolutions happen fast but dawn slowly. To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.

Read the whole piece.

Wayne