June 29, 2004
Trust the Technology, or Trust the People?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
You gotta like a guy who becomes an astronaut at the age of 63, and doesn't do it by hitching a ride as a spectator on somebody's else spaceship.
You also gotta know that it takes guts to take out serial no. 1 of any technology just to see if the darn thing works. Make that "guts-squared" when you just might pay for other people's mistakes with your life.
Like the early days of the space program, so much was known, yet so little was known. You see, any engineer will tell you that every time you try something new, there's a 50-50 chance it will fail.
Even on this first civilian flight into space, there was a perfect case in point - the tail nozzle cover buckled, and it turned out it was the first time they'd flown with this new larger part.
But don't be distracted by this simple example of making a single change. The larger picture is that this was a maiden voyage for the whole of the technology. And Michael Melvill took it some 62-plus miles above the Earth, officially into space by any definition.
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While a stunning success, the truth is plenty went wrong: Sudden 90 degree rolls. Loud bangs. Trim controls that malfunctioned. Reliance on back-up systems. But that's the nature of technical daring. You can't build perfect technology - and you sure can't build it perfectly the first time out.
Engineering is a process; it's designing, building and testing, and going back through that loop again and again.
There is some apparent urgency due to the influence of the Ansari X Prize. It figures to award $10 Million to the first privately-financed group to build and launch a space ship able to carry three people safely into space and back, and - oh, yeah - you gotta do it again, with the same vehicle, within the next two weeks.
That little wrinkle of the two weeks makes a huge difference. Build something to work once? Versus build it to work repeatedly? Think of it as the difference between building a movie set and building an actual building.
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Like the first-ever test of the Space Shuttle, this flight went up without a full crew. If it had been operationally smooth, the first flight with three people on board would have been scheduled quickly, setting the two-week countdown for the X Prize. But Bert Rutan, the designer of SpaceShipOne, knows better than that. Just too darn much happened. So it's back to the design-build-test loop, looking at everything that went wrong.
Which gets me back to pilot - and now, official astronaut, Michael Melvill. And here's why I find him so fascinating. Any person who takes the controls in a first-ever flight of potentially fatal technology is more than just immensely trained and capable of conscious, absolute daring. He is also a person capable of trust.
Some people would say it's a trust of technology, but I don't think that really captures it. No - to trust the technology - first-time ever technology - you've got to trust the people who designed and built it. You've got to be able to look them in the eye, be with them in meetings and one-on-one's, see if they're playing straight, if their public goals match their private actions, if what they say is what you get.
The trust I'm talking about is actually in the people behind the technology.
But come to think of it - that might always be case .
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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