Cathedrals vs. bazaars

Michael Mealling has some thoughtful analysis of the issues the new

presidential commission is tackling (and links to other commentary and
the first public hearing) at rocketforge:

http://www.rocketforge.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid9

Is the problem, as Neil Tyson describes, exactly that we're treating
what we do next in space as a single immense project (a modern
"cathedral", which is certainly the pattern for Apollo, Shuttle, Space
Station) when in fact what we want is many small projects, some of which
may fail on their own, but overall working together to bring humans
outward into space?

Reading "CIO" magazine the other day, this description of commercial
product development struck me:

"more than 60 percent of all new-product development efforts are
scuttled before they ever reach the market. Of the 40 percent that do
see the light of day, 40 percent fail to become profitable and are
[quickly] withdrawn [...] Three-quarters of the money spent in product
development investments results in products that [fail]".

Silicon Valley saw some of the greatest innovations of recent decades,
in a culture that saw no stigma in failure. Failure is ok - it's to be
expected! If you're not failing roughly 3/4 of the time, you're not
innovating enough! Our problem in space seems to be that we invest so
much in huge single projects that we can't afford to let them "fail".
Failure should be an option. In fact we have learned a lot from the
failures in our robotic missions, and they are widely acknowledged as a
big NASA bright spot. Hubble started out as a failure too.

Of course we don't want to recklessly kill people; designs should
include how to get people safely out of the various possible failure
conditions. But designing systems to eliminate the chance of failure
precludes innovation, and that's much worse.

As Michael suggests: "Figure out how to make the aerospace industry look
like the computer and Internet industries and we'll have large
populations living on Mars in our lifetimes."

Arthur Smith