Speaking For All Mankind

Nancy Dixon (author of one of the best books on communities of practice – CompanyCommand) has a great blog post about how NASA used conversation to capture knowledge gained from currently canceled Constellation program.  She describes how she helped NASA develop a knowledge capture strategy by working with NASA employees and other thought leaders in knowledge management.  Some excellent stuff here and I hope she formalizes the process into a book.

President Obama laid out an ambitious vision for American space exploration that included missions to an asteroid and to Mars while opening up routine launches to low-Earth orbit by private industries.  It is a great vision and I especially like the mission to an asteroid because of the vast mineral wealth from Near-Earth Objects and to develop an ability to protect against asteroid impacting on Earth.  It also appears that the plan has widespread support in the space community.

I do disagree with leaving out a mission to the Moon.  The Moon is a great base for launching missions to the asteroids and to Mars.  We know we can reach it within a few days, it has mineral resources, water, and an energy source for fusion.  The Moon’s gravity well is much smaller than the Earth’s gravity well and thus it easier to build bigger craft and launch them with less fuel.  Building a base on the Moon allows us to test out technologies and methods that can help us explore Mars.

This is not an argument for reestablishing the Constellation program.  Canceling Constellation was the right call as is the push to leave Low-Earth Orbit.  But skipping past such an obvious asset in our mission to Mars just doesn’t make sense.

Great interactive demonstration of the Space Communication Network.  Good example of creative of citizen engagement.

Great op-ed from James Cameron that argues for the new vision for NASA.  Turning NASA into a form of DARPA may be the best way to spur America’s lead in space technology.  Look at how technology grew under DARPA’s direction – The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs.

Yesterday, I wrote about NASA’s new budget and how this new direction has the potential to greatly revitalize the US economy.  A fascinating project that has major potential for IT is NASA’s cloud computing platform – Nebula.  In this video, NASA’s CIO describes Nebula.

Talk to anyone who knows me and they will tell you I am a fanatical space exploration advocate.  One of my earliest memories was watching an Apollo mission and, at one time, I could list every space mission by both the US and USSR.  So, when a friend emailed me about the “sad news” of President Obama’s NASA budget, I surprised him with my enthusiasm for this great decision.

After Apollo, NASA lost its way.  By this time, humans should have been on Mars several times and there should be a thriving lunar colony.  Heavy manufacturing should be in orbiting factories and we should be receiving our power from large solar arrays beaming power back to Earth.  What we ended up with was a Space Shuttle program that essentially limited us to low Earth orbit (LEO) and the money pit called the International Space Station.  The last “Grand Vision” is essentially a repeat of the Apollo program down to the same spacecraft designs.

By canceling the Constellation and Ares programs that were way behind schedule and had massive cost overruns, NASA was freed of the old-style model of procuring hardware and more importantly, providing launches to LEO.  Reaching LEO is a proven technology and it is time to turn this part over to the commercial sector so that it can be done more effectively and efficiently.  NASA has opened up the opportunities for building a private space sector and this will be the start of an economic boon that could eclipse even the impact of the Internet.

NASA will now be free to focus back on exploration.  The new budget is bigger than past NASA budgets and focuses on continuing the unmanned missions that have been amazing successes in the last forty years.  And the new budget contains projects that will build the infrastructure for manned exploration in the future (orbital fuel depots, automated docking systems, closed-cycle life support systems, etc.).

It is also encouraging to see that the future of space exploration is spreading beyond one government agency.  For example, an open-source approach to building a lunar base.  Spreading the dream around will help to make it more real.