The webcast has started, and they’re currently go for launch in about half an hour. It will take a while before they know if they’re successful, because they have to do a restart this time — it’s a mission requirement.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This is a little annoying. The webcast stalls every few seconds, and I have to hit pause/play to get it going again.
Earlier this year in an interview with the Globe and Mail you described Canada’s development of the oil sands as the equivalent of treating the atmosphere like an “open sewer.” What do you have to say about the findings of Canadian climate scientist and lead UN IPCC author Andrew Weaver, and his colleague Neal Swart, published in the journal Nature, that even if Canada developed all the commercially viable oil in the oilsands, global temperatures would rise by an insignificant 0.03 degrees?
It’s frightening how close this pompous hypocritical math-challenged fool came to being president.
Why they don’t know how to deal with technical messes:
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.
Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.
Of course, they ignore economic reality as well.
…and the gulf between planning and reality:
The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA’s vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright.
Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”
This is a point I make in the book. Which will be released (finally!) this week, in time for Christmas.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This is a good point as well:
It’s certainly true that Federal IT is chronically challenged by its own processes. But the biggest problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway.
This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on.
This is also a crucial distinction between “new” space and old.
Joel Achenbach writes about “old” space versus new.
“They’re lying about everything now.”
They have to. It’s all they have.
Five reasons childish leftists (if that’s redundant) love it.
The Democrats just nuked it.
I was thinking that myself yesterday, though not in as quite vivid terms.
[Saturday-morning update]
Six questions about the Senate’s nuclear winter.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Senate goes MAD.
…in a free society:
The present essay calls for the complete separation of school and state, indicates what a fully free market in education would look like, and explains why such a market would provide high-quality education for all children.
Log overdue.
…see their health costs skyrocket.
My schadenfreude runneth over.