Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace

After reading both Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz and An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield, a certain deep childhood fascination of space had quietly creeped back into me. It got to the point that I was this tempted to hunt down the LEGO NASA Saturn V set. What stopped me wasn't really the price, but that I would then need to find space for a 1 m tall construction---I don't have that luxury of space, so that served as a great brake towards stopping my temporary insanity.

But what was it that awakened once more in me after reading these two accounts about the US space programme? It is the idea that a dream, associated training, grit, tons of learning by doing in engineering and understanding in science are part of the necessary ingredients towards success and greatness. It was about being unafraid enough to build up a large risk appetite, and using the said appetite to take on large calculated risks that have associated large rewards. It was about pointing out how technology alone was insufficient to guarantee success---the infinitely flexible human factor was a much greater swing factor that, under the right amount of stimuli, can do things that technology alone cannot do.

It is related in some ways to the epiphany I had regarding TTRPGs and CRPGs---though that was cast in seemingly different terms, it is really saying the same thing: that human behaviour, being of an emergent system, is superior over technology that is deterministic in situations where the environment is uncontrolled/uncontrollable by virtue of the fact that the emergent system adapts in a more time-efficient way than the deterministic one that yields good-enough outcomes.

That last part is probably the most important point to take note: it's always about good-enough outcomes, not perfection, and sometimes, not even excellence. Now, I'm not saying that perfection or excellence are not worthy; they are the ideals that one ought to strive for. But reality is not understandable by us who are not God---sometimes the effort that is taken to get to perfection is infinitely more, while the effort to achieve excellence may be stupendous over good-enough.

Both books on space exploration talk about the single most understated thing of being an adult: everyone is making rules up as they go along. In Failure is Not an Option, Kranz makes it clear that there were no rules to govern how one ought to land humans on the moon---the mission controllers had to come up with their own rules even as they were learning what physics present them in terms of orbital mechanics, and the various limitations that their crafted spacecraft gave them. The tight deadline needed for regaining the lost lead of the space race did not give them enough time to go the academic route to reason everything from first principles and prove things rigorously. There is some sense of cowboy-ism, but it was not based on uncalculated recklessness. The importance of achieving the outcome with whatever resources were available was a strong motivating factor towards the success of the early US space programme. The courage to be less conservative to push the edge of what is permissible was what made the US space programme mighty.

Unfortunately, as we move on in this century, risk has become a bad word, and I don't just mean it for the US---I am also referring to SIN city and everywhere else that has reached a point where they believe they have something to lose.

The thing is, there is never a stable position that one can be in. Stability has always been quite illusionary---stability and conservatism just means that the majority hasn't been paying attention to their surroundings for a while.

Space exploration. It's probably the only frontier left that can pique the innate curiosity and hunger of knowledge for humanity. Some corpos have started to see it as the next step for their investment even as governments shrink back towards a more protectionist slant. But I am not laying the blame down on any specific people---we live in very strange times, and while we all know that the rules are still being made up as we go along, the signal-to-noise ratio just isn't as great as before.

Maybe we'll figure out how to push forward without killing ourselves first. After all, we ought to harbour a little bit of hope that things will turn out well.

Otherwise, what's the point of living?