ralph.ewig

Failure is Not an Option - With NASA having announced the date for the first commercial spacecraft to visit the ISS, this famous quote from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission has been very much on my mind lately. It sounds inspiring, but really think about what that means for a second: working on something so important that failure just cannot be tolerated. The experience is both exhilarating and thoroughly terrifying.

I’ve spent most of this winter working at Cape Canaveral, preparing for the visit of a SpaceX Dragon to the ISS next year, and whenever it is time to make another decision that phrase keeps going through my mind. Of course there are the obvious implications for career, company, and maybe even the nation (people in the US are unhappy having to buy space rides from the Russians). However, since this will be the first LEO mission by a commercial space company to involve people (the crew of the ISS), any mishap will inevitably be used as evidence that space travel belongs only in the hands of government.

Should it occur, a mishap won’t close the door on private space travel for good, but it would deal a serious blow to the progress made to date. For the last 50 years (half a century!) space travel has been strictly the domain of government organizations; and the number of people who have been to space remains so small it is still possible to memorize the names of them all. If we are to become a multi-planetary species, this must change.

And that’s why there won’t be a lot of holidays this year for the many people who are putting their personal convictions on the line to make sure everything has been tested, checked, re-checked, and tested some more; because when you’re pushing to effect a change so fundamentally important, failure is truly not an option.