December 7, 1999

I don't really follow NASA's space program, but I do know from the radio that in the wake of its last two spacecraft failures, there has been growing internal criticism of NASA's recent radical change of how it develops new space technology.

This new means has been nicknamed 'Faster. Better. Cheaper' and it was a departure from the days in which NASA prided itself on being centralized and monolithic and almost paranoid in their attempts to create fail-safe spacecrafts. Mind you, they were safer because NASA always created a number of redundancies in the spacecraft's design. So, for example, if the space shuttle's entire computer system failed, there were two other identical systems to back it up.

There was evidence that the new change in direction was good for NASA. Last year's Mars Pathfinder was able to broadcast images back to earth without costly human cargo on board. But with two embarrassing public blow-ups, NASA is starting to reassess the situation.

Instead of "Faster. Better. Cheaper", perhaps NASA should have kept to the original vision: "Faster. Cheaper. Out of Control." From the book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (which I recommend):

In a widely cited 1989 paper entitled "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System", Brooks claimed that "within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots." He proposed to invade the moon with a fleet of shoe-box-sized, solar-powered bulldozers that can be launched from throwaway rockets. Send an army of dispensable, limited agents coordinated on a task, and set them loose. Some will die, most will work, something will get done."
So imagine setting on Mars a whole bunch of shoe-box sized robot bugs: some shaped like beetles, some like mantises, some like mosquitos - each of them varied in protective devices, landing equipment, and such. They may not all survive the landing, but some might. And through this crude means of natural selection, some of our Mars robots would survive to be the fittest.

Space exploration should be more like biology.


 
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