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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I was always curious to know about the org/cultural evolution aspect of this problem at NASA, and I was also reminded of it when the 737 MAX issue happened.

As an organization starts to drift from its engineering origins and management gets populated with people who -- either because of increasing emphasis on management versus technical knowledge skills, and/or requirements to spend time on communicating versus building -- are making judgement calls far from the "detail level", is this problem bound to arise?

How does an organization incentivize its people and structure to keep on making the "right" calls?

*What I'm pointing out here is the terrible realization afterwards that the managers of the program were told about the potential damage to the orbiter, but actively denied requests from the engineering org to get help to image/diagnose/potentially repair the damage or come up with mitigations.

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The underlying problem was that the Shuttle made no sense, and the agency twisted itself into a pretzel trying to pretend it did.

And, it still goes on, now about SLS. E.g., inventing a space station in a weird orbit around the moon, completely useless as a staging point to land, just because it is a place SLS would be able to get to. And, continuing development after it is obvious it will be obsoleted by Superheavy/Starship.

And even in promoting Mars colonization at SpaceX, where people insist that apparatus at Mars would plausibly have some useful role as a staging point for trips beyond Mars.

Or that making humans "multiplanetary" is some sort of noble, drop-everything-and-pursue-at-all-costs goal as if living on Mars won't completely suck.

Moreso, that putting cans on Mars would make us "multiplanetary" in any meaningful sense, as if cans on Mars would help any if Earth got blasted. And, that it is actually going to happen at all, and won't go the way of self-driving Teslas, underground evacuated-tunnel trains, and that cave submarine.

What are the odds people who paid for self-driving will ever get a refund?

Presumably the point of having people on Mars is that eventually it might get better, and they would be self-supporting, not just "living in cans".

I mean, early life for settlers in the USA also sucked.

I'm a huge fan of Musk's engineering work, but comparing the American pioneers to early Martian settlers is naive at best.

Humans have evolved on Earth. Even the least habitable place on Earth (e.g. Antarctica) is paradise in comparison to Mars. Mars settlement using current technology is an intractable problem.

Musk is selling his vision as an aspirational goal, not something achievable in his (or any of our) lifetimes. He knows better than anyone that a planet without a magnetosphere, fertile soil or a breathable atmosphere (just to name a few) is a death trap for humanity. But he has made it his life purpose to get the ball rolling.

If we look at the goal of colonizing our solar system rationally, a far more optimal strategy is robotic colonization. Advances in AI are now making it possible to fundamentally change how manufacturing is done via robotics. Once this happens, Mars colonization becomes far more feasible. Musk knows this, hence his pivot of Tesla from cars to robotics. The idea of sending people onto a hostile planet, where they then build a colony is archaic. People will arrive once the colony is fully built and operational.

The state of robotics today is very, very far from anything that could construct a Mars colony without people there making it all happen. Even with people there, a self-sufficient Mars colony is far beyond our capacity today.

Even a self-sufficient colony in the middle of the Sahara Desert, constructed all hands-on, is out of reach.

I will believe a Mars colony could be self-sustaining if the colonists, before they leave for Mars, by themselves build all the equipment they will have on Mars, including a copy of the equipment they need to do that building.

Not holding my breath here.

I feel like Musk's actual work will still be useful for getting robots to Mars if we go that way.

People were sending robots to Mars long before Musk blew up his first rocket.

> How does an organization incentivize its people and structure to keep on making the "right" calls?

It basically may be impossible. Sure, officially, no doubt they would say anyone can speak up, raise the alarm, etc. However there are usually overriding contradicting incentives. “You slipped on the schedule”, “Creating trouble and making our department look bad”, “So and so raised concerns and got passed up for promotions… that’s not happening to me, no way”.

Though a lot of what say is reasonable, it's of interesting note that NASA has had this issue basically since day 1. Many of these causes boil down to the same issues that caused the devastating Apollo 1 fire.

And the loss of the Challenger.

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