Give 'Em A Buck

On the down side, the space program didn’t feed hungry children or prepare them for school. It diverted money from pure research. And maybe a robot could have brought back some moon rocks too. ("That’s one small step for an artificial intelligence . . . ") NASA didn’t invent or even anticipate the microprocessor. (That was some guy at a memory company who thought, "Gee, this thing doesn’t have to be just a pocket adding machine.") And it was two guys from Bell Labs, not NASA, who found the background noise left over from the Big Bang. (Well, we’ve made sure that will never happen again, haven’t we?)

But the space program worked. Over and over again, it worked. At least it worked when we were throwing lots of money at the problem. If you want proof of my thesis, note that it has stopped working. In these latter days, NASA was hamstrung by "Better, Cheaper, Faster." My God, all through my engineering career, that was a joke: "Better, Cheaper, Faster: Pick any two." Way back in the days of Xerox-speckled transparencies on overhead projectors, you put that gag on a presentation foil to lighten things up after too many foils with boring technical data. And what did the accountants do after one opened the wrong door and wandered into a technical briefing? They chopped off "Pick any two," and made the rest of it into a mantra.

So I’ll restate my dual thesis: a) If something big and technical needs to get done (Rural Electrification, Atomic Bomb, creating a whole generation of the best engineers in the world), throwing money at the job works better than doing it on the cheap. b) Parts of what gets done are going to range from unfortunate to awful, but with luck and a little common sense, the net result will be better than if you set out to achieve perfection.