A 100 years Plan for Space.

Today I printed off the brilliant diagram from Rockwell International (discovered thanks to sc-ifi/sw tweep @StevePoling)100 year space plan  that shows the time line stretching from 1983 forward a hundred years. Its a vision of interdependent events leading finally to interstellar travel.
I put the diagram (after sellotaping it together in A4 pieces) on the corridor wall at work . Each time I looked over, someone new was studying it. Some projects that people had actually worked on were identified, and highlighted, and of course the rovers, were of great interest. Most importantly for me was that someone however madly optimistic they might have been, had tried to articulate something, that even now we are struggling to describe - a global space future.

You Are Here.

The problem for many of us working in the space industry is that the "You are here" relationship mapped to the rest of the project or industry in general is not immediately obvious. It is possible to work at one desk for many years with out really getting a grasp of what the people working in the bay next door are up to, or the where the project is currently heading. Although we have much better communication tools and technology it is not clear that gaining understanding of inter-dependencies and production complexities are any better addressed than they were 20 years ago. In fact there's a strong possibility that due to a number of factors, it could be much worse.This is an opinion of course ;) but in the space community there appears to be a "clicky" culture in that you will belong to one group or the other either by nationality,discipline, gender, culture or all of them. If you're not in a group you're on your own and in general this is not a good place to be in space even if you're quite self sufficient. As a female software engineer I am used to being a bit of an outsider, but its also possible to identify many other outsiders not defined by gender.

Nice To Have, Difficult to handle

I tried to do a bit of investigating on why this happens, and there is a lot of research on-line on building effective communities based around -bit of a jump here - "diversity in schools". It appears that by bringing in different more balanced quotas of genders,race,class, culture or nationality does not necessarily bring an integrated community, in fact it can increase gang membership and bad relations in the community. mcgraw-hill article To counter this behaviour it was found that it was effective to build infrastructures where individuals could collaborate cross-community, this consisted of projects specifically set up to increase the possibility of socialising and working across the different community groups. Great care was taken to ensure that these collaboration projects were supported and given a high priority in the day-to-day planning. None of this information is rocket science of course but for some reason in the industry there still a belief that community interaction is a "nice to have" and not a necessity.

Heros and Villains

For the community in space there is an added element to the understanding cross-cultural behaviours, there is often the need to explain something complex a concept, details or other difficult elements to the other group. Language, behaviour and attitude in the cross group relationships becomes an essential part of the outcome. One aspect that is difficult to ignore is the stress. The space industry like many other industries is often underfunded for the almost impossible requirements,that now need to be satisfied, to achieve our new space project objectives. Some people behave well perhaps even heroically in a stressful situation and other do not.  If looking for a good project outcome it is advisable to prepare with some kind of "health check" for both behaviours!. 

How many lifetimes?

Anyway back to the 100 year plan - when i look across and see the effort made by one small group of people to explain a vision of the next 100 years and its complexities it helps to put things into perspective. Each of us has such a short time to contribute to this vision that requires many lifetimes to fulfill. Following in the footsteps of engineers that started this task, it is humbling to see how much was achieved with so little. I believe that much past achievement was realised by teams of engineers working closely together. I hope working against the current cult of the individual, we too can achieve this high level of collaboration required to face the challenges ahead in space.