By Dr. Peter H. Diamandis
Peter is the founder and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation and the co-founder and chairman of Singularity University.
It's rare that humanity lands on another planet. Sunday as a guest of the JPL director, Charles Elachi, along with a long list of space luminaries such as Jeff Bezos, Dennis Tito, Steve Jurvetson, George Whitesides, Buzz Aldrin, and hundreds more, I made my pilgrimage to Pasadena to be present for what the media called "seven-minutes of terror" - the final descent of JPL's Curiosity lander through the thin Martian atmosphere - slowing from 13,000 miles per hour to a 1 mph while executing a long list of complicated maneuvers.
Historically, only 33% of Mars lander missions have succeeded, and this landing was particularly complicated. It was no wonder, then, that stress was high and many were predicting the potential for a big crash. But NASA's boldness paid off: the rover Curiosity, a 1 ton, 6-wheeled robot, successfully landed on the surface of Mars exactly as planned at 10:31pm PST.
Charlie Bolden, the Administrator of NASA aptly said, "this isn't JPL's rover, or NASA's rover, it America's Rover. In this moment, we should all be very proud."
Many considered this mission way too risky; its landing configuration crazy in its complexity. That's to be expected since the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. What the success of Curiosity highlights is the importance of our being bold and audacious. It takes big risks to drive breakthroughs. Financial risks, technical risks, and when it comes to funding billion dollar programs - political risks. Apollo was one of the great risks this country took that paid off gloriously, allowing Humanity to make its first step on another world.
How unfortunate it is when America, itself one of the riskiest ventures in history, fails to take such risks. The United States had an opportunity to build the Supercollider, which would have been larger than the Large Hadron Collider which unlocked the Higgs Boson. Who knows what mysteries of the universe could have been discovered. Instead, billions were spent for a project that was never completed.
I spend much of my time as Executive Chairman of Singularity University and as CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. At SU we teach attending graduate students and executives about exponentially growing technology. More importantly, we speak about the importance of taking risk to truly create breakthroughs and the importance of failing early and failing often -- the Silicon Valley formulation for innovation.
Today there's a new generation of young commercial space companies entering on the horizon that may someday push the frontiers of science. But for now, and the next couple of decades, spending the billions required to explore Mars, search for life on Europa and develop cutting age science hardware like the Webb Telescope is exactly where our government (and others) must be focusing. Ultimately taking such risks is the province of government.
The role of government is not accomplishing "sure things" - it's in taking risks that the private sector simply can't. If government missions aren't failing on occasion, it probably means that they're not pushing the envelope hard enough. We need these bold ventures to inspire the next generation to pursue science and technology. No amount of STEM education funding could accomplish what the Apollo program did in terms of inspiring an entire generation with the wonder of technology.
Don't get me wrong - it's definitely worth mentioning the efforts of numerous private companies backed by risking taking investors, enabled by exponentially growing technologies. Companies like SpaceX, the many Google Lunar X PRIZE teams (building rovers to land on the surface of the Moon in pursuit of a $30M purse), Virgin Galactic, XCOR and Sierra Nevada Corporation, as well as my own recently announced company Planetary Resources (which I co-founded with Eric Anderson to focus on mining near-Earth asteroids). All of these companies are reaching for the stars with great energy.
That said, none of these efforts would exist today had it not been for the past 50-years of NASA efforts. As long as the government is willing to take the risks involved in big, bold ventures, they'll pave the way for the private sector to make space available to everyone. It's tempting, during times of economic troubles, to turn inward and away from risky ventures. But it's only through boldness and audacity that we can be inspired to innovate and ultimately to succeed.
When Dr. Elachi came to visit the group I was with at JPL on Sunday, he quoted President Teddy Roosevelt in a fashion that underscores this point, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure."
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It's entirely possible that the flow will be a back and forth one, on a curved spiral tending to a same direction after reaching a higher level. Perhaps. But the best of both worlds would be the best of both NASA and private venture at the same time, in both separate and shared spaces.
That may be true, but Mars had nothing to do with the failure of either of those, if I recall correctly. Most of those missions failed before reaching Mars and a few failed at Mars because of hardware and software issues that were built into them here on Earth. These missions would have failed on their way to the next Burgerking just as well. I think that's the most important take-away lesson from this... we are not competing against the pitfalls of the universe, but the depth of our talent for self-sabotage.
NASA did not attempt any Mars missions between Viking in 1975 and Mars Observer in 1992. It's no surprise that NASA suffered four failed Mars missions in the 1990s. The teams didn't know what they didn't know. They succombed to "been there done that" syndrome, even though few of the engineers or managers had worked on Viking.
NASA recovered by taking the one successful Mars mission of the 1990s, Pathfinder, and using that as the basis for the MER program (Spirit and Opportunity). Then they kept up the momentum with Phoenix in 2008 and now Curiosity. JPL has built a team that really has been there and done that on Mars. They know what they know, and they know what they don't know.
This expertise exists nowhere else in the world. It's a precious and transient asset. If we let it lapse by taking a break and not going back to Mars at least every six years, then we will lose this expertise, and if past is prologue, we will once again be surprised at how much we don't know whenever we eventually attempt a return to Mars.
It would be sabotage if we fail to commission this remarkable team to develop a follow-on mission for 2018. We would be squandering something truly special and unique in the world.
:-)
And was all spent in the US, paying for jobs and healthcare.
:-)