ROCKET SCIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT

The Columbia tragedy made me think about the optimism that the space program generated 30 to 25 years ago. A space program involves developing a complete technological system. One has to design and build the vehicles themselves, but one also has to design and build the facilities in which the vehicles will be made. One has to manufacture the fuel, the vehicles with which to transport the rockets to the launch site, and the vehicles to pick them up the space capsules when they return from space. One has to design and build the technology used in the control stations for the probes. One has to decide what the missions will be, and develop the instrumentation that will be used on the missions, and the communications systems to get information to and from space, and the technology with which to store, distribute and analyze the floods of data coming from space missions.

The process involved unprecedented use of ICTs. I would note especially the computer technology to calculate orbits, and to assure through simulation that unexpected events could be dealt with without compromising space missions. Indeed, simulation technology was far more important, for it was the only way to assure that the vast numbers of component parts of the system handling huge amounts of power worked, without endangering a lot of people.

New computer techniques were invented for project planning and for project management and evaluation, resulting in enormously complex networks of activity being achieved on time and within acceptable budget ranges.

At the time there was great excitement that if we could go to the moon, then we could apply the same powerful knowledge management techniques to solving the pressing problems of our planet. I think the first UN conferences on science and technology for development were organized in the hope of advancing the application of these cutting- edge approaches to technology to the reduction of the worst aspects of poverty – hunger, sickness, ignorance, discomfort, etc. That excitement is long disappeared.

There are very few examples of “rocket science” being applied to critical problems of development. Perhaps the eradication of smallpox, the programs to control malaria in the 1950s and 60s, the program against polio and a few others might be identified. One hopes that the new programs against HIV/AIDS and other diseases of poverty might be one such program. But there are few other examples.

I suspect that simulation, computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, project design, project scheduling and monitoring, and other high-tech approaches would work if the world would establish targets and programs for poverty reduction comparable to the space program in prestige and political and economic support. What we have here is not a technological failure, but a failure of political will and process.