I expect space travel is like 3D printers. They existed for decades and
cost at least a few arms and legs, so they were only used in a few niche
areas. Then the RepRap project showed everyone that you could make a
simpler version of the process work for orders of magnitude less dollars.
Now that 3D printers are cheap, tons more people are able to experiment
with applications. That means all of the associated areas, like 3D
modeling, and materials science, suddenly have a much bigger market and a
greater variety of use cases, so they get the chance to experiment more
too. The diversity and velocity increased when the technology became cheap,
even if it still can't do what the expensive machines can do.
The interesting things happen when a technology becomes ubiquitous enough
for lots of experimentation, not when some genius figures out something
clever. Tesla's approach might be right, but Edison's approach changes
things. The iPhone only changed the conversation around cellphones because
Jobs maintained a production line that treated humans brutally enough to
churn out enough phones at a low enough price to keep up with demand. If
the boss (Jobs) hadn't insisted on making sure the thing would sell then
the iPhone would have been just another promising technology that
disappeared.
It's actually hard to come up with examples of the trivial stuff that gets
produced when bosses get to build exactly what they want because those
projects hardly ever go anywhere and usually get buried as embarrassing
failures. Sometimes they survive as amusing anecdotes or case studies. It's
the stuff that kept getting massaged until it got traction in the
marketplace that we all know about.
Nobody wants the rockets themselves except a few engineers and historians.
Everyone else wants the service that rockets provide. If the boss of an
aerospace company wants to build a better rocket, and is rich enough to
self-fund, there's a reasonable risk that they'll make something
promising...but ultimately only footnote-worthy. At the end of the day
they're providing a service, not a product, so it will only be interesting
when the service is self-sustaining. The longer the boss puts off trying to
make it self-sustaining, the greater the chances of being relegated to
historical trivia.
On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 3:49 PM, John Schilling <
John.Schilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 1/24/2016 11:16 AM, Matt Maier wrote:
Trivial things happen when the boss gets to build what they want.
Interesting things happen when the boss builds what other people want.
No, boring things happen when the boss builds what other people want.
Interesting things happen when the boss builds what other people
*didn't know they were going to want. *See, e.g., the entire career of
Steve Jobs. Or, for another possibly relevant example, who really wanted a
giant online bookstore, until there already was one?
But in order to get there, someone has to be able to build things that, at
present, almost nobody really wants. And yes, all number of people who
ever really wanted to see a reusable orbital launch vehicle built, or more
importantly to really buy any service it could best provide, add up to a
giant "almost nobody".
John Schilling
john.schilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(661) 718-0955
