Re: In space, where will we be in 30 years?
From: Allen Thomson (thomsona_at_flash.net)
Date: 07/05/04
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Date: 5 Jul 2004 15:39:08 -0700
simberg.interglobal@org.trash (Rand Simberg) wrote
> >There is no "Bush's Mars plan." Where do people get this idea? It is a
> >plan for establishing a presence on the Moon.
> No, it's a plan for moving out into the solar system. The moon is
> just a first step. Having "plans" for anything beyond that would be
> foolish and hubristic, like Stalinist/Maoist "five-year plans."
This reminds me of my days in the bureaucracy, when various
management fads came and went with depressing and predictable
regularity. "Strategic planning" always seemed futile on time
scales beyond a few years, because the decorrelation time of
events is not more than a decade, give or take.
However, there was an associated concept called "strategic
directions" that seemed to me to be somewhat better. Basically
the idea was to develop a touchstone that would tell you in
which way to make decisions to achieve desired long-term results
when the inevitable surprises came along.
In the present context, I think Rand is right: the direction
is to move out into the solar system. The immediate plan is
to go to the moon as a way to develop methods to move in the
direction.
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