The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.

I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)

Unfortunately it means that any time you need anything from someone outside your team, it comes with a lead time of '3-5 business days' unless you know the magic words or you raise it up the chain.

It's fascinating to me that a plane in full (emergency) autonomous mode, having run an algorithm to identify airport and landing sequence, is using speech to text to broadcast over analogue radio to the humans in the area. And the tower tentatively communicating back ('Outfitter 9, if you can hear me, cleared to land...') to do the expected final step in the exchange.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23913251/waymo-roof-dome...

Thanks for closing the loop - always interesting to hear about any progress when stuck in a bureaucratic logjam.

My preferred approach is to explicitly plan in 'keep the lights on' capacity into the quarter/sprint/etc in much the same way that oncall/incident handling is budgeted for. With the right guidelines, it gives the air cover for an engineer to justify spending the time to fix it right away and builds a culture of constantly making small tweaks.

That said, I totally resonate with the culture aspect - I think I'd just expand the scope of the week-long event to include enhancements and POCs like a quasi hackathon

That said, I too think the main value of ISS declined several years ago or more. Looking forward to the next generation, whatever it is

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793

Without doing hard calculations, it intuitively feels pretty marginal potential flight weight savings for the operational complexity it would add

[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47262/how-much-...

Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.

Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.

Why would a company ever open-source their product then? Giving up that complete leverage can be a selling point during the purchasing process, making buyers more comfortable that they won't be (completely) locked in, and be a net positive on revenue through faster sales.

I think everyone would generally agree a constitution would be stronger without it, but even if 'it's only a matter of time', it's played out as a pretty decent compromise to actually get the charter signed ~45 years earlier than potentially no charter at all.

Canada generally relies on trust and good behaviour more than the US system of checks-and-balances - the most obvious difference is that our Prime Minister plays the role of both US president (head of exec) and congress (technically just the House equivalent, but the senate equivalent is much weaker)

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/notwithstanding-clause-doug...

The communication gets much clearer and less staccato when something is going on that's not regular - my favourite example is an incident at JFK where a taxiway was unexpectedly blocked and you can watch the Russian pilots struggle a bit to explain[1], presumably because 'cones' isn't in the normal ATC glossary[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/YmywjMQDbos?feature=shared&t=77 [2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/pcg_4-03-...

https://animalcrossing.nintendo.com/new-horizons/happy-home-...

My light bulb moment was when I looked at the Apollo 13 orbital paths and mentally considered a few alternatives they could have done too.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/220200/Kerbal_Space_Progr...