“One miracle per project,” used to be a common saying around my mission development teams. It meant that you could explain to evaluators one new technology that puts you ahead of the competition, but not more. Include more than one and you were running out of pages in your proposal before you were running out of project schedule. Over time, this caused proposals to prefer conservative, safe projects that didn’t stretch much beyond the state-of-the-art. I guess this was as intended for the medium-scale, cost-capped, schedule-driven missions that these calls were looking for.

In contracts, large, flag-ship missions were supposed to be more open to risks to achieve the higher science per dollar returns. Now I invite you to take a step back and take a moment to think about your personal financial decisions. Does it make sense to take more risk with bigger, more consequential, decisions than with smaller ones? Are you more ready to tryout a college for your kids’ education than a new dinner place? On reflection, neither was the government. So, they tried to reduce risk by separating investments for “technology development” from “program implementation.” Though that didn’t quite work either and here is why.  

Ideally, a technology program develops and demonstrates the key elements, all the difficult-to-do steps, before committing to the larger program. Unfortunately, our vision of the future, and that includes listing all the technologies required for a system, is cloudy at best. Not only are there many, some yet undiscovered, roads up the mountain, but there are also other mountains from which the views might be just as nice. If your business is all about building better steam-engines, you may be rather surprised by these new-fangled internal combustion ones. Or to make a more current example, if you are an entry-level software developer, the coding prowess of the latest large language model might make you question your career choice. Some technologies, driven by enormous investments, seemingly advance by leaps and bounds, while others, say for example grazing-incidence optics for large X-ray telescopes, struggle with the same issues for decades. And let’s not forget the risk of even well-run technology programs turning into the proverbial self-licking ice cream cone. Those programs always make good progress, yet the goal remains forever around the next corner, or just after the next infusion of funding.

This brings me to my argument to aim for the stars but hold your goals lightly. Let’s embrace that we will not always know what we need to achieve the next break-through and sometimes we may have to plot a course around an obstacle instead of straight through the wall. And yes, sometimes we will have to back down. Not all dreams are achievable, perhaps not today, perhaps not by us. But if we are good stewards of the resources entrusted to us and we are ready to get back after a disappointment, we should be able to maintain the trust put into us by our sponsors. So, let’s not wait for the last piece to be in place before we take our own bite at the ice cream cone. It may melt faster than we realize.