“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in our space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.” - President John F. Kennedy
As an aerospace engineer, I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering what the next Apollo mission will be. Not literally, of course. I want to know what’s going to exert that kind of pull on our hearts and our imaginations. This is a regular topic of conversation for me that, by and large, my friends are fairly exhausted with. There’s an entire segment of the skydiving community that is so completely tired of this line of reasoning that it’s become a surefire way to chase everyone away from the campfire.
Of all of the incredible things we’ve accomplished, though, the Apollo missions are still in a class of their own. There’s something different, right? A different color? The project defines its own class of anticipation. It united not just our country, but the entire world towards a common goal. When we look back on it, either through the lens of our imaginations or through popular media, it conjures engineers in ties and short-sleeve button-ups, chain smoking and tirelessly working to solve the unsolvable. Dynamic decisions bound only by the facts as we knew them and the best path forward. Fearlessness.
We could just as easily look back on other massive undertakings, but the reality is that we don’t. Something about mass production, Henry Ford and the Model T, the Wright Brothers and their Flyer… even Leonardo da Vinci and all of his somewhat unhinged endeavors. They just don’t hit the same.
I believe that the real magic of the Apollo missions is that they were emblematic of real, tangible hope. Hope for a future that so many of us dream of. Not just a future where we’ve landed on the moon – a future where we’ve created a world we want to live in. A Jetsons future, with flying cars and robot butlers. A prosperous future, where we’ve solved the problem of putting food on the table and can set our sights on loftier goals, high up the rungs of Maslow’s pyramid.
In Bret Victor’s talk, “Inventing on Principle”, he advocates for a third option in life. Alongside the diligent Craftsman and the fearless Problem Solver, you can choose to identify with a principle. You can choose a vision for the world you want, and work tirelessly in whatever capacity is needed to bring the world to that vision. I’ve never quite heard it put so succinctly, but that’s what I want to do. This isn’t to say I know exactly what I want from the future. I’m still finding my principle, to use Bret’s words. I’ve come to believe that the process of finding your principle is the answer to a far more important question. So instead of exhausting the world with questions about the next Apollo program, I’ve start asking something different: How will you know that the future we’ve created is the one you’ve been dreaming of?
I’m not sure I have a good answer to this myself. I’ve gotten a few glimpses of what this means to me. Here’s one of those glimpses: I believe that there is intrinsic value in doing more with less, and I believe that’s something worth chasing with the same fervor as acquiring more.
As a programmer, Moore’s law is the bane of my existence. Whenever we approach the boundaries of our current computing capacity, those boundaries get pushed out further, meaning there’s fundamentally no incentive to push for more efficient software. There are still benefits hiding in there, though, and we aren’t taking advantage of them.
There’s the obvious impact on energy consumption. Fewer cycles will always be fewer electrons. Smaller, more efficient codesets simply take less energy to run. In 2019, computing technology accounted for approx. 8.5% of global energy consumption, a number that’s growing annually. By the nature of computing devices, they often operate most efficiently when loaded at 60-80%. By continually choosing hardware that provides nearly limitless computing power compared to the problem at hand, we’re wasting energy.
This goes deeper, though. Software reliability is a complex topic. Traceability to requirements is a fundamental tenet of safety critical software development; so is test coverage. In my experience, these topics often become extremely muddled in safety critical software development projects, with the application of DO-178 being seen as “best effort”, often carried out by someone with little practical knowledge of the codebase and shirked by the programmers themselves. This is deeply concerning. Bloated, overcomplicated codebases exacerbate this problem dramatically.
Finally, there’s the concept of design constraints. I believe that design constraints, used in moderation and bent when appropriate, lead to better design. This is why I don’t own a 5-axis mill. Similarly, it’s why I typically spec just enough processor to get the job done. Most of my embedded projects have used a hybrid 8/16-bit processor clocked at 16MHz, and that’s been plenty. We have to think about time and space – not agonize over it, but think about it. As a result, we get small, simple, reliable codebases that elegantly address the problem at hand. I’ll add that interrupt programming is, in my opinion, one of the more deeply satisfying things life has to offer.
A hardware corollary to this lies in PCB design. I follow a few self-imposed constraints – no passives smaller than an 0805, no traces under 10 mils, no spacing under 6 mils, no more than two layers, and if it goes outside the board it gets ESD protection. I pick a board footprint at the get-go and I don’t change it until I’m out of options. This usually puts the slightest amount of discomfort on my layouts – I have to think about where components go, and I always have to analyze the ground planes to ensure there’s sufficient return area. The rewards are immense, however. I can rework my boards by hand, they’re bulletproof, and they all work at 40,000 ft. without me having to think about it. I can assemble them with a pick-and-place machine from 1992 and I can debug them with handheld scope probes. And when I look at boards I’ve designed, I’m proud of them (the good ones, at least – we all have a few misses). I can’t tell you the number of boards I’ve seen from major aerospace companies that consist of a bunch of 0402s scattered like grains of salt on top of four pasture-like layers. There’s no art there.
Throughout 2024, we saw major advancements in nuclear fusion and AI. While I’m excited about these things, they aren’t my Apollo. They don’t, on their own, paint a picture of a future that I’m fighting for. I want to see a future where we don’t just thoughtlessly expand to meet the bounds of the box that we’re in. I want to see all of us appreciate and value the art in what we do.
I haven’t quite figured out what that looks like yet, but I have some ideas. Agricultural innovations, such as hydroponic farming and drip irrigation systems, really speak to me. I’m also really interested in anything that stops us from throwing out our phones and computers every two years. And I’m coming to realize that establishing these principles for myself and learning to work for them is an important piece of me.
When we’re living in a future that you’ve hoped and dreamed about, how will you know?