“FINALLY, someone in the commercial sector can actually do this better…”
… So when SpaceX started, I thought FINALLY, someone in the commercial sector can actually do this better… and they have. It is amazing how fast they have left NASA in the dust…
…the idea in the bottom drawer…
Every tech leader has a drawer full of them. The architecture you pitched in 2015 that nobody would fund. The product the market was not ready for. The tool your old team built that died in a reorganization. You filed it under impossible and stopped looking. Meanwhile, someone else kept going.
It is not your fault. You made the right call with what you knew then. But the reasons you gave up have a shelf life, and most of them expired years ago. The Space between “impossible” and “shipping” is usually just time, money, and somebody stubborn enough to try again.
…the astronaut who heard it first…
In May 2021, with no audiences anywhere on Earth, Coldplay played a new song to an audience of one. Thomas Pesquet, a French aerospace engineer and ESA astronaut, was aboard the ISS, and the band premiered Higher Power to him over a video link before it was released. “Right now we aren’t able to play for anybody on Earth, so we thought we’d just play for you,” Chris Martin told him. “It’s like our one-man concert.” Pesquet beamed it back down to Earth by satellite.
The thing you filed as impossible is somebody’s Tuesday now. Go find them, and renew it.
…to renew is to look again with new eyes…
To renew is to go back to something you set down and pick it up again, knowing what you know now. NASA once predicted the Shuttle would fly 24 missions a year. In 1985, its busiest year before Challenger, it flew 9. SpaceX landed its first Falcon 9 booster in December 2015, and in 2025 it flew 165 Falcon 9 launches, a new annual record. The impossible became routine while most of us were not watching.
The roadblock is expertise. The more you know about why something failed, the harder it is to see that the reasons have changed. Your experience is a map of the old ground. Use it to ask better questions, not to close the drawer again.
…a song about the astronaut in all of us…
Higher Power came out on May 7, 2021, the lead single from Music of the Spheres. Chris Martin had the title first and could not finish it, until he started hitting a resonant sink for a beat, went to the keyboard, “and the song just landed in one go.” He said “the song is about trying to find the astronaut in all of us, the person that can do amazing things.” It went to No. 12 in the UK and was nominated for a Grammy. In the album’s made-up solar system it is the planet Kaotica, and its video ends with Martin flying off into outer Space, which is about as clear as a band can be about where it wants to go.
…what I watched renew itself…
I watched as everyone got passionate about the Artemis launch recently… and the trip they took around the Dark Side of the Moon. I worked on that project… in 1987. Before I left the Space program, the technology they used was started then. Like the 386 processor still flying the Space station, the government and NASA just cannot keep up. Particularly now that the same voices will ask “why are we spending this on Space when…” exactly what happened in the 70’s when we left a completed Saturn V ready to go into Space as a model on the ground… to rot. A testimony to our short attention span…
This week was about Space: the Space between people, the Space in music, and the kind over our heads. Go find the astronaut in you.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Name 1 thing you filed as impossible 10 years ago, and find out this week who is doing it now.
If there is an old dream in the drawer you want to renew, let’s look at it together. Schedule time with me here.
Open the drawer, and let it lift you toward a… Higher Power
