We Gotta Stop Saying "Space is Hard"
We know. That's not good enough.
It was challenging to decide what the first post on Anti-Hype would be after the short welcome that went out last month. Internal pressure (and excitement) to write about all things hardware has been building so long that I already have 25 drafts in the hopper covering everything from the danger of huffing grandiose mission statements, to the power of proper procedure, to a whole damn guide on how to bootstrap a hardware company through the early stages1.
I am excited to write all of these, and most are already in some state of partial completion. But still I found myself paralyzed wondering which one would best capture the constructively contrarian spirit I want to cultivate here at Anti-Hype.
I decided it’s this: We gotta stop saying space is hard.
We Already Know Space is Hard.
Yes, space is a challenging environment to work in. Sometimes it’s cold, and sometimes it's hot, too depending on your position with respect to the sun. Sometimes that changes a lot in a matter of hours, or even instantly across the exposure boundary of whatever thing you have floating around in orbit. Worse, it's a near-perfect vacuum and there isn't a lot of gravity, depending on where you set up shop. As you get further from earth, micrometeorites and radiation will eat you up. If they don’t then landing on another planet or even our neighboring heavenly body probably will.
But we already know all that! Hell, we've been flying up there for over 70 years at this point! Every American company launching a rocket, or a satellite, or even heading back to the moon has seven decades of publicly available, taxpayer-backed science, research, mission data, and precedence to pull from. I mean, worst case how many times did you watch Apollo 13 growing up?
Now, maybe *your* company didn't take any of that seriously, do the boring research, invest that slow effort, or even engineer your systems with proper process in place, but I’ll be damned if that isn’t a different problem altogether! That’s not space, that’s just a lack of discipline — it’s hubris!
You thought you were going to waltz on to the scene as a wunderkind and shake things up? You thought 70 years of missions in the bag meant we had the logistical and engineering wrinkles so ironed out they simply no longer had to be accounted for? Woof, big “gifted child” energy there.
No, friend, that’s not how this works. A mission to space is one of those few things in life that’s purely binary and every stage, every action, every moment is a new casting of lots. Mission success or mission failure, that’s it. Failure is always an option2, and usually the entropically favorable one at that.
We all know people and companies like this. Since my last company had just about every major New Space company as a client, I got to see it dozens of times from players old and new. Some were more memorable than others, like when a well-known CEO thought his launch pad would cost $2M, take 8 weeks to build, and require just two people to build and operate it.3
Or when I overheard a pitch to global investors by a different CEO that the mission was simple, solved, and the next round of cash was for the next shiny thing because you’ll be hockey-sticking your way to orbit any day now. Can’t forget about the time those same guys thought it would be ok for the first flight or two to just hit the ocean. That’s fine, I guess; it was their call.
But when that call gets made, the outcome must be owned! After the shit (often predictably) hits the fan sideways, one really shouldn’t be able to just tweet "space is hard" and move on to commit the same sins of poor process again, and again. Instead, the focus should be on the real, tangile things in front of us that are indeed quite challenging.
The Other Challenges
Raising money is hard.
Raising money is really tough, especially these days. I know that in order to stand out, it is easier to tell investors what they want to hear and sell them the hype. But the bill eventually comes due, even if you were lucky enough to enjoy a few fun months skipping the IPO process and SPAC'ing before you had a real product. These shenanigans make it harder for other hardware founders in the future. Quit salting the earth.
Hitting technical milestones is hard.
Once you raise a little money, now you have to hit technical milestones. This is hard because engineering is decidedly distinct from physics, and generally it’s a huge pain in the ass to get the two to line up while also respecting your timeline and budget. However, the answer to these difficulties is not to underfund development and cut schedules in half as a form of motivation. It definitely isn’t cutting down your qualification program until only a cynical series of check boxes remains, nor is it throwing out proper procedure in an attempt to ‘cut bureaucracy’ and go faster.
Managing people is hard.
Worse, than meeting technical milestones is managing the people who do the engineering. Yes, I am talking about managing engineers, a phrase that is enough to cause former PM’s to break out in hives, throw their iPhone in the ocean, and join a commune beyond the reaches of Microsoft Project. It would have helped if you’d trained actual managers, instead of just promoting the loudest, most opinionated engineers, but too late for that now, I guess, it’s time for mission!
Making money in space is damn hard.
Cool, you made it to space! Now the trouble really begins because the further you get from earth — the place where dyed pieces of cotton paper overcome their non-intrinsic value by being blessed as fiat currency — the less chance any business model is going to work. As venture dollars wane (and with the IPO markets essentially closed) all revenue roads near the space industry run directly through NASA and the DOD, sooner or later.
Right now, the companies racing to return humans to the Moon, as well as to replace the ISS with a commercial alternative, are struggling to find real, established, paying customers. That’s not to say the mission or the science of both aren’t important, because they are. Rather, it’s just to say that behind closed doors everyone is whispering their worry that the only LOI’s they’ve managed to sign are with a bunch of other shaky startups who also need two or three miracles each in order to survive.
The whole thing ends up looking like the Spiderman pointing meme.
Firing an entire company should be hard.
Then the hard times really hit, because without money coming in from investors of customers, the layoffs begin. It would be cool if you didn’t do it over Zoom, or email, and it would be especially cool if you didn’t hose everyone out of their livelihoods before taking a golden parachute for yourself.
Hardware Matters & Space is the Standard Bearer
The reason this matters is because hardware is key to unlocking a sustainable future on this planet, and learning more about the universe around us. Machines are fundamental to how we make energy, grow food with modern agriculture, and save lives with modern medicine. Hardware is the foundation from which we support a growing world while working to improve outcomes for everyone.
And the reason I am picking on the space industry is because, for better or worse, it is the standard bearer for how hardware projects are developed. Everyone from energy startups to the gundo boys look to the modern space industry as standard for how hardware is developed and deployed.4
So, if we want to spin in circles burning investor dollars and customer goodwill all while steadily eroding public trust before letting that virus spread to energy, defense, and every other hardware-heavy industry while the earth burns around us, then I have good news: we’re on the right track! We have the right mindset and we must do nothing more than let the process play out. It’s only natural in that scenario that “space is hard” or whatever shrugging non-mea-culpa applies to the industry in question is as close to accountability as anyone will get.
The real consequence is that if we build enough failed, sloppy projects we will forget how to build anything of consequence. We deserve better, and we must demand better both of our others and of ourselves if we want the future humanity truly deserves.
While the majority of posts here on A-H will be free, this guide (and others like it) will only be available to paid subscribers!
More on this soon. The number of times I have heard people in-tone “failure is a not an option” as some kind of ward, rather than the warning it was meant to be… oof.
Final tally over $100 million, and many, many years of effort.
Not to mention, what the CEO’s look like and how they think they should act.