Real work, real people - Lessons from the Hubble
WSJ published a commentary that is a great reminder about who we are and why we get up and work each day… For those of you who haven’t been watching, the guys in space were floating around repairing this magnificent peice of engineering. They had a few problems with the bolts being stuck. Below are a few snippets and the link to the full commentary:
The news inundates us now with daily battle reports from the low-grade war that is America’s politics. One cost is a national preoccupation with failure.
Politics always and forever is about the failure of others. President Obama appears before us daily, and that ensures we will hear again about “the failed policies of the past.” The laws of political physics then require that his opponents crack back at his manifest failures. To spend all one’s time with politics is to marinate in failure.
It becomes easy to forget that most people go to work each day to succeed, not fail. Still, it was startling last week to catch sight on TV of men floating in space. This was Servicing Mission 4, NASA’s long-scheduled flight to fix the space-based Hubble telescope.
On the Sticking Bolts, ya gotta love the humor of the situation…
“I don’t think it’s coming out, Drew,” astronaut Mike Massimino said to Drew Feustel on spacewalk four as he fought a bolt on a handrail attached to the Hubble’s spectrograph, which transforms light into colors that reveal celestial chemistry.
Mike Massimino did what you’d do; he sucked in his breath and muscled it. It gave. But you wouldn’t have had to then remove 111 little screws from the cover plate, and make sure none of them floated into space.
And the lessons to be learned
Lessons abound in what one witnessed during the 11-day mission to restore the legendary Hubble, which ends tomorrow when the astronauts land in Florida. Here’s one: Like the Hubble team, try to be lucky enough once in life to be part of a great project worked by great people — the early Microsoft or Genentech, the Manhattan Project, the 1927 New York Yankees, many now-gone Wall Street financial “shops” at the top of their game, or the Iraq surge. It’s an ethos of team-driven possibility caught in the famous title of a book, “The Soul of a New Machine.”
I’ve been part of great teams. Nothing like it.
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