SPACEX – To Simplicity and Beyond

Admittedly, my knowledge of space exploration comes from the likes of such movies as Armageddon, Apollo 13, Gravity and The Martian so my perception of reality is somewhat skewed when it comes the recent SpaceX missions.

However, whilst watching out for the SpaceX Dragon aircraft overhead, with Aerosmith’s - I don’t want to miss a thing playing in my head, it prompted me to look into this a bit more and understand the point and purpose of such missions.

I mean a short haul flight to somewhere in Europe makes my palms sweat, so if commercial flights to space do take off (excuse the pun) then you won’t find me at the front of the queue!

So, in my self-appointed home schooling on a brief history of space travel, I first learned that Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut was the first person in space in orbiting the Earth in a Vostok spacecraft on April 12, 1961. Then about a month later an American Alan Shephard, Jr joined the club in a 15-minute flight watched by 45 million television viewers.

In these early days a race to see who can get there first and then pushing boundaries. It’s pushing these boundaries which makes me understand a bit more as to the point and purpose of these missions.

The race began in 1957 when the US and USSR made their statements of intent but go back to such authors as H.G. Wells, the concept in all its fiction was in people’s minds. So be it fiction or reality, if the questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ aren’t ever asked then how will things ever evolve?

Rather like the current world of Unified Communications, with vendor one-upmanship and who can release the latest and greatest bit of kit.

One thing that jumps out when looking at different spacecraft through the years is what you see in the cockpit and how this has evolved…

It’s a reminder of just why continual improvement is so important, and actually that there is so much more to reaching a desired outcome than just the latest thing for the sake of having the latest thing.

Do you think Yuri Gagarin said after that flight, ‘It went okaaaay, but I just have all of those buttons on smart touch display that I can intuitively use?’ Aside from the fact that the technology to do this wouldn’t have existed back then, I doubt it.

However, they would have asked many questions around why things happened and what if we could do it slightly differently next time and what challenges occured which we can overcome.

You couldn’t for example go from Vostok 1 to the SpaceX dragon craft without all the steps in between in engineering and the evolution of technology to enable this.

Comparisons could be drawn when it comes to evolving a Unified Communications strategy in the workplace with learning, discovery and continual business improvements made on many different levels.

·        Outcome – Why? When? How? What if?

·        Human – Workflow, Intuition, Ergonomics, Abilities, Preferences, Behaviour

·        Hardware – What’s available? What’s possible? What's Needed?

·        Service – Platform, Connectivity, Network, Interoperability

·        Support – SLA, Uptime, Availability

·        Security – ISO, Policies, Physical, Logical

·        Continual Improvement – Reporting, Feedback, Evolution

There are a lot more things to think about than you might think to get all of the above right.

Elon Musk's SpaceX will launch 60 satellites into space tonight (03/06/20), as part of its Starlink fleet with a new total of 482.

“SpaceX is leveraging its experience in building rockets and spacecraft to deploy the world's most advanced broadband internet system.”

They weren’t saying this in the 1950’s that’s for sure but I do now understand the point and purpose of such missions. Evolution and Continual Improvement.

According to Find Starlink, the satellites will be visible from the UK at: