remarkable. But large Federal agencies are not, as a rule, the best place for generating new ideas. The Atomic Energy Commission explicitly recognized this when it turned over its research and development work to contractor operated facilities. Without going so far, NASA officials have conceded that many of the most creative ideas for its programs will come from outside, from contractors, universities, and advisory committees. The point is that the seminal ideas — the capital off which the sponsoring agency will live for a generation - may be generated in a short span, but their working out is a complex, lengthy, and very expensive process that only a large organization can manage.

Our third and final point is that a research installation of the right size (see Chapter IV) should always do some research in advance of current needs. Defensive research, such as NASA's Research and Technology program, serves many purposes: It provides the agency with a portfolio of ideas which may reach the development stage — in some cases, 20 to 25 years after they were first conceived (the orbiting Space Telescope is an example); it is a way of making effective use of young engineers and scientists just starting their careers; and as our case studies illustrate, it may reshape the entire installation so that its mission coincides with, or becomes part of, those disciplines which appear to be at the leading edge

microelectronics or artificial intelligence as opposed to civil engineering. The more formal a management system is, the more time-consuming the review process becomes and the less likely it becomes that anything genuinely new will emerge from the organization. Basic research not tied to a specific project is one of the ways by which a technology development organization stays alive.

CHAPTER VI

Projects: The Ultimate Reality

Definition of the Subject

In the past five chapters, we have described the process of technology development in some detail and we have tried to define the features of the institutions in which it is practiced. We have stressed that the process of technology development in the end should lead to some "practical" application of the technology that is being created and developed. In the institutions that we are concerned with we do not study solid-state physics for its own sake but rather to create (say) small light sensitive detector elements that ultimately will be used to take better pictures of the planet Mars, or perhaps of Russian ICBM installations to monitor arms control agreements. The application of the technology being developed requires that it be used in some kind of a "system" designed to accomplish some end. The creation of this system is usually accomplished by carrying out a project. The word "project" itself is quite neutral and can mean anything from building a bridge or a group of tract houses to creating a Broadway show. In the context of technology development, however, it has come to mean something special, with sometimes unfortunate results.

The use of project methods is nothing new in facilitating the application of new technology, and history abounds with good examples - such as the construction of the "Monitor" in about six months in 1862 under the leadership of John Ericsson. The Manhattan Project and Apollo were much more complex and the results were apparently so much greater than anything heretofore attempted that some people began to believe that there was something magical about the project approach, independent of the technological substance of the project. Indeed, many government officials believed that the project approach could be transferred bodily to the solution of hitherto intractable social problems. The project approach was to be adapted to developing modular, low-cost, factory-built housing; to transferring available technology to municipal and county governments; to starting a Dial-a-Ride program intended to combine the advantages of urban mass transit with the convenience of an automobile; and even to building a "Personal Rapid Transit System" (with the Jet

Propulsion Laboratory as prime contractor), a guideway with small cars which could pick up and discharge passengers on demand (ref. 97). None of these projects was an unqualified success and some (the Personal Rapid Transit System in particular) were, frankly, white elephants.

Despite these reservations, we regard the project approach for applying new technology to be of central importance. That is why we are devoting a chapter to it. But to understand the advantages and limitations of projects better, we must begin with some definitions. Whatever else may be said about them, all projects have the following four features: They are planned to have a definite beginning and end; they have a specific goal; there is a fairly precise limit to the number of people, below which the activity is a research task, above which it becomes coextensive with the agency's mission; and they all involve more than one science or engineering discipline, so that the larger the project, the greater the need for coordination.

It is rarely the case in a large project that the manager will be accountable to only one official in one organization. In a NASA flight project, for example, the manager will interface to use a horribly technocratic but useful word with the Headquarters program manager, representatives of the prime contractors, principal investigators who design and develop experiments to be flown, subsystems managers, contracts officers, and, of course, the management of the laboratory at which the project is located. Thus a project of any complexity leads to a systematic, continuous review of all the elements, as they move from conception to hardware; to a breaking down of organizational barriers, so that the manager may draw on the requisite skills, wherever in the organization they may be located; to a sharing of authority; and to a constant flow of communication among all the managers in the project organization (ref. 98).

Having defined a project, the question we would ask is, What are the advantages and disadvantages of the project approach? The principal advantage is that, in the words of a National Research Council report, "projects often provide the ultimate reality." (ref. 99.) It is one thing to originate a concept for a new aeronautical vehicle, nuclear reactor, computer, ship, or spacecraft, another to "prove" the concept, in NASA jargon. As the report notes, "Projects are practical demonstrations. New equipment must function well, performance is measured against the previous experience, and success needs to be achieved."

By bringing together people in many technical disciplines, the project may lead to interactions that could occur in no other way. Another, quite different, advantage of a large project is that it builds political constituencies willing to support the agency's mission. A project, even a small one, has a visibility that a technology development task lacks. And when the project is very large, as with Apollo, it may

even bring in research and technology development work on its coattails that might never have been funded on its own.

Yet the project approach sometimes entails heavy penalties when it is pushed to the exclusion of other approaches and becomes a brute force effort to achieve a goal, or freezes technology prematurely. The tendency of large projects to close out options is one of the hidden costs associated with this approach. There is no better example of this effect than the choice of the mission mode for the lunar landing. In the preceding chapter, mention was made of the events leading to NASA's selection in 1962 of lunar-orbit rendezvous for Apollo. On strictly technical grounds, lunar-orbit rendezvous was a great success, since the lunar landing was achieved on schedule. But it also ensured that Apollo would be a dead end. By 1969, it was apparent that there was no logical sequel to the lunar landing, and that the agency would have to redeploy its resources in a radically different direction. Had NASA selected earth-orbit rendezvous instead, the lunar landing could still have been achieved and NASA would have had at least a ten-year start on deploying an orbiting space station, rather than waiting until 1982 to let study contracts for its design.

Another example of premature commitment to a certain approach refers to several of NASA's more advanced scientific satellites. As we shall see, there is considerable (although not conclusive) evidence that the Orbiting Astronomical Observatories launched by NASA between 1966 and 1972 represented too great a forcing of the available technology. Several of the agency's scientific advisors argued unsuccessfully in favor of cheaper, less ambitious satellites that might have returned data earlier. What is more interesting, some senior NASA officials came to believe, after the fact, that their advisors had been right.

It may be that what was wrong with these decisions — if, in fact, they were wrong—was the decisions and not the project approach itself. But we would argue that the decision to select one method to the exclusion of others is inherent in the project approach to technology development; that it is usually neither possible nor even desirable to attempt all feasible alternatives simultaneously; and that it is precisely the business of an institution's or agency's senior management to study the long-range implications of projects that the line organization wants. Whatever the merits of a phased project approach, it becomes exceedingly difficult to alter the design, as opposed to the purpose, of a project, once it goes beyond the advanced study stage. Once the decision to proceed with (say) Apollo had been made, a projectized approach was inevitable. But as a result, the Apollo project, in the words of one scholar, "could not capitalize on most post-1962 developments, and therefore placed less relative emphasis on basic development. Advanced development in the NASA program as a whole had to be a matter of secondary emphasis." (ref. 100.)