What Startups Can Learn From The Philae Lander
Like millions of people, I spent a large part of Wednesday watching the live stream of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission landing its Philae Probe on the surface of Comet 67P.
The landing was successful and the achievement so epic that the scientist announcing it literally dropped his mic.
However, despite the amazing planning and execution that led to a portable space lab flying ten years through the Solar System and setting up shop on a freakin comet, Philae ended up hugging a cliff and only getting a tiny amount of sunlight on its solar panels, which means it’s only getting a fraction of the energy it needs to stay powered.
With many of the mission’s objectives fulfilled, it’s not fair to call this turn of events a Failure, but it is for sure a disappointment when considering how much more Philae could do (and possibly will do as the comet’s angle to the sun changes over time).
For me personally, watching the ESA team present this achievement struck a special nerve. While nowhere as audacious as sending a probe onto a comet 30 light minutes away, I’ve been spending the past few months co-founding AweVid, a startup with the mission to change how real world happenings are experienced.
Our vision is of a world that’s as far from the current state of the world as comet 67P is far from Earth, and step by step we’re working to make that vision a reality.
So what can startup founders learn from the current fate of the Rosetta Mission?
Shoot for the stars
With the right team and a ton of work, even landing a robot on a comet is possible. Every member of the Rosetta team could probably work on something easier, with better benefits, and without waiting 10 years to see the results of their work, but they chose to work on the complicated, on the extreme, on the crazy vision, and history will remember them for it.
Dream big and make it a reality.
Be ready to handle the unexpected
In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries provides an analogy that kept ringing my head’s bells long after I put the book down.
Paraphrased by Derek Sivers it is:
Too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. They prescribe the steps to take and the results to expect in excruciating detail, and as in planning to launch a rocket, they are set up in such a way that even tiny errors in assumptions can lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Obviously, the Rosetta Mission was not the pre-set rocket launch sort of mission described in this analogy (even the 60's Apollo mission had plenty room for mid-mission adjustments) but the essence stays true: when your assumptions turn out to be wrong, you need to have the ability to steer around those misassumptions.
You might be planning on going to a comet. You will need power to run your science stuff while hanging out on the comet.
You make an assumption that sounds perfectly valid: there will be plenty of free energy coming from the Sun. You coat your comet robot with state of the art solar panels and send it to space.
Ten years later it lands in the cool shade of a comet cliff, its battery power is quickly draining, and attempting to move it requires you to send a command and wait an hour to receive a response.
Without criticizing Philae’s designers (which undeniably did an amazing job) — things will go wrong in every possible way that you currently cannot imagine. If you consider something to be obvious (“obviously there will be plenty sunlight on a comet’s surface”) it will be catastrophic when it turns out to be false.
Work hard to identify your assumptions, test them early, and be ready for them to turn out to be proven wrong.
Make the best of the situation
No power? No problem.
Philae has a thick battery pack on it, and the team made the best of using every bit of pre-charged power to run their planned experiments.
I can’t imagine how low spirits were in Philae’s control room upon learning the power situation. The team spent the past 10 years waiting to be able to run their experiments, and now they have to go to standby just a couple of days after finally landing.
But in spite of those feelings, they worked their hardest and got most of their planned experiments done in time.
Use everything you have to complete your mission, even when it looks like all hope is lost.
