Iterating to the Stars

Alyssa Levitz

When I finished House of Cards and needed something new to watch on Netflix, I mostly randomly settled on When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. (Side note: Really helped in restoring my faith in humanity.) In the decade-ish leading up to the moon landing, the scientists and astronauts at NASA made some amazing advances. They all seem like giant leaps at first glance, but what this documentary shows is that they actually divided it into as small chunks as possible to prove the concept and get the information they needed to move to the next step.

The Mercury missions were about getting humans into orbit. First a monkey, then just getting someone up to near space, then getting someone there for one orbit around the earth, then two, then many.

The Gemini missions came next, and they were about learning the key skills needed to survive a trip to the moon. How do you do further-out orbit? How do you have two space modules fly near each other? Dock to each other? How do you work in zero G? What happens to people when they spend two weeks in space?

Then, of course, Apollo. Testing the new big module on Earth with lots of pressure around it (during which three astronauts died). Testing lunar landing vehicles on earth. Testing lunar landing vehicles in orbit around the earth. And and and…

You can’t just go to the moon. You have to accept that you don’t know lots of things and that you’re going to make a lot of mistakes along the way, but you’ll recover from those mistakes and correct your course. And if iterative projects were good enough for NASA, then they’re good enough for me.

Alyssa Levitz is a Product Manager at Yammer. She is best known for shouting YAMMER NORTH whenever anyone says Yammer North (our Redmond team).