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A Stellar Achievement (Part 2)
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Having detailed the February test firing of the U.K.’s Skylark at the Woomera rocket range in Australia, and with U.S. plans to launch 12 artificial satellites from Cape Canaveral, it notes in passing that the USSR “has also announced an intention to launch artificial Earth satellites.”
Of course, the editors of Science News (issue number 45, published by Penguin Books in August 1957, price two shillings and six pence--or about 24 cents in today’s money)--from which that sentence is taken--could have had no inkling of how historical hindsight would load that laconic observation with the shape of things to come. But the launch of Sputnik, under the banner of the International Geophysical Year 1957-58, set in motion a train of events that still continues today.
In Part 1 we looked at how, in the wake of Sputnik, a singular vision statement and the contemplation of a catastrophic failure reflected the central role that project management played in the space race. In Part 2, we will look at some further examples.
Get with the program
If you play the word association game and offer up program, nine times out of 10 most people will respond with a computing or software association. But I belong to that quirky minority who automatically think: shiny silver spacesuit. As a child of the Space Age, what I learnt as I watched the slo-mo …
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"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world." - George Bernard Shaw |