Moore’s Law encapsulates a number of economic and technological practices that have come to dominate modern economies. The power of imagination joined with the human capacity for tool-making leads to inventions that make various activities easier or more desirable. The steam turbine leads to the jet engine; the vacuum tube becomes the transistor; an eyeglass is transformed into a telescope.
Amplifying this trend, the economic theory of competition in an open market provides an incentive for providers to innovate. A firm that manufactures integrated circuits must increase the capacity of its product or reduce its cost (or both), or face the likelihood that the company will go out of business in a few years. Moore’s observation specifically predicts that the number of transistors that humans can fit on an integrated circuit will double every eighteen months. If one firm does not do it, another will.
An innovation can be a new idea that changes the way in which humans conduct their lives. It may take the form of an improvement in an existing device or process. Speaking generally, it typically makes some activity cheaper, faster, easier, more effective, or more accessible to a wider range of people.
When innovation occurs, the pace of change is often exponential. Its characteristics resemble an ever-ascending curve in which each new change becomes more profound than its predecessors. Two becomes four becomes eight and so on past one hundred. Eventually the pace of change becomes so rapid that the applications of new technologies become difficult to predict. 1
Importantly, innovation contributes to economic growth. Economists estimate that approximately 70% of economic growth in the late twentieth century flowed directly from advances in information technology. In turn, economic growth promotes political stability, reduces government deficits, and allows societies to accomplish tasks they could not previously afford to undertake (like producing clean energy or traveling to Mars). 2
Innovations that follow the characteristics of Moore’s Law have affected many sectors of modern society. Such innovations have fostered the modern jet transport industry, propelled advances in the computer industry, revolutionized the broadcast of electromagnetic signals, reduced the risks of medical procedures, and produced the amazing world of nanotechnology.
A Characterization of Innovation
In twentieth-century America innovation has entered the lexicon of the success story, especially those stories associated with technology. And no society has been more enamored with innovation and what it might do for it or to it than modern America. 3 If there is one hallmark of the American people, it is their enthusiasm for technology and what it can help them to accomplish. Historian Perry Miller wrote of the Puritans of New England that they “flung themselves in the technological torrent, how they shouted with glee in the midst of the cataract, and cried to each other as they went headlong down the chute that here was their destiny” as they used technology to transform a wilderness into their “City upon a hill.” 4 Since that time the USA has been known as a nation of technological system builders who could use this ability to create great machines, and the components of their operation, of wonder.
For the twentieth century no set of technological innovations are more intriguing than those associated with spaceflight. The compelling nature of this effort, and the activity that it has engendered on the part of many peoples and governments, makes the development of space technology an important area of investigation. Accordingly, there are many avenues of historical exploration at this juncture. Why did space technology take the shape it did; which individuals and organizations were involved in driving it; what factors influenced particular choices of scientific objectives and technologies to be used; and what were the political, economic, managerial, international, and cultural contexts in which the events of the space age have unfolded?
More importantly, how has innovation affected this technology? If there is a folklore in the public mind about the history of space engineering, it is the story of genius and its role in innovation . Americans love the idea of the lone inventor, especially if that inventor strives against all odds to develop some revolutionary piece of technology in a basement or garage. There have been enough instances of this in US history to feed this folklore and allow it to persist. The “Renaissance man” with a broad background who can build a technological system from the ground up permeates this ideal. We see this in the story of Robert Goddard and Elon Musk , though neither was as innovative nor as singular in his accomplishments as the public believes. 5
Perhaps the central ingredient guiding the innovative process in space is the set of interrelationships that make up the enterprise. Since human beings are at the core of this enterprise, the complexity expands to include chance and nonlinear factors endemic to the real world of people. The challenge for the historian interested in the development of innovation is that these complexities make the innovation process exceptionally difficult to analyze and explain in a form understandable to any but the most probing specialists. The relationships between technological innovation ; various institutions; innovative concepts, practices, or organizations; and the people associated with each are intrinsically complex. Essentially nonlinear, these relationships allow innovation to take place, no doubt, but there does not seem to be a way to guarantee it. Those who seek to command innovation find that changes in inputs to various aspects of systems, themselves designed to yield innovative alterations, do not necessarily ensure proportionate positive developments in output. It is nonlinearity writ large. 6
Historians interested in innovation in aviation and spaceflight have much to learn from the sciences and the evolution of “chaos” theory. First developed as an identifiable unit of scientific theory in the mid-1970s, chaos theory asserts that the universe cannot be understood using standard approaches, but only with the acceptance of “nonrandom complicated motions that exhibit a very rapid growth of errors that, despite perfect determinism, inhibits any pragmatic ability to render long-term predictions.” 7 The implications of these scientific theories offer profound opportunities for historians by suggesting that the world does not work in a deterministic, automatic fashion. They suggest that to all of the other factors that account for change in history with which the discipline has been wrestling since the beginning of the study of human affairs, we must add literally thousands of other independent variables not previously considered. As practitioners of an art, not a science, historians must, in coming to grips with aeronautical and astronautical innovation , understand and explain the complex interrelationships of institutions and cultures, myriad actions and agendas, technologies and their evolution, the uncertainties of conflict and cooperation in human relations, and the inexactitude of possibilities. That is a task not without difficulties.
The Innovation Process
Notwithstanding the complexity of the innovation process, and its inexact and nonlinear nature, both those engaged in seeking it and those recording it tend to seek order, clarity, and linearity. These are ultimately foolhardy goals, and the essays in this volume help to overcome this tendency by embracing the complexity and noting that even the actors in the innovation dramas depicted often did not understand the process. An opaqueness to the entire process frequently seems to be the most salient feature. To a very real extent, innovation in spaceflight is an example of heterogeneous engineering, which recognizes that technological issues are simultaneously organizational, economic, social, cultural, political, and on occasion irrational. Various interests tend to clash in the decision-making process as difficult calculations have to be made. What perhaps should be suggested is that a complex web or system of ties between various people, institutions, and interests shaped air- and spacecraft as they eventually evolved. 8 When these were combined they made it possible to develop machines that satisfied the majority of the priorities brought into the political process by the various parties concerned with the issue at the time, but that left other priorities untamed.
This raises the specter of Moore’s Law once again. Those who question its applicability to spaceflight base their ideas on the US experience with rockets in general and spacecraft that hold human beings. Various attempts between 1972 and the present to reduce the cost of space transportation “by a factor of ten” did not materialize. With f...