NASA and the ability for a government program to be startup-like, as well as my impression that test pilots were selected only for bravado. I'm reading Carryin

NASA and the ability for a government program to be startup-like, as well as my impression that test pilots were selected only for bravado. I'm reading Carrying The Fire, a book by the Gemini and Apollo astronaut Michael Collins. I was totally caught off-guard about how fast-paced, creative and generally entrepreneurial the early space program was. A common description of their working life was that people on a space mission put in insanely long hours because they were captivated by the long term vision and routinely made fun of other areas of the government where people were just punching the clock. Even working with otherwise disagreeable folk was tolerated. Collins on learning that he'd have to work with John Young on Gemini 10: "...besides, I would have flown by myself or with a kangaroo - I just wanted to fly. All that stuff about crew psychology compatibility is crap. Almost anyone can put up with almost anyone else for a clearly defined period of time in pursuit of a mutual object important to each." Also, I thought test pilots were crazy people with a death wish, probably because of The Right Stuff. Turns out they practice a form of user-centered design and consider themselves as advocates for the end user (pilots in the field). It doesn't surprise me that the current field of HCI was born from the study of airplane cockpits. A joke in the book was about the true story of emergency instructions printed on the inside of a canopy - all the steps after the first one were completely unusable in the context of a real emergency because step #1 was to blast off the canopy.