Life lessons from NASA legends

A longtime friend in the space business invited me to an event that turned out to be special for several reasons, the most noteworthy being able to meet, listen to and talk with a true living legend from the glory years of NASA: Jay F. Honeycutt.

Honeycutt — now a spry and incredibly sharp 86-year old — had a remarkable career in the space business. It started at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, as an engineer in 1960, and culminated as the director of NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in 1997.

Honeycutt the guest of honor for a company called Lonestar Data Holdings — which seeks to protect our most sensitive data by placing it within encrypted vaults on the moon — and was being honored by having the company’s new mission control center named after him.

After Honeycutt literally cut the red ribbon leading to the “J.F. Honeycutt Mission Control Center” in St. Petersburg, Florida, he gave a brief speech in recognition of the honor. My ears perked up. 

Honeycutt outlined some of the rules he and other NASA legends used to survive and succeed in their literal life-and-death business — commonsense and pragmatic rules that apply to any person, business, entity or country.

Rule number one: “The key to success can be easily defined in just two words. The Boy Scouts have used the words for over 100 years: ‘Be prepared.’”

The space legend later addressed that bullet point by explaining why so many people, corporations or even nations are woefully unprepared to deal with the worst. In an age when information, troubled history and past mistakes are at our fingertips, fewer and fewer people, CEOs or world leaders seem to avail themselves of those basic lessons. As Honeycutt told me, “Too many people in search of instant results or profit are flying by the seat of their pants, don’t do the necessary homework and are not prepared.”

Honeycutt and I agreed that the power of “negative thinking” can often be used to avert disaster while seeking success. Envision the worst that could possibly happen and then work your way backwards.

This was a hallmark of NASA during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo years. Their engineers and team leaders would try to think of every possible scenario in which something could go wrong, and then print out the solution for that scenario and place it in a three-ring binder on a shelf.

With that history in mind, Honeycutt also quoted Gene Kranz, flight director for the Apollo moon landing program, who was made famous when actor Ed Harris played him in the film “Apollo 13.” Said Kranz: “The core principle of every control center, then and now, is to ask: ‘what if?’ If this happens, what do we do?”

Honeycutt then expanded upon that dilemma by quoting the great Chris Kraft, the “father” of Mission Control for NASA human space flight. As Kraft repeatedly said back in the day: “If somebody says that it can never fail, be prepared, because it probably will fail.”

That warning is even more relevant today than back in the 1960s. Today, much or most of our lives are literally controlled by technology. Things that “can never fail” — but, of course, often do.

Now, in the blink of an eye, if we lose our contact list, most of us can’t even remember the phone number of our mom or best friend. What was once committed to memory — or an old-fashioned Filofax — is now gone until our phone can be rebooted and the information restored.

Going back to the protection of our indispensable data, what is our backup plan for our most sensitive banking or personal information when the system which “can never fail” … fails?

Our three-letter U.S. intelligence agencies are now going back to paper files in secured filing cabinets within vaults. 1950s much?

What do they know that you don’t? That the technology that determines our lives can and will fail.

“Be prepared.” 

Next, Honeycutt quoted Kraft again: “If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.”

As Honeycutt stressed, “It’s a simple but powerful statement that must drive operational philosophy.”

When something critical does fail, don’t try to guess how to fix it. What was bad could be made irreversibly worse by the guesswork. Either find the expert in charge or, if it is a time-sensitive emergency, choose the option that will do the least damage if you do have to guess. The basic “Just unplug it and plug it back in” rule, as opposed to opening program after program and risking corrupting what was previously working properly. 

Last, Honeycutt touched upon two rules that work across the life, corporate and government spectrum. The first being: “Don’t change a plan in the heat of battle without thoroughly thinking it through.”

Meaning, oftentimes, the plan is viable. You just have to give current events time to catch up to its solutions. And if time does not catch up to it, switch to “Plan B.”

Again, “Be prepared.”

And last, as the old joke advises when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall, Honeycutt preached the classic: “Practice, practice, practice.”

As the U.S. and other nations — with all of our state-of-the-art technology — now struggle to get humanity back on the moon, maybe it would be a good idea to follow the advice and warnings of space legends who accomplished that “impossible” task six decades ago using slide rules, pocket protectors and cathode-ray tube technology.

Something to think about as we roll into 2024 and an increasingly surreal world. 

Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.