Amateur enthusiast beats NASA with a helium balloon
Written by Martin Jacobsen
This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 9:30 am and is filed under Innovation, Integrated Thinking, Transformation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
What is true, radical innovation? It is hard to provide a single, unified answer to such question, but this blog post will present an example of what we believe is an excellent example of integrated thinking and innovation.
For years, NASA has been the primary force in exploring what’s above the sky. They have led countless spaceships into, well yes, space, been a leading force in the ISS Space Station, landed on the moon in 1969 and given us unseen footage and knowledge via the Hubble Telescope and satellites.
So, you would think that their near limitless budget would ensure their leading role in everything they do? Well, think again. British amateur enthusiast Robert Harrison wanted to take his own photos of space. Browsing through the Internet, Harrison found the recipe for what ended as an enormous success. With a $747 setup consisting of a helium balloon, a GPS tracking device, a small parachute and a camera programmed to sleep and reactivate every five minutes to take eight photos and record video. Dubbed “Icarus”, he launched the balloon and the camera rig – and the result is absolutely spectacular.
After posting the results on the Internet, the footage buzzed around the web, and caught the attention of mighty NASA. They phoned him up, curious to know how he had done it. Certain that he must have used an expensive (home made) rocket, they were amazed and bedazzled when they realised that it was a home made $747-camera rig that had outperformed their million dollar setups.
And the learning? NASA is a huge organisation with 17,900 highly skilled employees and a $17.7 billion budget. Still, one single amateur came up with a solution far superior to those of NASA. And why? Harrison didn’t have any managers to refer to, bureaucracy to fight or meetings to attend. He just had an idea and the curiosity to pursue it. So he did. That is a truly fascinating story about a single persons “Skunk Worked” project. And perhaps NASA should give that same “Skunk Works” model a go?
(Source: Gnews.com, Wikipedia, Robertharrison.org and Flickr)
Tags: Innovation, Integrated Thinking, NASA
One Response to “Amateur enthusiast beats NASA with a helium balloon”
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NASA is as much a government body as any of this world, and with a multi-billion-dollar budget they are of course compelled to spend it – and keep a lot of people employed in the process. They should be spending their money on innovation and stuff that FOR SURE is beyond the possibilities of individual people and utilise their strength – size & clout – to e.g. go to the Moon or Mars. But of course – full marks to Mr Harrison for his amazing feat!