Why innovation isn’t Rocket Science, it is Rocket Engineering.

Nathan Boyega
8 min readNov 19, 2022

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I’m sure George Bush is somewhere reeling in his grave that I reconstructed his idiom into this. But in my defence, this title is not supposed to be figurative, it is actually quite literal and it follows a different narrative.

An astronaut stands on the moon with the american flag rooted on the ground. A remastered photo of the Apollo 15 mission which land the first men on the moon.
Remastered photo of the Apollo 15 mission which land the first men on the moon. Obtained by USA TODAY (NASA /JSC /ASU / ANDY SAUNDERS)

Have you seen a rocket in person? No? Well, I haven’t either. But I did spend the earlier part of my life gathering as much information as I could about ‘rocketology’.

You see, before I even knew what all three of my names were, my parents already decided what my career path was and up until the year I graduated high school. Whenever I was asked about what I wanted to study in the future, only two words left my mouth — Aeronautic Engineering. While I don’t pretend to be remotely as knowledgeable as experts in the aerospace field, I did learn as much as I could, enthusiastically.

How NASA build rockets

Observers watch the the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla: the Bumper 2.
The launch of the first rocket, in 1950, from Cape Canaveral, Fla: the Bumper 2, an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a Corporal rocket. Image credit: NASA

The word Rocket science itself is used to depict something notoriously difficult, something that’s considered incomprehensible to the Average Joe, and for good reason too. Because when you really think about it, no other engineering discipline comes close to rivalling it in terms of the difficulty and complexity of maintaining an interface for seamless operation. Taking away all the mathematics and physics from the development process, building a rocket isn’t actually rocket science, it’s rocket engineering.

The engineering process is a series of steps and procedures engineers use to find solutions to problems. More often than not, the solution is developed to solve, answer, manage, or accomplish a specific task.

In the case of aerospace travel, rockets were designed to help with space exploration. However, the nature of every travel is not always the same and special modifications have to be made depending on the objective of the mission.

“What is the mission?”

This is usually the first question engineers ask when building a rocket.

You could interpret that as: What is the objective? What problems are we supposed to solve? What issues do we need answers to?

Rockets cannot be built generically. A weaponized rocket differs in functionality from that for space exploration or carrying passengers- humans or artificial satellites. By defining the purpose of the rocket, engineers can immediately identify the problem and set a clear objective to create a solution to that problem.

Mission: Operation Paperclip

After the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union needed a way to successfully put their satellites into space. Before then, all they had were ‘rockets’ that could reach higher altitudes than air balloons could, which still fell short of escape velocity — the minimum speed needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull.

At that moment, the Germans were the leading experts on rocket science, particularly focused on using rockets as weapons. The Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel) led by Wernher von Braun worked on developing the V-2 rocket, which was used during the world war against London. Just before the war ended, the allied forces got to witness the devastation of the V-2 rocket, a weapon capable of clearing out a whole city.

Wernher von Braun, the man that led the first development of the V-2 rocket, sits with a desk in front of him. On the desks are models of the V-2 rocket.
Wernher von Braun led the first development of the V-2 rocket. Image credit: NASA

Fortunately for England, the devastation caused by the V-2 wasn’t enough to change the outcome of the war. From the fragrant display by the Germans, one nameless American was able to suggest that the rockets designed by the Germans could be pivotal in how they solved the issue of building enough speed to escape the earth’s gravity. And in doing so, this person was able to brainstorm a possible solution to the earlier identified problem.

This suggestion birthed a whole special not-so-secret-anymore intelligence program — Operation Overcast a.k.a Operation Paper Clip.

This brings us to an important aspect of the engineering process — collaboration.

“Collaboration and augmentation are the foundational principles of innovation” — Vaclav Smil

The United States allied forces and the Soviet Union began resourcing and hunting for German tech and weapons from the war, then finally thought, instead of the creation, why not go after the “brains behind the creation.” So on thought, 1600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and Technicians were smuggled into the U.S for government employment and granted absolution of their war crimes.

Mission Impossible: Back to the drawing board

The United States (and Russia) employed the services of people more knowledgeable than they were to assist them in winning the space race to the moon. The contest was actually a demonstration of superiority between both countries in technological and military prowess and the space race was just a cover competition. By using the initial designs of the rocket V-2, both countries were able to develop rockets that were capable of beating the earth’s gravitational pull.

While the Russians did it first with Sputnik 1, launching the first artificial satellite into space, and shortly after, another satellite was launched into orbit with a rocket, (this time carrying a dog, Laika, that died peacefully in a sleep seven days after due to lack of oxygen), the United States paid very close attention to the milestones reached by its soviet counterpart.

However, while the Soviet Union celebrated this astronomical success, the Americans under a new co-operate body called NASA saw another problem — returning the spacecraft or space shuttle back to Earth. If not everything and anything sent there were going to have a one-way trip till they ran out of oxygen and died.

Laika in a training capsule before her mission to space. Photograph by Sputnik / Alamy. Image credit: The NewYorker.

Design, build, test, evaluate, and redesign… the iterative process of engineering.

NASA worked with German experts and came up with a solution, the Saturn V — a super heavy-lift launch shuttle that carried inside it the Saturn IB — a lander housing the living subjects of travel, or astronauts. While the last part of the multi-component shuttle continued to hover around the moon’s orbit, the lander would settle on a preferred spot. This was the whole plot of the Apollo mission and it was how the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon.

The whole engineering process for building a Rocket is very similar to the process of innovation. It is the same thing!

Innovation is an iterative process — identify the problem, brainstorm solutions, single out the best possible solution, collaborate, design a prototype, test and evaluate, if necessary redesign.

To expatiate, let’s revisit the story of the computer mouse.

In the 80s’, Apple were on the verge of releasing their latest computer, LISA. Steve Jobs, however, felt that the product was incomplete and toured the Palo Alto Research Center in search of anything that would perfect his about-to-be-released product. He arrived in front of the original mouse created by Douglas Engelbart for the Xerox computer. And after a demonstration, Jobs saw how the mouse could improve human interaction with their computers and fought to gain access to use the device, going as far as selling a hundred thousand of Apple’s shares to Xerox Cooperation.

Steve Jobs holding the first Lisa mouse. Photography by Ted Thai — Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

There was a reason the device never caught on with people when it was first created and Jobs knew he had to do something to make it better and more desirable. He identified the core problems with the original invention and highlighted the best possible solutions to them. Steve Jobs lacked the technical know-how to implement these solutions into a feasible product. So he employed the services of a design firm, IDEO, under the leadership of David Kelly.

Their job was simple; to create a replica of the original mouse that was cheaper, simpler, more efficient and easy to replicate.

In Jobs’s words, “Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my blue jeans”

Having a clear objective of what to do, Kelly and his team took out a bunch of household equipment and began working on the prototype. A roll-on deodorant ball and a yellow butter dish were the working components of the first prototype. He turned the lid over, filled it with a wax-like substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball and tucked the deodorant underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop.

The first consumer-friendly mouse for the Apple Lisa. Image credit: IDEO

The first problem presented itself; Kelly and his team needed to find a way to connect the mouse to the housing so that it didn’t fall out. There was also the issue caused by friction and accumulation of dust from the tabletop that caused the mouse to skip its movements on the computer screen.

After the specifics had been concluded by the design team, Jobs took the device to his software team with the instruction of taking the graphical interface of the PARC mouse a giant step further. Jobs wanted his users to have direct influence with their computers and after going back and forth with concepts, designs and implementation, they developed the first mouse used by end consumers.

Away from all the technical jargon, the reoccurring theme of how Jobs got the mouse to work was heavily dependent on the engineering process of iteration and collaboration, just like the story of Operation paperclip and the Saturn V rocket.

In Conclusion

Innovation or cross-generational revolutionary ideas don’t always happen under an apple tree. It starts by asking the What, Why, and How’s. What problem exists? Why does this problem exist? How can I solve this problem? That is how innovation starts; how its iterative process starts — by identifying the problem and then going on a series of iterations till the intended goal is achieved.

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Nathan Boyega
Nathan Boyega

Written by Nathan Boyega

Exploring the intersection between brand, product and business.

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