Moonshot projects: Delivering the impossible

Finding a vaccine for COVID‑19 was one. Alexander Garrett uncovers what it takes to deliver other audacious projects that have the capability to inspire and transform.

Moonshot projects

On 25 May 1961 President John F Kennedy told the US Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” It was the birth of the original moonshot project, famously delivered in July 1969, and has since become a beacon and shorthand for all those wanting to achieve audacious goals with a far‑reaching impact.

Fast‑forward to September 2020 and Boris Johnson was talking up Operation Moonshot, a plan to carry out 10 million COVID tests in the UK each day at a cost estimated to be as much as £100bn, later quietly dropped. Fascination with moonshots nevertheless reaches far and wide. X, a research and development company formed by Google parent Alphabet in 2015, describes itself as a “moonshot factory”, with projects ranging from everyday robots to an underwater camera network. Japan has its own government‑sponsored Moonshot R&D programme with a ¥100bn budget; the US’s National Cancer Institute has a Cancer Moonshot; the African Union and the World Bank have teamed up to launch the All Africa Digital Economy Moonshot.

These are typically vast projects, with enormous complexity, multiple partners in public and private sectors, and budgets and timescales to match. But what does it take to manage moonshot projects successfully, and what are the challenges they present?

Andrew Davies, professor of innovation management at University of Sussex Business School, says moonshots are a powerful metaphor, albeit one that struggles to be effective in the face of many of the world’s biggest challenges today, especially so‑called ‘wicked’ problems that are more diffuse and complicated – climate change being a prime example. “There is no single Manhattan Project that can solve that. It’s going to take multiple diffuse projects solving problems in areas like carbon capture or renewables to make a difference.”

Where the problem is more singular and susceptible to a moonshot approach, says Davies, the solution is likely to involve a complex system. “So you need an ability to understand what the system is that you’re designing, and be able to procure and get the subsystems and components delivered so that they can be integrated effectively.”

Typically, you will need a delivery model that’s adaptive and flexible, says Davies, “because the duration of these things and the outcome are so uncertain that you need to be able to absorb and change to deal with things that you can’t predict. So you need the ability to learn as you’re going, bringing new ideas and technologies.”

You may need to work on rival technologies concurrently – as happened with the space and ballistic missile programmes in the 1950s – and you will need deep contingency funds to deal with the unexpected. Being prepared for failure is another important aspect.

“Too often, project or programme managers are risk averse because they’re trying to control costs and schedule. But people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, when they were trying to introduce radically new products, always had a kind of skunkworks operation; they created a separation from existing ways of doing things so that they had the room for experimentation.”

And the style of working needed to tackle moonshot projects is almost certainly collaborative, open and peer‑to‑peer, simply because of the large number of stakeholders who are likely to be involved. The pandemic may have inspired many to think big – to believe that giant problems need ambitious and imaginative attempts to solve them. What’s clear is that, while such projects can generate great excitement, managing them is an extraordinary feat in itself.

Is there life on Mars?

NASA’s Perseverance rover mission has placed the fifth in a series of robotic vehicles on the Red Planet, with the ultimate objective of seeking signs of ancient life and collecting samples of rock and soil to bring back to Earth. Perseverance touched down on 18 February, together with the mini‑helicopter Ingenuity, which has since carried out the first powered flights on another planet.

Jennifer Trosper, who joined NASA in the 1990s, has worked on Perseverance since 2015 and is now a project manager based at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Each rover has a limited life expectancy, and it’s vital to extract maximum value from the multibillion‑dollar investments, so each day they must draw on the latest data to submit the following day’s instructions. The overall schedule is governed by planetary alignment. “If we miss a key schedule milestone, like launch, we’re 26 months slipped,” says Trosper. “That’s a lot of money, and a lot of problems.”

Sheer complexity is another characteristic. “We have many sub‑assemblies, assemblies, subsystems, systems all put together and then working with this layer of software.” Figuring out how to move forward in the face of this complexity is one of the biggest challenges. “And so, a lot of what I do as a project manager is help people prioritise, decide what’s important, what’s not important, what we do today versus what we do tomorrow.”

The stakes are high. “The technical pressure of having multibillion‑dollar national assets on the surface of Mars means that you need to make sure that every one of the thousands of commands you give to it on a daily basis is good and will not harm the rover. That pressure to make it work, but also to not screw up, is very big.”

From a technical point of view, although previous rover missions provide a starting point for design, the quest for performance improvement means that much has to be designed from scratch. The adaptive caching assembly deployed on Perseverance required a new robotic arm to be developed involving higher‑level flight software, force sensors and autonomous operation. “In order to even design something like that, we don’t get a chance to iterate five or 10 times,” says Trosper. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get a prototype and engineering model, and then two flight units. So we have to be very agile.”

Problem‑solving, meanwhile, is absolutely central to overcoming the challenges that arise and moving closer towards the project’s goals. “My role as a leader is to make sure first of all that we have even understood the problem correctly; sometimes it’s hard with these complex systems to even articulate the problem well enough to solve it. And on Earth, there’s a much larger space within which we can solve problems; we can actually swap out hardware. But when we’re on Mars, the solution space is much different.”

That means hiring people who love problem‑solving, and also listening to everyone’s perspective, because people can see it in different ways. The other quality that is invaluable on a project that requires years of preparation, and where many doubt the outcome at various times, is – like the rover itself – perseverance. “My advice is: if you keep things moving forward, and solve the problems that keep you moving forward, then anything is possible.”

‘The sun in a box’: nuclear fusion

The ITER project aims to demonstrate the viability of nuclear fusion as a source of electricity generation by producing net energy – more output than is input – for the first time. It is a colossal project, with 35 countries participating, a timescale that stretches from 2006 to 2035, and a total cost that has been unofficially estimated at more than €50bn. Construction of its reactor at Cadarache in France started in 2013 and is 80 per cent complete, with the assembly of the tokamak electromagnetic field starting last year, and the first attempt to create plasma due in 2026.

Tom Eastup, who spent a year working as a project manager at ITER, says that the overriding characteristic of the project is complexity. “The engineering complexity is staggering, and the science that goes with it. You’ve got ground‑breaking physics, materials science and lots of other disciplines. Then, at the same time, the project has required collaboration from so many organisations, both public and private sector, from lots of different countries, each coming with different languages, cultures, capabilities and political biases.”

In engineering terms, a systems approach has been taken to break down the project into more manageable components, such as the auxiliary buildings, the tokamak (reactor), nuclear lifting systems and electrical power elements. To manage this, the project has used a dedicated integration team to make sure everything fits together. “They were running a 3D model so that each time anyone designed a system, the integration team would be responsible for checking that it will fit in,” says Eastup. “Because once you’ve poured concrete or installed equipment, it’s very difficult (and expensive) to undo and redo it if you need to change something.” An equally intensive parallel effort has been required, he says, to integrate the many stakeholders, both commercially (across contractual boundaries) and culturally (accommodating different ways of working).

Michel Claessens, former communications chief at ITER, says: “I would say the real innovation of this project is managing the 35 countries involved. More than 100 tokamaks have already been built in the world, but having these 35 countries working together is the biggest challenge.”

Until 2015, says Claessens, the management of the project was not up to the task, explained in part by the immaturity of the organisation and the fact that it was led by scientists, rather than those with the initial construction expertise required. One response was to step up communication, which had previously taken place largely through email and phone, by convening a meeting in Cadarache at least once a month of the key individuals coordinating the production and management of components.

The extreme longevity of the project means that it has had to ride national political cycles and huge external events ranging from the financial crisis to Brexit and the pandemic. And because so many governments are involved there is close scrutiny of budgets and the schedule, with politicians often unwilling to acknowledge the realities of carrying out pioneering science. That has meant having to educate politicians, says Claessens.

It has also meant having to manage perceptions about how the project is progressing, says Eastup. “Moonshot projects are very difficult to forecast with a high degree of accuracy or certainty. But even though it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean that proactively controlling cost is any less important; these projects have a responsibility to their investors and supporters to do so.

“But what is really different about these projects is that, due to the technical complexities, the different organisations involved and the long‑term nature, you have to build the energy and inspiration around the project to maintain stakeholder support and momentum. You need to encourage all of the different participants to transcend their differences and rally around a purpose that is greater than themselves. In essence, you need to create and share a vision of how the project is going to change the world.”

World‑class motor racing in electric cars

Famously conceived at a restaurant in Paris in 2011, 10 years later Formula E became the first electric single‑seater racing series to be given world championship status. The original idea was simple: a motorsports event staged in some of the world’s leading cities in which combustion engines were replaced with electric motors.

“Nobody believed that we could deliver the first event,” says Gemma Roura Serra, Formula E’s strategic planning director. “So when we did, they said we would not survive the first year.” That first race was in Beijing in September 2014. This season, Formula E will be staging races in cities including Monaco, Rome, London, New York and Berlin. The cars in the first season were a single design, provided by Formula E itself; among the teams competing this year are Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes and Porsche.

The Formula E project set out with a clear and audacious vision: “To accelerate sustainable human progress through the power of electric racing.” But to do that involved much more than creating an event; a significant change in perception had to be achieved. “People had the idea that electric cars were slow and old‑fashioned,” says Roura Serra. “What we’ve been able to show is that they can be fast, they can be sexy.”

The pioneering use of electric cars nevertheless meant there were some serious unknowns, such as the safety issues posed by having large electrical charges present. “Normally in motor racing, if the car stops or has an accident, the marshals go to it. But if the car is an electric car? You need to develop a specific training to know that if the car has a green light you can touch it, but if it’s a red light you can’t.”

Before any racing could take place, the cars had to be thoroughly tested, and key documents such as event specifications and operational plans created from scratch. The budget was an unknown factor at the outset, says Roura Serra. “If you go to a permanent circuit, all of the important infrastructures are there. You don’t need to worry about the civil works, the track, the fences, the medical centre, the race centre, the hospitality areas or the fan zone. We had to build all those things. Now we know, more or less, how much everything costs because we have more experience and data.”

Selling the concept to host cities was one of the biggest hurdles to be overcome. “When you go to a place like New York, you are coming from Europe with a project they don’t know called Formula E, and they don’t know you either. So you’re in a meeting with the city officials and all the local authorities like the police and the fire departments, and what they need is for you to build trust with them. You need absolutely to show them that you know what you are doing because an event like this has never happened before in the streets of New York – and it’s the same whether it’s Hong Kong, Paris or London.”

Getting cities on board, she says, has involved inspiring them with the vision of sustainable mobility, but at the same time demonstrating a relentless attention to detail. It was also recognised that it is important to reach out to the local communities where the races would take place and to give something back to them.

Developing professional standards and consistency in delivery have played a part in getting Formula E to where it is today, says Roura Serra, but equally important have been flexibility and the ability to listen to people. “You may have a process, but you cannot just come and impose that process. You need to bring people with you.”