Failure is not an option

I'm currently stateside, San Antonio, Texas to be precise for SolidWorks World 2011. Running since 1999, SWW (as it known, check the hashtag #sww11 on twitter for the latest) is now a huge event that brings together the team behind Solidworks and their users.

It's an impressive affair, highlighted well by the fist keynote speakers — Jim Lovell and Gene Krantz. These are almost certainly names you know: Lovell was the commander of the Appolo 13 mission, NASAs ill-fated third trip to the moon, Kranz was the mission control director back in Houston. The title of this post is Kranz's oft-repeated mantra. Lovell on the other hand gave us the ubiquitous 'Houston, we have a problem.'

The session began however with former SW CEO, Jeff Ray, now EVP of Geographic Operations at parent company Dassault Systémes. Ray gave us an overview of some impressive applications of SW products, including how they were used to help free the Chilean miners last year.

Ray then introduced his successor, Bertrand Sicot. Sicot explained how DraftSight, the company's free 2D offering has been downloaded 300,000 times and has 16,000 DraftSight Community members — impressive uptake since last year's launch.

Now normally the current and previous CEO's of a company would be the keynote, a big deal, a pair of grand framages. But on this occasion they were merely the warm up act for what followed.

Kranz and Lovell are both unparalleled public speakers, and truly brought the story of Apollo 13 to life. For an hour the room was enraptured with quiet, respectful admiration. You'll notice that sww11 hashtag all but stopped while they talked.

In the press conference that followed they were both upbeat about engineers and engineering, but expressed reservations about the future of space exploration.

In today's litigious society, where bad things must never happen, and everyone must die only of old age, it seems unlikely that we'll get a figure like JFK standing up and proclaiming that: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."

It's more likely to be "We have do these things because they are safe," and that will almost certainly stop us dead in our tracks.

Like Lovell said: "You can't have achievement without risk."