The Only Option - September 1, 2022 | Kids Out and About Los Angeles <

The Only Option

September 1, 2022

Debra Ross

We're going back to the moon... just not quite yet.

Early Monday morning, I was with my daughter Ella and hundreds of other excited people at Johnson Space Center in Houston at a watch party for the launch of Artemis 1. Artemis 1 is an unmanned spacecraft for research and testing that will pave the way for Artemis 2 to bring people back to the moon in 2024 for the first time since 1972. The Houston crowd kept track of NASA's Florida broadcast on a huge screen while we heard from NASA researchers in person. Joy and anticipation were in the air at JSC as we counted down to the launch. But at the last minute, it was scrubbed due to an engine issue.

The popular phrase "Failure is not an option" notwithstanding, what every NASA engineer knows is that there is no such thing as progress without failures along the way. We fail all the time. Whenever we learn something new, try something new, build something new, we fail until we succeed. Not only accepting but embracing failure has been the single most important ingredient in KidsOutAndAbout.com's success for the past two decades. But it wasn't something I learned in school. 

Turns out, though, that sometimes a gifted teacher can get students there sideways: My colleague Aileen tells a story of building household budgets in her high school computer class. Just as she was getting the hang of it—her theoretical income balanced with her theoretical expenses and savings—the teacher would come and sneak each of them a little slip of paper. “Your washing machine just broke,” the paper whispered. That meant the budget broke, too, so Aileen had to redo the spreadsheet several times before it could withstand life's unexpected hardships to her teacher's satisfaction. The real lesson wasn't about computers, of course, it was about something much more important to success in life: learning to manage small failures without letting them derail you.

Somehow, Aileen's computer teacher made it safe to fail. Imagine how quickly we'd get to Mars, and beyond, if each of today's students could take this lesson to heart.

Deb