Growing pains and supply chains

I’m currently in the middle of the hardest thing I have done in my entire life. The one sentence gist is that a project of mine got funded by NASA and I am stressed out of my mind about it.

Throughout the pandemic I’ve heard about the rippling delays throughout the entire supply chain, but I was never really comprehended how bad it was since my closest exposure was a delayed Amazon delivery or two.

Oh man it is so bad.

A year ago I did not imagine myself trying to navigate supply chain issues for my entire spring break, and the week before, and the week before…

I can’t even begin to comprehend how anything even manages to get done nowadays considering the fact that everything is either A) out of stock, B) on back order, C) has a manufacturing lead time of 52 weeks, or D) is being scalped 2,400% MSRP pricing. Those eye-watering numbers are not an exaggeration but our reality. We’re extremely fortunate that our budget can comfortably cover the costs of what is available, but it’s the 2 or 3 critical components that really throw a wrench into the works. You can’t build a car if you’re missing the doors and a steering wheel. One component gone. Poof. Design doesn’t work.

The old saying that plans never survive first contact with reality could not be anymore true. We entered with a plan to build a quadruped (a four legged robot) by adapting the legs of an already existing design. This should have saved us months of work but now we’ve been reduced to ground zero. Our idea still remains the same but the entire plan of implementation has been flipped on its head.

It’s important to pivot in the face of hardship, but we’ve pulled so many one-eighties that at this point we’re continously spinning like a merry go round. We’re on plan B of plan B of plan B of the plan B. Our contingency plans have contingency plans.

Whenever we’re faced with a decision, by pure conditioning at this point, we automatically assume that what we want to go right will have a 99% chance of failure (murphy’s law anyone?). Not because the option is flawed, but it would be short-sighted to stake the entire project on a single decision, even if it was significantly easier. We already made that mistake once trying to build off of the pre-existing design.

We are trying to choose the least bad option with the highest likelihood that we even get what we need in time. However, that almost always means taking the hard road, the time consuming one. This project is supposed to be a learning experience, and if we are talking purely from a real-life issues standpoint it certaintly has delivered. But because our team has less experience overall, I feel like we’re being pigeon-holed into being results oriented (does it even work?), which is a fine mindset if you have the experienced needed. But what I’m deeply worried is going to happen is that we’re going to slap together pre-existing tools without having the understanding as to how they work. That would be such a waste of a massive learning opportunity.

The project so far has been one giant balancing act of competing timelines. We’re trying to juggle the logistics of normal everyday stuff (homework, classes, you know, living) alongside the logistics of scheduling meetings that work for 25 different people, trying to even find a consistent space to work (which is ridiculous we have this problem), procuring components (which arrive 3 weeks later), and trying to learn and build the robot we set out to build.

That last point should be our biggest priority, but we’re trying to put out so many other fires that it gets knocked down a peg or two.

NASA is an ambitious organization in general. I get it. But a 6-7 month timeline even for a normal year is dancing with the improbable. And currently we’re at T-minus 46 days until our mid project report with over three quarters of our parts not shipped, despite ordering a soon as humanly possible.

Since the Big Idea Challenge is normally a senior design project, there is typically time dedicated in students’ schedules to work. But UConn’s team is different. We’re mostly composed of underclassmen who are working alongside a full course load with, conveniently, finals eating a large chunk out of our available time to make something happen. And then by the time summer rolls around (25 days remaining), most students won’t be on campus over the summer, leaving the skeleton crew to work in person with everyone virtual (again).

As I have come to realize, once the school day ends, the work day begins. Bye-bye free time.