Organisations tend to see rebels as troublemakers – but suppressing these individuals and their ideas could backfire.
The engineers’ concerns fell on deaf ears; Nasa knew and trusted the Apollo-era systems, which had successfully sent humans to the moon. Undeterred, the renegade group – who subsequently called themselves ‘the pirates’ – began to code new software for the mission control sub-systems in their free time, using borrowed equipment from Nasa suppliers. Their system was based on commercially available personal workstations linked through a Unix network, in what the pirates felt was a more resilient and adaptive set-up. After several months, they physically brought their system into mission control to test it – but they were asked to leave by the flight controllers.