# A Project's Age of Innocence Every engineering project or system design endeavor kicks off with what we can call the age of innocence: loads of credulous wishes sometimes dressed as “requirements”—although they read stupidly wishful—and a plethora of childish, rudimentary graphical depictions posed as serious diagrams, all sprinkled with industrial loads of assumptions, naivety, obviousness, and collective wishful thinking. Years ago, I was visiting a company that was desperately trying to ‘get into space’ and one of its employees showed me a “design” (it was just a Visio diagram with a few colored boxes, arrows, and lines of unknown meaning) and said with a straight face that his design would eventually be “the next Cubesat standard”. Eight-ish years after this encounter, I have not seen his alternative “standard” much around, and I can’t say I’m surprised. It feels close to when my kid shows me a drawing of a rocket and assures me it can go to the moon; he is five by the way, the engineer was in his mid-forties. Some more years ago, the founders of another company posed for a local magazine with an early model of their satellite, made out of plastic. Nothing wrong with that, I mean, models tend to be oversimplifications and can be made of plastic, but the photo gave a strong feeling of two boys happily smiling next to their favorite toy. Is a plastic satellite less of a toy than a Chinese stuffed teddy bear? To finish with storytelling, I had once the chance to witness the launch of a rocket made by an early-stage _wannabe_ launcher company. The “rocket”—in fact, it was more like a model rocket at the most—did not prevent all actors involved in the operation from acting like they were about to launch a new Saturn V. While I was sitting there, with 50 degrees Celsius in the shadow at the Mojave desert drinking my 100th bottle of water, I could not help but think I was witnessing a collective delusion. I could see them perceiving the rocket as big, steamy, majestic; far from its modest reality, which I could see at its fullest because I was an external observer.  > [!Figure] > _"Then, I added the fins to lower the air resistance"_ It seems projects’ life cycle stages are named like that for a reason: they do resemble a person’s life cycle stages. Projects do have a childhood, and such a stage seems to transport grownup engineers into a shared hypnotic regression of sorts, where they relax their judgment, unleash their imagination, craft wild stories that will never happen, and observe everything with a cute dose of innocence. I must say, it’s a great atmosphere to be in because everybody seems to be waiting for Santa and the tooth fairy. It’s alright, and perhaps necessary to some extent, but it can’t last forever. Sadly, sooner than later, the project’s life starts to ruthlessly calibrate us all and remind us that Santa is our parents. Life eventually will teach that displacing a popular hardware standard like Cubesat will require devising something better, that plastic satellites will evaporate in space, and that orbital flight needs way more than a rocket the size of a firework. Psychologist Oliver James [wrote](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2005/oct/16/healthandwellbeing): “It's very hard to be adult and retain the spontaneity and inventiveness found in three-year-olds, without being mad, personality disordered or employed as an artist. I believe that creating the context in which these childlike attributes can flourish in adults should be the principal goal of politics; they are the cornerstone of mental well-being.” It appears that projects can offer even the stiffest engineer the opportunity to throw open an internal window to the fresh, freewheeling creativity of childish imagination.