Earth's Logistics Crisis: We Can Put A Rover On Mars But Can't Deliver Insulin To Maya

Forbes

27-06-2025

Shekar Natarajan is the founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI.
My colleague's daughter Maya was a joyful eight-year-old living with diabetes in Brooklyn, New York. One Friday, she was supposed to receive a delivery of insulin. By Sunday night, it still hadn't arrived. The delivery app kept saying 'Out for delivery.' But the box never came.
When it finally did, the cold pack had failed and the insulin was spoiled. Maya ended up in the ER, shaking and struggling to breathe.
This wasn't a rare event in a remote village. This was a major city in a wealthy country and the daughter of a Fortune 100 supply chain executive. Even he couldn't prevent the system from failing his child. Maya's case may seem exceptional—but it's just one pixel in a much larger pattern. The world lost Maya to a failed logistics execution.
We like to think of these moments as isolated. But they're not. They're happening everywhere, quietly, at scale, in ways we've normalized. Every year, '53% of e-commerce deliveries are late, damaged, or delivered to the wrong address.' Some 85 million items arrive broken. Calls asking 'Where is my order?' account for up to 50% of customer service calls. These aren't random glitches. They're signals of a much larger breakdown.
We Built For Control, Not For Chaos
Today's logistics systems were built for static, plan-driven processes, not volatility. But as the world has shifted, we've moved from push-based to pull-based logistics, where consumers, not companies, dictate demand. Now, everything operates on the customer's timeline. And that changes everything.
The number of transactions has exploded. In 2023, '356 billion packages shipped worldwide'—a number projected to rise to 498 billion by 2028. Expectations have risen along with this demand. Consumers want fast, free shipping.
But underneath the sleek interface is brittle architecture: outdated systems, duplicated routes and blind spots no AI can patch. Planning systems weren't designed to gracefully handle failure. And in logistics, failure isn't the exception; it's the norm.
What people experience as a late or missing package is actually the endpoint of a systemic breakdown. From the first mile to the last, we're seeing chaos: duplicated routes, outdated software, disconnected carriers. But because the pain is distributed, one broken delivery at a time, it's easy to ignore. Until it hits you personally.
We treat the last mile like it's the problem. But the truth is, every mile is broken. The last mile is just where it finally becomes visible. Instead of fixing the broken system, we just live with it and turn our focus to more exciting things.
We Can Simulate Mars But Can't Coordinate Brooklyn
The same day Maya landed in the ER, a billion-dollar rocket launched flawlessly from a pad in Florida. Cameras rolled, the livestream spiked and mission control erupted in applause.
We can coordinate autonomous vehicles on Mars. We can simulate lunar supply chains. But we can't reliably deliver medicine across town? It's not that the problems are harder here. They're just more human. More layered, harder to fix. We avoid solving Earth's logistics because it's messy, controlled by zoning laws, legacy systems and fragmented networks.
Mars is a clean slate. Earth is not. But that's no excuse.
Getting to Mars requires staggering precision. Launch windows open once every 26 months, and even a few seconds of delay can throw off the entire mission. Trajectories are calculated to within meters per second, and landings must fall inside an ellipse of just a few meters after traveling millions of kilometers. We simulate descent in high definition, calibrate sensors to arcsecond accuracy and coordinate actions to the millisecond. It's not that we can't apply this level of precision to Earth. We simply don't. We choose not to.
And yet, in investment circles, rockets feel more appealing than refrigerated trucks. As a society, we gravitate toward the unimaginable. That's where we pour our time, talent and money. Meanwhile, the infrastructure that connects people to food, medicine, education and opportunity remains underfunded and misunderstood.
But logistics isn't a cost center. It's life infrastructure. It's the circulatory system of modern society. If you want to understand how competitive a country is, look at its logistics. Germany's logistics costs are under 8% of GDP. India has driven its logistics cost down from 14% of GDP to under 10% through infrastructure investment. That's what smart nations do: They reduce friction, increase access and grow inclusively.
Fragmentation Is The Enemy Of Scale
What we're facing isn't just inefficiency. It's entropy—the gradual breakdown of structure as more companies duplicate effort and chase control instead of collaboration.. Everyone is building their own networks. Every company wants control, so they duplicate infrastructure and chase density they'll never achieve on their own.
But logistics isn't built on control. It's built on the law of large numbers. It thrives on shared systems, aggregated volume and need-based resources.
We don't need more trucks. We need smarter use of the trucks we already have. Instead of having five carriers delivering to the same address, we need one network that can optimize across demand. It's the same logic utilities figured out years ago: multiple producers, one efficient pipe to the door.
To fix this, we need interoperability, which means data sharing, whether anonymized or real-time, so carriers can collaborate rather than compete at cross-purposes. We need to rethink the last mile so it's not a scramble, but a system that truly delivers.
The problem is, retailers and platforms keep forcing one-size-fits-all models. That makes everyone worse off. Let carriers do what they do best. If you specialize in high-density urban delivery, double down on it. If you're better at bulk freight, stay in that lane. The commercial model and the operational model don't need to be the same. But we keep forcing them to overlap, and in doing so, we undermine both.
Logistics Is Not Optional
During Covid, people joked about Santa Claus missing Christmas because of supply chain delays. But behind those jokes were real stakes: much-needed groceries, PPE, medicine. The system faltered. And we were reminded how thin the margin really is.
Everything we depend on, including insulin, textbooks, groceries, replacement parts, tissue samples, surgical tools, moves through this invisible infrastructure. When it breaks, it breaks lives.
We can't afford to treat logistics like an afterthought. It's not back-office anymore. It's frontline. It's economic, human and national security infrastructure rolled into one.
Policymakers: Treat logistics like healthcare—it's a public good, not a private luxury.
Executives: Make logistics a boardroom conversation, not a back-office line item.
Technologists: Prioritize coordination over control.
Investors: Ask yourself: What's the more scalable bet for humanity—a launchpad, or a logistics layer that works?
Because Maya didn't need a miracle. She just needed her insulin to show up.
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