Jeff Thornburg

That they will not make.

Right, exactly.

And I don't think nation states should rely on CEOs.

to be their only hope in achieving certain national goals.

I just think that's a bad idea.

I think people think engineers just know, and therefore when we fail, oh, we're stupid or we're a bad engineer.

And they don't understand the art of engineering is designing a system around unknowns

and that we don't always know the first time it's gonna be successful.

Correct.

I think that's the unlock for people to know failure is a good thing because you've now given engineers a gift because now they have all of the information.

So that's why failure is so important to engineering because now you've pushed the design all the way up to the line.

You don't have to guess about it anymore.

So now you've gone from that initial phase of engineering of,

engineering around the margins you don't know, which normally means it's heavier or carries more fuel or less efficient in some way because you're just trying to get it to work.

And when you fail it, now you can totally isolate that to what it needs to be.

And that's why things like the Falcon 9 first stage land the way they do.

Because we failed so many of those as the gag reel has shown over the years.

So there's a failure in leadership there that I personally believe in, that I operate differently in my organizations over the years and my company now.

You're always going to have somebody say, I'm worried about this before you launch or before you field a spacecraft on orbit.

And so what I do is we have what's called active risk management, which is a NASA term,