Jeff Thornburg

That sounds just like my engineers when I'm pricing a program out.

So you're hitting it right on the head.

I'll answer that with a quick story, which is...

A lot of legacy government and NASA programs have this failure is not an option moniker to them.

And what that means is to have infinitely low risk requires infinitely high cost.

And so that's not how a lot of commercial startups and businesses have formed in the last decade or so, because instead there's a different approach in engineering where we want to actually break it because we want to see where the design fails and what we don't know yet and what we need to fix.

And I think a lot of the legacy NASA programs have suffered at times because they've had to try to get everything right on the first go.

And that's a pretty tall order.

That's why these aerospace programs have taken so much longer than anybody ever wanted from a schedule-wise or from a cost standpoint.

And it's true to a certain extent, but not all failures are planned and most of them aren't.

But the value is if your company or organizational culture accepts failure, then you will actually get to the end product much faster.

Yeah, but as Neil knows as well, look at the history of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo program.

We blew up a ton of stuff.

Yeah.

Those young men and women were in their 20s.

They looked like SpaceX looked a few years ago.

And so NASA used to operate exactly in that mold, but somewhere along the way,

politics took over and it got different for them.

So I think NASA should focus on the programs that aren't viable as a business, that are pushing technology forward, because I think that's what they do really well at.

I don't think they do well in big rocket programs.