April 2, 2026

NASA VERSUS SPACEX:

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SpaceX on the other hand can rapidly develop their rockets because most of it is built by them. If they make changes it doesn’t result in months of back and forth they can pretty much do it on the fly. And then test them on full rockets. This ultimately saves time and money but faces more public scrutiny, especially from those who are ignorant or are simply against the company/elon and are looking for any reason to be critical.

A perfect example of this was on the last couple of flights where various heat tiles and even no tiles were all tested to see what real world effects they would have.

To boldly go where Virginia Postrel has gone before. In 1997, she explored “Resilience vs. Anticipation:”

Boston’s winter is a natural disaster, but its predictability changes everything.3 As Hutchinson suggests, New Englanders know winter is coming. Bad weather is annoying but easy to plan for: You build snow days into the school year, buy a car with four-wheel drive, get used to scraping ice and shoveling snow. You make sure you have a coat, hat, and gloves. Snow, says Hutchinson, is no big deal: “You just put on boots.” Life has a regular rhythm.

Good weather plus earthquakes creates an utterly different environment. On a day-to-day basis, you can concentrate on your goals, with no need for contingency plans. Your softball game, your picnic, your wedding won’t be rained out. But everything could change in an instant. You can’t anticipate earthquakes, can’t plan for them, can’t even predict when and where they’ll strike. Instead of providing the certainty of seasons, nature promises a future of random shocks. All you can do is develop general coping skills and resources. There is nothing familiar about the aftermath of an earthquake, and no one survives it alone.

In his 1988 book, SEARCHING FOR SAFETY, the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky laid out two alternatives for dealing with risk: anticipation, the static planning that aspires to perfect foresight, and resilience, the dynamic response that relies on having many margins of adjustment:

Anticipation is a mode of control by a central mind; efforts are made to predict and prevent potential dangers before damage is done. Forbidding the sale of certain medical drugs is an anticipatory measure. Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back. An innovative biomedical industry that creates new drugs for new diseases is a resilient device. . . . Anticipation seeks to preserve stability: the less fluctuation, the better. Resilience accommodates variability; one may not do so well in good times but learn to persist in the bad.

Here, then, is the basic difference between the Valley and the Hub: Viewing the world as predictable and itself as the center of the universe, Boston has encouraged strategies of anticipation. People try to imagine everything that might go wrong and fix it in advance. But in Silicon Valley, there are no certainties. The future is open and subject to upheaval. Resilience is the strategy of choice. People do the best they can at the moment, deal with problems as they arise, and develop networks to help them out.

I wonder how much of Musk’s experiences in Silicon Valley impact how his team builds and tests rockets?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll