David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…There's another one I've been thinking about, which is a parallel to our SpaceX episode, where if you remember on the SpaceX episode, we talked about—gosh, that was a lifetime ago, three years—how NASA prioritized safety over everything else. They took that to such an extreme, where things could happen on a 20-year time span instead of a 5-year time span. SpaceX came in and said, what if we do it on a 2-year time span? We figure out how to be much more iterative in our development, and we're happy to explode some rockets, not with people on them. You take this, again, much more Silicon Valley approach to rapid iteration, testing your own prototypes internally, being okay showing off your failures, and gathering data from them. Whereas NASA couldn't do enough calculations before it finally was willing to do something to let something go to a launchpad. That would cause extreme delays, massive budget overruns, and at the end of the day, it actually wasn't safer. That's the important thing here. In 130 or whatever it was space shuttle missions, there were two that were tragic loss of life calamities. You look at that, you're like, that's actually not a great safety record, so maybe this isn't the right way to do it. Maybe calculating something to 15 significant digits of unlikely to fail is not actually the best outcome. It seems like the same thing in the military industrial complex, where we're willing to sign a contract for airplanes that we get in 25 years because they're these big, huge productions. It's just the opposite of the skunk works way of operating, where test your own prototypes, do it rapidly, start moving up and up and up, crash some planes in the desert. But overall, we're going to get to the same outcome, much faster on a much lower budget and maybe with equivalent or better safety. A hundred percent. I can't think of a better place to talk about what I think are really the takeaways. For me, at least, and I hope for many people listening of this episode, and it's really the heyday, glory days, whatever you want to call it, of Lockheed, both with Skunk Works and LMSC, of how these small skunk works–type organizations achieved unbelievable, unfathomable things, with a small number of people, in an unrealistically tight timeframe, with very constrained resources. That mindset is certainly not the only way that you can achieve great things, but it's a really damn good way to do it. That mindset got injected into Silicon Valley by these people, by the military and by Lockheed. It's just so funny that the military industrial complex has now become the opposite of that. It has become like what you're talking about with NASA. Again, there are many ways to succeed in different situations that call for different things. But if you really need to or want to achieve something great, bordering on impossible, in a tight bordering on unreasonable time frame, Kelly's 14 laws and LMSC's 7 tenets are pretty damn good ways to do it. That's so true. Otherwise, you get to this thing that Norm Augustine said, “How unbelievably expensive these things get if you do it the non skunk works way? We just move into this larger and larger morass. That's the direction we're basically going in these 25-year programs.” He says, “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared between the Air Force and the Navy 3½ days per week, except for leap year when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.…

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