In the space business, there is an old adage. If you don’t have time to do it right. Do you have time to do it twice? This is, in a sense, one of the rules of the space business that has been challenged in the new space environment.
In some ways the whole point of the new space approach was to question whether or not the amount of time, energy, and especially money that was usually spent on getting to space was really necessary. In effect, the whole new space approach was to ask the question whether or not it was possible to be more entrepreneurial in our approach to going to space.
Because one of the central tenants of the entrepreneurial philosophy is the so-called “fail early, fail often” approach. In other words, the idea that fear of making a mistake often gets in the way of real innovation. So that pushing through those failures is often the most important thing to do in order to find a way through to success. Which means that being willing to risk proximate failure is critical to ultimate success in an innovative endeavor.
The fact that this was not an approach that the legacy space companies took was one of the reasons why space was not a popular choice for private sector investors. So, in effect, the New Space “revolution” was very much about challenging the idea that quality and certainty had to be given priority over innovation and the chance that something might go wrong.
As a result, there has been a real collision between these two approaches.
To be sure, legacy space companies have been challenged by the New Space approach. Legacy space companies have been looking for ways to reduce the cost of getting to space – beyond simply reducing the cost of launch.
These, mostly large, companies have worked hard to find efficiencies in the way they design and test spacecraft. They have also been putting serious effort into finding ways to accomplish things from orbit using smaller and less complex satellites. Those effects are obvious in the market.
Internally to these companies there have been a lot of challenges to the idea that any failure is toxic. Often that challenge has been coming from a new generation of engineers. As a result, many legacy space companies have developed much leaner processes than they had five years ago. But there is still a definite bias toward testing and certainty in that community.
New Space companies, on the other hand, have also discovered that the business of space imposes some serious limitations on the value of failing early and failing often.
That’s because space poses some challenges not necessarily encountered in other entrepreneurial environments. In many entrepreneurial environments the cost of “failure” is limited to the cost that has already been sunk into a new technology that did not fully meet expectations. But, even then, the cost is not completely lost because much may have been learned on the way to failure – this is the essence of the fail-early, fail-often philosophy – that lessons learned from failure may be as valuable as success itself. Perhaps those lessons may even be more valuable in the long term.
This works fine – on the ground. But, in order to test an innovation and entrepreneur in space has to get to space with a working spacecraft – upon which their innovation is based. If that spacecraft either doesn’t reach orbit, or reaches orbit in a non-functioning condition, or can’t communicate with the ground when it gets there, then the entrepreneur fails.
But without having learned anything about the innovation they were attempting to test.
And the opportunity to run another test often requires a significant amount of time and a significant amount of money. Because another test will require not only building another copy of the payload that was never tested. It will also involve buying or building another spacecraft to host it. And it will require arranging for another flight opportunity. None of those things are likely to be quick or inexpensive.
In other words, the price of failure both in terms of money and in terms of time can be very high in space. Much higher than in many sectors which have been the classic homes for entrepreneurs – and their investors.
So, in a very real sense. Both approaches to the problem of space have been confronting the old adage. If you don’t have time to do it right. Do you have time to do it twice?
Legacy space companies have been discovering that, well, in fact, sometimes they do have time to do it twice. If their definition of doing it right simply takes more time or more money than is really justified by avoiding the risk of having to repeat some steps. This is actually a question that they have been forced to ask themselves. The answer has not always been as obvious as it seemed – at least to some.
New space companies, on the other hand, have begun to realize that this adage is very true. And that if they take too many shortcuts. Or rather too many of the wrong kind of shortcuts – to save time doing it right, they may very well cost themselves much more time in the future by having to do it twice.
These companies are also coming to the realization that the cost of “going to space” is not just about the cost of the ride to space. Or to be more specific, the reduction in the price of launch has (and will) only reduce the cost of getting an operating spacecraft to orbit by a small fraction of the overall investment. Because of that, the reduction in launch cost does not imply that space has become a sector in which founders can afford to make progress through failing often and certainly not by failing early.
In space, innovation is not stifled by paying attention to quality. In some ways, innovation in space is enabled by that focus. It is impossible to demonstrate innovation in one particular area of space technology without having, or having access to, a degree of mastery of all the other disciplines that go into conceiving, designing, building and executing a full space mission. There are just too many ways for the mission to fail without ever generating any useful data to help improve the innovative technology it was designed to test. Long term success cannot be trusted to the hope that you have done those things well.
In space it really is (and always will be) the case that the cost of not doing it right is likely to be the cost of doing it again. It’s important to understand if an when it’s worth it.
- Read more columns in the Advice to Founders series.