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I’m late to link to this, but here are my Book Thoughts on Liftoff by Eric Berger, which is about the early years of SpaceX:

I picked up this book to better understand how big leaps forward in hard tech innovation happen, but as I got to the end, including the annecdote above, all I could think about is whether or not history is contingent.

I didn’t put this in the Book Thoughts post because it somehow felt out of place, but here are the factors that seemed most essential to SpaceX’s success (not necessarily in order):

• Have a big mission. This helps to pull in talent in a way that smaller projects don’t

• Be as iterative as possible in taking on technical challenges. Your speed of failure is inversely correlated to your speed of learning. In a way, the culture of tight deadlines at SpaceX helped with this because it forced the organization to learn from reality rather than debate.

• Either buy things off the shelf or make them yourself. If you try and find a middle ground between off the shelf and fully customized, you risk getting neither of the benefits.

• Early customers are in many ways investors. They need to be treated as such, since they’re likely to not get the full benefit of your company existing.

From Why Not Mars by Maciej Cegłowski

"At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops[28], inside nuclear reactor cores[29], and in aerosols high in the stratosphere[30]. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there[31] than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea[32], are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals[33] or Antarctic ice[34] have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing[35] without so much as a cup of coffee."

As Ceglowski points out, this should make us pretty confident that microbial life already exists on Mars, if only from a stray asteroid.

The brilliant Dr. Maggie Lieu aka Space Mog was kind enough to join me on Browser Bets. I was surprised to learn that she volunteered to go to Mars and was very nearly selected.

Our bets:

Bet 1: Humans will land on Mars by 2035 James says before, Maggie says later. Maggie thinks it will be China, James hopes it will be the US.

Bet 2: We’ll have generalizable robots in our houses by 2035 Maggie says no way, James says yes out of an unfounded sense of optimism.

Bet 3: The standard model of cosmology will be overturned by 2035 by something that aligns quantum physics and relativity. Maggie says yes, James says no.