Think Like a Rocket Scientist summary

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk had a problem – a $20 million one. He wanted to launch a space company to pursue his dream of settling Mars. But he couldn’t afford a single rocket. The aerospace companies building them all outsourced work to subcontractors, who outsourced work further. All those margins added to an already expensive item, making it unobtainable.

Musk was about to give up when he had a revelation. He asked himself what you needed to go to space. The answer, of course, was a rocket. And what makes a rocket? Raw materials. After some number crunching, Musk found that those materials cost just 2 percent of the average price of a rocket. And if Musk did the bulk of manufacturing in-house, he’d have far greater control over quality and budget. By striking out on his own, Musk could start working towards his dream.

When he was 16, Albert Einstein mused over what would happen if he could observe light by running as fast as it. He knew this was beyond the scope of his body. But imagining this scenario lay the foundations for what became the special theory of relativity, a decade later.

Nikola Tesla also used his imagination as his laboratory. He devoted hours to planning out his inventions mentally, before sketching them. His mind was the first testing ground for his alternating-current system, which we benefit from every day. Neither he nor Einstein would have achieved their incredible breakthroughs if their lives had been cluttered with busyness.

You’re probably familiar with the story of Icarus, who tried to escape imprisonment on Crete by using wings made of wax. Despite his father’s warnings, Icarus flew too high. The sun melted his wings and Icarus plunged to his death.

Through warnings and stories like this, society teaches you to fear taking risks. This keeps you safe when you’re young, but it holds you back as an adult. You tell yourself you don’t have what it takes to go for that promotion, or ask your crush out on a date. But if you change the story you’re telling yourself, you can finally soar.

In 1999, Ozan Varol received some terrible news from NASA. The three-legged landing system he intended to use to set down a rover on Mars had just failed spectacularly on another mission. Varol immediately snapped into action. The question on his mind was: How do we fix the existing system?

But engineer Mark Adler saw things differently. He asked the question: how do we defy gravity so that the rover reaches Mars safely? To answer this question, Adler abandoned the three-legged system completely. Instead, he designed a system of enormous airbags that would inflate around the rover, letting it bounce a few dozen times before coming to a halt on the Martian surface. Eventually, Adler’s design safely delivered two rovers to Mars.

“What aren’t we seeing?” If the navigators of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter had asked this question in 1999, they may have avoided a $193 million mistake. Two months before the orbiter’s scheduled arrival date, data projected that it would orbit Mars 100 kilometers lower than it should. This meant certain failure. The orbiter would either burn to a crisp or bounce off Mars’s atmosphere and into the depths of space.

But the navigators put the data discrepancy down to an error in the navigation system. They were wrong. On its arrival date, the orbiter passed behind Mars as planned, but was never heard from again. Later, an investigation found the real source of the error: the system had been designed by Lockheed Martin, a company that uses the inch-pound system. The navigators used metric. All of their measurements were off by a factor of four. If they’d questioned the data instead of ignoring it, they may have prevented the costly disaster.

Astronauts train for years before they go to space. They spend hours practicing procedures in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, an enormous pool that houses a submerged replica of the International Space Station. They even experience weightlessness in an airplane dubbed the “vomit comet,” which replicates zero gravity by diving like a rollercoaster.

But the most grueling training exercises are the simulated emergencies that take astronauts to their physical limits. In space, one wrong move could turn a situation like this fatal. So, the training program tries to trick them into making a mistake. That way, the astronaut is better prepared for their mission.

Failure is inevitable when you’re aiming high. If you’re on the hunt for an original solution, you’ll be generating lots of ideas. Many of those ideas won’t meet the brief. But they play an important role by moving you closer to that breakthrough concept. 

James Dyson clocked up 5,126 failed prototypes over 15 years. Only then did he find the right design for his famous bagless vacuum. When we carefully study our failures, as Dyson did, they provide us with powerful insight.