In November, NASA announced it would be conducting a “cultural assessment study” of SpaceX and Boeing to ensure the companies were meeting NASA’s requirements of “adherence to a drug-free environment.” The Washington Post reported that officials had indicated “the review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk.”

From this piece. Boeing is good at hewing to bureaucratic edicts issued by bureaucratic organizations but is bad at recovering rocket stages and decreasing the price of space launch. SpaceX is great at, you know, putting shit into space, which is what both companies are putatively supposed to be doing. For Boeing, compliance with infinite rules and regulations takes precedence over lowering the cost of space access.

The quoted paragraph reminds me of Peter Thiel’s point in Zero to One: as HP floundered, it was still really good at “following the rules,” but really terrible at building products people want. Senior administrators were adepts at process but novices at results. Many people who are good at results do not care for excessive process.

Perhaps we should focus less on virtue signaling and demographics, and more on results. I suspect the NASA of the 1960s was not terribly interested in its employees’s private lives, but it was very interested in putting a man on the moon. Today, NASA seems unable to do the latter but very good at the former.

We need fewer bureaucrats and bureaucratic barriers and more people with a piratical gleam in their eye trying new things. Elon Musk has that piratical gleam and that is part of what makes him a hero, despite his flaws (which are real). Online, it is easy to tear people down (The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium describes how the Internet enables nihilism and tearing people down while doing too little real building of new things—comprehensive post this important book will be forthcoming). It costs a billion dollars a mile to build new urban rail in the United States, since contractors must specialize in placating politicians, employing too many people at too high waves (“In his exposé, Rosenthal talked about labor problems: severe overstaffing, with some workers doing jobs that are no longer necessary, and wages well into six figures”), and dealing with lawsuits rather than specializing in building shit quickly. We need to find our way to a new, better equilibrium that de-emphasizes drug testing for harmless substances and emphasizes getting the thing done.