We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Jeff BezosRead
If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It's hard to get off of that equilibrium.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of reliability in space launches, especially when the payloads are extremely valuable.
Jeff Bezos highlights the intricate relationship between the cost of payloads and the stability required from launch vehicles. When payloads are worth hundreds of millions, the imperative for reliability overshadows cost concerns, as the stakes are incredibly high. This creates a challenging situation where changes and innovations in technology must be approached with caution, ensuring that the fundamental stability of the launch process is maintained.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of reliability in aerospace projects.
We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Work hard, have fun and make history.
If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.
The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.
Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.
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I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device.
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