A former JPL engineer who now leads Capella Space explains how NASA's "anything is possible" culture shaped her approach to building hardware. At JPL, perfectionism meant long development cycles. At Capella, she chose speed and iteration instead, accepting early failures to learn faster.
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In your career, you had this opportunity, if I understood correctly, you worked at NASA JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab down south, and it's an iconic place in this field. What about that environment did you, you spend enough time there to kind of know, what are things that existed in that world that you have taken to Capella? And maybe what's something, not that it's inherently good or bad, but you just decided that's not for us, that's for them.
Yeah, so JPL is a magical place. They built all the essentially robots that we've ever sent into space. The one that you guys might be familiar with is the Mars rover, the Curiosity rover that landed, I believe, in 2012. Just magical place. And I think, you know, I obviously learned a lot of aerospace there and processes and management, but what I took away the most was this mentality that anything is possible and it's just an engineering challenge. And so if there is someone that wants something, we can make it happen. And that was so much of the mentality at JPL. I mean, for God's sake, we built a rover that was 1 ton and we used the sky crane to literally put it down on the surface of Mars, right? Like, who imagines that? And then who can actually build that? I guess my entrepreneurial reality distortion came from JPL, and that was really helpful. I thought anything in the world is possible, and you do need a little bit of naive, ignorant thinking when you're starting a company. That's what I took away. And there's stuff that I didn't take away, right? So JPL, what I didn't take away from there is the sense of perfectionism. And anything that JPL builds needs to be perfect and it needs to work the first time. And if it takes us 10 years and $3 billion to do it, we will do it that way, but it will be a perfect product. And I left that right there. And so what we do at Capella is we try not to be perfect and we try to be quicker and we try to bring sort of this, what's been known in the software industry as agile software, into hardware and aerospace. Which is really, really difficult. But what if the first one doesn't work the way that the ultimate product— I'm going to learn so much more through that process and it's going to cost cheaper and it's going to be faster. And so that's something that kind of left behind at JPL.
