Episode 074: Impact of Poor Communication: Lessons from Artemis

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We are a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley. Joining with my co-host Jeff Jenkins.

Hey, it's good to have you back. You just came back from vacation.

I did. Well, I mean, you know, it's been a little bit, but yeah, it was a fun time out in Orlando. And, you know, we went out there, we went out to go see the rocket launch. Like, that was the whole purpose of going in August because nobody really wants to be in Florida in August.

Not really, because you walk outside and you're soaking wet.

It's just, it's 80% humidity, and for an Arizona boy who's used to like 5% humidity I got back and like I could literally feel my skin drying out. I was like, yeah, I'm back. I'm back in the heat. Give me the dry 109 any day of the week. I would agree with that. It was so nice.

Yeah, but you had like an interesting experience in that.

It was. It was. So we go out there and we're, you know, if any of you have ever been to a rocket launch before, it's an experience. I can remember going to one of the shuttle missions when I was 19. This would have been like 2005-ish, and I guess, well, yeah, I would have been 19, almost 20. And, uh, I can still remember feeling like when that rocket lifted off, I can feel it in my chest, and I can still remember that feeling, like the rumbling and just the ground, like the rumble, like the ground was shaking, but like you could feel the air moving in your lungs.

Really?

It was that intense. Okay, right, like that's cool. It's a feeling I can't quite describe, but It was awesome. Yeah. Right? Like, I still remember it. It was just so loud and impressive. Just an impressive display of the firepower, I guess. You know, I don't know what the right word is for that, but thrust. Um, and so I was excited to go out there and see this newest rocket, which produces even more thrust than the old rocket system did.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, this is the new SLS that NASA's spent some almost $100 billion on developing. and I didn't know this until last week, I learned this— apparently this SLS uses a lot of the same tech from both the Space Shuttle and the Saturn V. So it's new tech. That's great. Oh yeah. Okay, I'm gonna— like, this is no joke. The rocket they use, you know, on the bottom of the main booster, the main stage, the rockets are literally leftover surplus from the Space Shuttle program. They said, hey, we've got 16 of these RS-25 rockets still left laying around. What do you want to do with them? Well, let's go ahead and we'll design the new rocket just using those ones. We've got 4 missions of rockets still going. And so they just use the old tech.

Listen, I get saving money, right? And, and repurposing things.

However, that was designed like literally the first rocket flew, I want to say, during the Carter administration. Right? It might have been just before Reagan took over. So you're talking like late '70s.

So half of our employees weren't alive when that was designed.

Nope. It's 50-year-old tech. Yeah. Like, no joke. So they're using those. The solid rocket boosters that are on the side of SLS, the exact same design that Morton Thiokol did for the Space Shuttle. Right? So it's still built out in Utah. They're still test-fired up there. That same exact solid rocket boosters. The capsules and stuff all on top, those are all new, but that stack design was basically lifted from the Saturn V program. So not a lot of innovation there. None of it's reusable. Like, the solid rocket boosters, I guess they could reuse those, but like the main stage, it just disintegrates in space.

You know what, Josh, I've got this brand new Corvette for you, but I'm gonna put some tires on it that were manufactured 50 years ago.

Right. And guess what? Like, none of it will work. You can drive it once and then it's going to fall apart. Yeah, in the ocean. Versus— it just kills me, right? It's like, I'm going to come to this point later, but you look at SpaceX and what they're doing, and like, they have built this whole reusable rocket system. Every single one of their pieces is recoverable. Yep. And it's recyclable. And so they can reuse it. Like, this— they just launched a rocket This is kind of, you know, embarrassing for NASA, but like NASA had to scrub the launch a second time. And then SpaceX launched Falcon 9 and they put a bunch of Starlink satellites up there. But I guess they— that's the 7th time this particular Falcon 9 has flown and come back.

Oh geez.

Successfully.

Nice.

Yeah. So their track record is working pretty good. But so anyway, the whole point of telling you this story is that I had a lot of insights as I was going through this experience, going out to see this rocket, that I thought really applied to what we do in business and what we do in fleet. And things that I was like, I just saw that stood out to me as like, wow, I wonder how often we do this and don't realize it. So I'm gonna tell you a story. The first day, the first launch is Monday, and it's scheduled to go off sometime between the morning of 8:30 10:30.

Okay.

So 2-hour launch window, fairly early in the morning.

But you knew the launch window before you—

I knew the launch window before we went, right? So we booked our plane tickets, and we knew that if they didn't launch on Monday, like, there's always a chance of scrub. If they didn't launch on Monday, the second date was going to be on that Friday, and the third backup date was the following Monday. Okay. So there's 3 dates they could have launched in that window. So we get out there and, you know, they notified us ahead of time. They said, hey, traffic's gonna be really bad between the hours of 5 and 6, so go out early. So we left our place, we were in Orlando, takes about an hour to get from there to the coast. We left at 3 AM.

Okay.

We didn't pull into Kennedy until 7 AM. Mm-hmm. It was a 4-hour drive. Like, 8 kids in the car, right? So that's just crazy.

Not much driving though.

But there was like And the issue was that they had 3 lanes of traffic coming from 3 different directions on freeways, all merging into essentially one lane so that one police officer could check and make sure you actually had a ticket to the event.

Wait, so the logistics were to put them in one lane so one guy could check?

Yes.

Makes sense.

Right? Instead of doing like 2 or 3 lanes or checking before they ever merged onto the highway, like it was just— and then they had— that was the other issue they had is they had a bunch of like side roads that people were using. And so you ended up with like 5 or 6 like unmerging and merging events. It was just a bad logistical situation.

Yeah, nightmare.

And they had planned— they said there was going to be about 100,000 people coming out on Monday. It's a significant crowd for an area that small. Um, so that was the first thing that just really like, wow, this was not planned very well. Like, they were not ready for this. Yeah. Um, Thankfully, we get out there and like the last shuttle to take us to our viewing site left at 7:15. We got there 15 minutes before. In fact, like we walked through the shuttle bus at like 7:08 and got on. They're like, "Alright, that's the last bus." Like we barely made it and we left 4 hours ahead of time.

That's crazy.

Absolutely insane. But it was supposed to be like a super awesome experience and we were looking forward to it. Yep. We get out there to the viewing site And the first thing I notice is like we get all the way through. There's not really a lot of signs telling you where to go. But we get to the viewing site and there's no like countdown clock at all. So I have no idea like when it's going to go off. I just know that the window is between 8:30 and 10:30. Yeah. But I don't have like the T-minus or the L-minus, so I don't know when it's actually going to launch.

Wait, so is the viewing site indoors or outdoors?

It's outdoors. Okay. Yeah. So it's this particular viewing site, we were just outside the Saturn V. Rocket area, like the museum area that they have off-site. And you could see the, you know, you could see the launch pad, you know, directly. I think we're about 3 miles away from the launch pad. And so you could see the rocket, but like you had no idea where we were at. So like, I look at your watch and like, okay, it's 8, we're coming up on 8 o'clock, 30 minutes.

It's about to happen.

It's about to happen, right? But there was no, like, you just had no idea what was going on. Are we on? Are we scheduled? Is it going? Is it not going? Nothing, right? And there's probably about 500 or 600 people, like they had a bunch of bleachers set up and things like that, and they're all just sitting out there. They had a PA system, but there was no announcements or anything like that coming out.

So they didn't come on and be like, hey, we're about to start our countdown, right?

You know, like, hey, we're in a delay, which as it so happened, they had had a fueling delay because there was a fueling leak.

Okay.

And so they were having to slow manually fill the thing instead of their fast automated fill. Which put them behind schedule, but not outside of their launch window. They were still able to make up the time. But then they also had, you know, an issue. If you go back and look at it, they had an issue with one of the rockets was too hot and they couldn't get it cooled down. Turns out it was just a bad sensor. It was fine. They could have totally launched on Monday. Yeah. Right? But sometimes you have bad sensor and that's what it is. But they were going through this whole process and No communication from the launch pad was getting back to the viewing site.

So, huh, so could there have been communication, you guys just didn't know about it?

Oh, it was, so they did have inside the building.

Okay.

They had the broadcast going, right? So you could go watch and like they had, you know, there's a NASA TV broadcast, which was interesting because like I've watched the SpaceX broadcasts and they have like professional broadcast people doing it. Who explain things about the rocket, and they're like, they've got these infographics and they tell you all about what's going to happen.

Very educational.

Oh yeah. And it's— but they're constantly talking about the status and like, and you can hear Mission Control coming through, and then they give commentary on like what you just heard Mission Control say. So like you feel like you're in the know.

Yeah.

You're like, okay, I'm in the loop and this is what's going on. And then they're filling airtime. And so like as information changes, like they're constantly like repeating that information. So if you just came into the feed, you were hearing what's going on. Okay. That's SpaceX. That's how they do it, right? Modern company. NASA? No. NASA, like, they might speak every 2 or 3 minutes, and so you'll just have 2 or 3 minutes of watching a rocket on a screen, and then they're not even showing Mission Control. No. And then they might have a, like, a status thing or, you know, like an infographic that'll pop up. It'll rotate through every once in a while. But you're not really sure what it means or anything. And then it's like there's this total delay, right? They have a problem with the fueling, they've got a problem with the rocket, and then suddenly somebody's like, hey, by the way, you know, like, they're— we're on a countdown pause. Okay, that's kind of a big deal. Like, you probably should announce that to everybody, mm-hmm, that the countdown is paused, because that means it's not launching at 8:30, right? A countdown clock would have told you that. They didn't have one of those, right?

Well, but we live in a modern world.

Yeah, you think—

Don't you have like a smartphone where you can stay up to date?

Well, so that was my next thing to go to was like, well, let's go look at Twitter because they've got to be updating Twitter. It's NASA. Yeah, and I know they're on Twitter, but there were so many people out at the launch site that it overwhelmed the cell networks. And so like, you know, even with 2 bars of service, like, you just— I couldn't even get Twitter to come back. It was like, sorry, something's wrong. I'm like, okay, we're just loading tweets here, like, for one channel. Come on now. It's not that, not that much bandwidth. So I was like, all right, well, let's jump on the Kennedy Space Center Wi-Fi and we'll get there. Nope.

Oh, perfect.

That was totally shut down and disconnected.

What?

Like they just didn't have any internet access. So it was also overwhelmed.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. So just like a lack of planning. You can kind of see a trend here, right? And it's been a little bit since they've probably had a NASA launch.

That's true.

But they do launches all the time with like other companies, you know, SpaceX. So they've put Crew Dragon up there a couple times. And it hasn't been that long since the last space shuttle mission.

There was Wi-Fi back then.

Yeah, right? Yeah. I don't know. I'm not a rocket scientist. I don't know.

I don't think you need to be a rocket scientist though for communication and preparation.

And that really was like the— like, I wonder how many times we as fleets do the same thing, right? Which is just kind of like we don't communicate the status or we don't communicate what we're doing or what's happening. You know, how many times do we take a vehicle in the shop and then like we just don't tell anybody what's going on with it?

Yeah.

Or is this going to be another hour? Is it going to be another 5 hours? Is this a big repair, little repair? Like, what's the expectation? And then if something changes, are we communicating that change immediately, or is it taking us 20 or 30 minutes to communicate that change?

Yeah.

And how often are we communicating? And I think that was like the biggest thing that I took from this was there was just a total lack of communication from, you know, the people who were in the know, who knew what was going on, to anybody who was just there to watch it, right? And it wasn't like we were doing this for free. Like, you paid to get tickets and things like that. That's— I mean, it's Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. It's like their whole— like, they own this show.

Yeah, it's a revenue stream.

Yeah. And so, like, there's just a total lack of communication that you have there. The other thing that was really interesting to me is as they were going through some of the troubleshooting techniques, like again, those same communications, it just wasn't happening. And so as soon as they were like, hey, you know, this was the best part. I finally got Twitter to load.

Okay.

Like one or two tweets, right? And so I'm sitting in there and I'm watching, I'm like, okay. And then it says, like, I finally get the tweet to come through and it says that they've scrubbed the mission launch.

Okay.

So I got the tweet. They didn't make any announcement on the broadcast yet.

Yeah.

And they didn't make any announcement outside. And so I'm like, okay, like, is this official yet? 2 or 3 minutes later, they finally come over the broadcast. Just got the word, Mission Control has scrubbed the launch for today. Right? Now that's inside the building.

Yeah.

I walk outside, nobody knows.

They didn't have it announced at the same time?

Nobody knows a thing.

Oh my gosh. Okay.

Right? And so they're all just sitting there in their lawn chairs and on their picnic blankets and in the bleachers, right? There's tons of— there's probably 500 or 600 people in the bleachers, and they're just sitting there just waiting, waiting, just waiting the whole time. And so I'd look at my wife, I'm like, hey, they just scrubbed, you know, let's pack up.

Yeah.

So we get all the kids together, we get all packed up, and then it starts spreading around, like people are, oh, they just scrubbed it, right? Because words start spreading.

Oh yeah.

And communication, I think this was interesting, is that the communication was spreading virally among the people and not from NASA, not from NASA, not from the visitor complex, right? So I'm like, how often does that happen to us as managers where we're not communicating and the message is getting relayed without us? So misinformation, there could be a lot of misinformation happening there where like rumors are getting spread that aren't quite true. Now in this case, the mission was scrubbed, right? But There could have been so many bad things that came about that. And the funniest thing to me was, you know, nobody has said anything for a while. And then all of a sudden they finally come over the PA, NASA has scrubbed this launch attempt. All NASA employees must report to the buses they came in on in the next 5 minutes. It was like, okay, so you guys, you know, like you took 15 minutes to finally say something and now you have 5 minutes to get on the bus. You know, to take you back to, you know, because there was a lot of NASA employees that were there for the launch.

Right.

Which I think might have been part of the issue with the traffic that day.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it could have been because there's a lot of people coming in that probably weren't there on Saturday. Because that was the other interesting thing is they did move it. So instead of like their original dates were Friday and Monday, they did move it to Saturday, was, you know, for the next launch attempt. We went out there, they were expecting 400,000 people. So 4 times as many people, and I was expecting traffic to be like 6 or 7 hours, right? Instead of the 4, instead of 4, right? We get out there and we get in within like— there's no backup at all. They had 2 cops checking the tickets and it was like in and out.

So the difference one cop makes.

Yeah, I don't know, you know, either that or they just didn't have as many people going to the place as they thought they would.

But when you were there, did they— did it—

was it as full, um, or was it Did it look— there's still quite a few people there, you know, but like, yeah, I would say it was less.

You probably at least had 100,000 or no?

Yeah. Okay. We did get better parking that second time too.

I would hope so.

It was a little bit different, but it was interesting to me though, is to see that difference. Um, and on the second day they scrubbed it a little bit sooner. Uh, and since we were still at the main part of the complex, they didn't even start loading the shuttle buses for that one. We were still getting some decent internet. But it was just that total lack of communication that just really stuck with me. It's like, how often are we doing that where we could really have this amazing client experience or customer experience and, you know, have stuff up on wallboards and just communicate visually to them, automate some of our communication so they're, they're kept apprised of the status of our units and the status of repairs if we're doing replacement scheduling or things like that. Just how much do we know or that we're keeping them in the dark that we don't know we're keeping them in the dark about? And how proactive are we being in sharing that information so that they can stay in the know and in the loop so they're not surprised when something goes wrong or something variance comes up like, "Oh, I didn't even know that was happening." You're like, "Well, if you were— oh, sorry, I didn't tell you about that 6 months ago." Yes. Well, that information would have been relevant. I think the other thing that I thought was interesting too is not knowing what I knew about the rocket. I didn't know this, but I guess with the Space Shuttle program, they scrubbed like once for every 5 launch attempts. They had to scrub it.

Okay.

Like some, some Space Shuttle missions scrubbed 5 times before they finally launched. Wow. That's incredible.

That's a lot.

Like that tells me that there might be something wrong with your technology or your, or your, or your process.

Pre-launch process.

Right. Like there's something not working right if you have to scrub. Now, Maybe it was the weather. It's Florida in the summer, hurricane season, whatever. I get it. Thunderstorms are going crazy. Rains there like every afternoon. Uh, but at the same time, you know, if you have, and I guess this hydrogen leak issue, which is what scrubbed our Saturday launch, was, uh, you know, there's, there's this hydrogen fitting that has to pop away from the vehicle really quickly and it didn't seal correctly. And so it was leaking hydrogen, which is very flammable.

Yep.

If you know anything about the Hindenburg. And so they're trying to avoid another Hindenburg incident with their rocket on the pad. I guess it costs a lot of money, so they don't want to blow it up. I get it. Um, but I guess they've had the same issue with the space shuttle and with Saturn V, but instead of doing what Elon Musk did, which was switch the fuel to a different type of fuel that doesn't leak as easily, they just keep perpetuating the same stuff. Uh, and so instead of using hydrogen, Elon Musk over at SpaceX uses liquid methane, which, you know, I guess is a lot more stable and a lot less leaky.

Leaky.

Yeah, I don't know what the right word is for that, but—

Less leakage, yeah.

But I wonder how often we do that too, you know, and you talk about the difference between like the SpaceX broadcast or the NASA broadcast. You know, the SpaceX Super Heavy that's going up, I think this is amazing, right? I talked about the SLS, the biggest rocket NASA's ever produced. They generate something like 8 million pounds of thrust. SpaceX and their Super Heavy thing that's gonna lift off and go to the moon?

Yeah.

16 million pounds of thrust, twice the size of this big ol' rocket that NASA's doing. So SpaceX is doing some pretty crazy stuff.

So, but that's, when you look at it, think about the lack of humility that you have, like, and our government, first of all, is not humble at all.

Hey, there's a lot of perpetuity that goes in there.

There is, right? But if you were humble and looked at someone else who had this improved process or something in place, you know, and you didn't at least consider it and look at it, then I mean, that's kind of an issue, right?

There's a thing called hubris in there. Yeah.

Like, we have those same issues too when we look at whether it's our shops or fleets where we do something one way and we've done it this way forever, so we're going to keep it this way even though there's different processes and advances that have taken place.

And some of that you have to look at motivation, right? You know, not to get into federal government slamming or anything like that, but you definitely know there's some palms getting greased to keep some of this old shuttle tech going around, right? Oh yeah. And, and you look at stuff like, you know, what Elon Musk is doing over at SpaceX, and it's all brand new, and it only benefits his company. Yeah, right. Like, there's, you know, he's using subcontractors, things like that. But when you're a lobbyist, right, you're going to keep lobbying for— if you're Morton Thiokol and you're Boeing and you're the big ones, right?

Lockheed Martin, all that.

Yeah, because all of them had a hand in designing that rocket, and there's a huge incentive for them to not have to redesign and reinvent the wheel because it doesn't cost— they don't have any R&D expense now. They could just keep building the same stuff and charging the same price, right? So there's huge profitability margins for them. Um, and so they keep using and perpetuating the same stuff instead of looking at it, what could we do different and how could we make this an even better experience? The other thing that really was interesting to me is the they never got through a full wet dress rehearsal for this rocket. They skipped a couple steps during the last one because they had to like trick the computer to keep going through the full countdown.

Huh?

Yeah, this is NASA, right? So they never went through the full wet dress rehearsal, and people were telling them like, no, you need to go roll it back and then roll it. But they didn't want the delays, so they were kind of giving in to some of the pressure from outside. It's like, we've got to launch this thing. Wow.

Okay.

I think part of it is because they want to beat Elon.

Yeah, out. Oh, most likely, yeah.

Um, because I would— like, I'll tell you, there's no love lost between Biden and Musk. Like, they just— what? It's weird. I don't know why, because I mean, the guy's Tesla, right? Like, he's a huge EV guy. Yeah, but like, he doesn't— Biden won't ever include him in the EV conversation.

Biggest, biggest EV, uh, producer out there. Yeah, you know, he's never talked about—

I do think it's— there's probably something to do with unions, right? Because Elon doesn't have any unions. Very true, right? So there's probably a little bit of that, but It's interesting to me is like there is some competition even between SpaceX and NASA, even though they're working together. It's like coopetition. But I wonder how often we do that too, where like we're not looking at something because we— there's like an interpersonal conflict. Yeah, right.

So you've got a grudge or something.

There's a grudge, right? And like we're shooting ourselves in the foot because we don't want to accept that somebody else might have a better answer, even if we don't necessarily like that person. Yeah. So the thing that stood out to me about this, right, is that NASA never went through a full wet dress rehearsal, right? And they have so many processes and safety checks in place to keep them from launching if something's wrong, right? Like, there's— it's bureaucracy. You compare that to SpaceX, which, like, a month ago, they're spinning up, they're doing a spin-up test, which is kind of like a wet dress rehearsal. And they're spinning up this— the Super Heavy rocket, by the way, has 33 engines on it.

—One or two, gotcha.

—Right, like, so it's a big, it's a BAMF, right? So you go through and they do the spin-up test, which is basically like, we're gonna get this rocket all the way ready to launch, we're just not gonna throw the switch, right? So we're not gonna light it. It's like turning on all the gas burners, but not pressing the igniter. Okay. Right? So they go through, they spin up all 33 engines, and I guess there was a little, like, there must have been a spark somewhere, in the vicinity of the rockets because it lit all that methane and there was this huge pop, right? Just a huge explosion underneath the rocket. Didn't light them, didn't launch the rocket or anything like that, but it definitely was like, oops, that's not supposed to happen. It just burned that methane. Yeah, burned it all off. And Elon's response was, maybe we shouldn't spin up all 33 at the same time the first time. Let's rotate. Right, so now what they're doing is they're starting with one and then now they're doing 3, and then they just did 6 the other day, right? So they're kind of building up slowly. They just did a static fire test with all 6 engines, which is fun because they always light them up. But sometimes, like, we get into that mentality of, like, oh, we have to be so safety conscious that we don't actually do anything, and then we're cost conscious, and we're under pressure from all these other people. So NASA, like, they should have done another wet dress rehearsal before inviting all these people out to watch a launch attempt. Yes. Because essentially what they just did last week was wet dress rehearsal attempt number 5 and 6.

Yeah, and they wasted so many people's— like, you flew there. Yeah. With 9 other people.

Yep. And there's a lot of families that did the same thing to go watch it.

Yeah. So the cost that you— yeah, I mean, it's just crazy to have them not be prepared. Yeah.

And, and little things like, you know, that if they had gone through the— done the full wet dress rehearsal, they would have found these problems. Yes. Right. If they had just done it the right way. The other side of that is like, there's got to be ways, like there's things in their systems that are keeping them from doing it, doing more wet dress rehearsals, because it costs them way too much money to transport it back to the vehicle assembly building and back out to the pad and back to the building and back to the pad. Whereas Elon's system, he's like, well, we can reassemble and service this thing while it's on the pad all day long. Yeah, right. It's because they've looked at it and said, how do we make this whole process more efficient? The recyclability of the rockets. Every piece of Elon's system is recyclable. They, they land that thing back on the pad. You know, like when they launched that Falcon 9 I mentioned right after the NASA scrub, like that night, you know, within just 2 minutes of it launching, I think you watch the whole video and like, I think in minute 4 or 5, it's back on the ground at Kennedy. It's crazy. Yeah, like that they can even do that. Blows my mind. Yeah, that's amazing. It's just incredible that they've gotten to that point.

The fact they can land them on a boat too, which is just crazy.

Like, they play catch, like, there's drone boats out there in the middle of the ocean, you know, like, just see it like moving around, like, okay, all right, where, you know. And you think about how small of a target that is in the big old ocean, and it just precision right there on the right, on the money. Yep. You know, but you know how many rockets they had to blow up to get that? A lot. A ton. And it was okay because they failed fast. And I think that's the thing I like about SpaceX is it's like, hey, we're not gonna be haphazard, we're not gonna be, you know, we're not gonna throw caution to the wind, but we're also not going to stop from trying, right? We're not putting human lives at risk, but we are going to do things that, you know, like we're gonna blow up a ton of rockets and it's okay because guess what? We can reuse every single one of these rockets and we can land them after launching them. With precision. It's great. It's just that, you know, like, you would never be able to do that if you weren't willing to take risks and blow up a few rockets along the way. Yeah, true. So how often are we looking at our own processes and saying, okay, is there something here? Like, you know, it's not gonna cost a human life, it might cost a lot of money. Guarantee you, every one of those rockets that he blew up, it was like, ka-ching! You know, that's more money than I'll ever see in a lifetime. But at the same time, like, now he can catch rockets and he can charge a gajillion dollars to launch stuff into space, and he doesn't have to rebuild that rocket anymore. It's the 7th time that rocket flew into space. Just crazy. And came back successfully. NASA can't even get one up in the air. Kills me. It's like there's something major to say about that.

You need to go watch a SpaceX launch instead of a NASA launch, apparently.

And it's in Texas, so maybe, you know, that's a little bit closer, I guess. But how often do we do that? You know, like, are we taking risks and are we trying new things and just being experimental? and being willing to fail and look like an idiot, to try new things so we can learn what not to do in the future, until we can finally learn what to do.

Yeah, people are just so reserved. They don't want to fail. Like, no one likes to fail. No. Nobody likes to fail at all, but what do you take away from those failures? And I think that a lot of people miss that insight.

So on that note, I will say then that I guess NASA did pull a little bit of an Elon. Instead of doing another wet dress rehearsal, they went for the launch. And they failed. Okay. So I guess maybe I'll give them a little bit of credit on that one.

I mean, they still failed, but whatever.

Right. Maybe they'll learn. Maybe they'll just communicate better next time. Like, I wouldn't be as bitter about it.

Yeah, maybe.

I'm not bitter at all. Jerks. My kid, 4 hours sitting in traffic. Anyway, so those are some of my fun observations. This episode ended up being way longer than I thought it was gonna be.

It was good though. Good insights.

It was really good. So that's going to do it for us. Just as a reminder, we have Fleet Success Summit coming up in March 2023. 3 speakers. 3 speakers. We got Mike Pitcher, Sam Bradford, Don Osterberg. Osterberg. I want to say Otterberg, but it's not. It's Osterberg. So super awesome. We're going to have more speaker announcements coming up. But until next time, take care.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you like the show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.