To test this hypothesis, Spencer sent an assistant out for a bag of popcorn. When the kernels were held in front of the magnetron, they exploded all over the lab. By 1947, Raytheon had built the first microwave oven, and in 1949 Spencer had received a patent for his new "method of preparing food."

David also profiles the giant, R. Buckminster Fuller:

Visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute

In 1927, R. Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller was a failed businessman who was drinking too much, depressed about the death of his first daughter, and worried about how to take care of his family. That winter, while living in Chicago, he walked out to Lake Michigan to throw himself into its icy waters. "I said to myself, 'I've done the best I know how and it hasn't worked. I guess I'm just no good,'" he remembered. Fuller gave himself a choice: jump or think. He stood on the lakeshore for hours, finally deciding that he didn't have the right to kill himself. And so began Fuller's career as an inventor, thinker, and futurist.

The new race for the space business is no different. Ships will sit there or tumble over (remember Vanguard), there will be failures to launch and errors that cannot be anticipated. Yet the scientists and engineers who can deal with failure and use it to take the next step, who can see the accident for what it really means for some project will, in the end, prevail.

The photographer who shoots and sees that the story he/she wanted to tell was lost, the moment missed, the avenue of seeing not taken, and uses the failure to become Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or Robert Frank has used failure as a step toward the stars. The question is if there is creativity to see the possibilities of the failure and the guts to put it behind. The new space entrepreneurs may have it, probably have it. The government agencies are a question. Will NASA learn from its mistakes and tragedies as quickly and as well?

Clarebrough gets to advise emerging space entrepreneurs and write about the management of science-oriented businesses because he can write this:

With all this talk of failure, you might be thinking, “What’s wrong with success?” For sure, no company can survive for long unless it produces sustained success. The problem is that when something regularly works perfectly, we humans fall prey to deadly diseases—complacency followed by arrogance. When the rocket does blow up—which it will—we go into denial, making it harder, and taking longer, to learn the lessons. Even then we may resist learning and merely repeat what we did. There’s a saying in the business world: “To those whom the gods wish to destroy they first award forty years of success.” Maybe even three good launches in a year will do it.