The early days of major American rocketry were filled with failures, some of them disasters.

To get to the moon, we needed crashes and endless fiddling.

The master builder did not need to force the design of the details down the builders’ throats, because the builders themselves knew enough of the shared pattern language to make the details correctly, with their own individual flair....

We grasp for mathematics or engineering to come to our rescue—perhaps even the law: By requiring licenses for our developers maybe we can force improvement in software making.This passage by the poet and playwright Harold Pinter is typical of how poets envision: The thing germinated and bred itself. The characters sounded in my ears—it was apparent to me what one would say and what would be the other’s response, at any given point.It was apparent to me what they would not, ever, say, whatever one might wish....But like survivors, we’ve managed to make these islands homes. Up until Alan Shepard’s launch into space, the Redstone rocket had experienced failures including launchpad and downrange explosions 23 times—the last failure was 2 months before Shepard’s flight.We’ve found the succulent but bitter fruit that can sustain us, the small encrusted or overfurred creatures we can eat to survive, the slow-moving and muddy streams from which we drink against the urge to spit it out. My favorite failure took place on the twenty-first of November, 1960, when the Redstone’s engines shut off 1 second after ignition: The rocket lifted off a couple of centimeters, and then sat down—with no significant damage.