why NASA flew a broken spacecraft to the moon

Fun fact:

NASA just completed the first crewed lunar mission since 1972.

Artemis II took four astronauts on a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back.

Pretty neat if you ask me.

Also perfectly timed to hype me up for season 5 of For All Mankind 🪐

Yet the Artemis engineers were sitting on something a little unsettling the entire time…

Which was:

The spacecraft’s heat shield had known design flaws going into the mission.

Not “suspected” flaws…

KNOWN ones.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but…

The heat shield doesn’t sound like the type of thing you want to have trouble with.

Then again, what do I know?

Lol

Because they ran the numbers and made the call to fly anyway.

So, needless to say:

Watching them re-enter the atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound was a tad bit nervewracking.

Nevertheless…

Their calculations were bang on.

And the crew came out the other side just fine.

Moral of the story?

The heat shield didn't survive because it was perfect on the outside…

It survived because it was rock solid on the inside.

And most entrepreneurs I see would benefit from taking a page out of the NASA playbook.

Why?

Because they’ll spend months polishing the surface of an offer before anyone's ever seen it…

Tweaking the sales page, fiddling with the pricing, redesigning the logo...

All while the one question that actually matters goes unanswered:

Do people actually WANT this?

There’s only one way to get that answer:

Put it in front of your audience and see if they buy it.

Don’t waste weeks tinkering with an offer that hasn’t seen the light of day yet.

Let the market tell you what actually needs fixing.

Because surface flaws are survivable.

You can fix the landing page and tighten up the copy after you’ve confirmed people are actually willing to pay for it.

But if the core isn't there…

If it doesn’t solve a burning pain point or deliver a result they badly want…

Then no amount of polish is gonna save you.

And the longer you wait to find out, the more time you've sunk into something the market never asked for.

Some food for thought :)

Jim Hamilton