Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, also runs a spaceship company called Blue Origin. His production and launch facilities for his rather secretive enterprise are located in Culberson County, Texas. Since about the year 2000, his company has been busy developing a suborbital vehicle to take paying passengers to space and back. He is joined by several other commercial ventures with the same goal, including SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Virgin Galactic, and XCor, all of whom are striving to make cheap commercial human access to space a common thing.

In late August, 2011, Jeff Bezos’ company suffered a serious setback. During the second unscrewed test flight of their New Shepherd launch vehicle, when their rocket was at 45,000 feet and traveling at Mach 1.2, it went off course and had to be destroyed.

Problems in developing a new rocket are quite normal. But you’d hardly know that if you’ve read some of the news accounts of the incident. I’ve noticed what to me seems a peculiar reaction from the pundits: that Blue Origin’s loss of one of their test vehicles is so grave that it puts into question the whole notion of commercial space flight. I’ve witnessed this reaction before. The same negativity surfaced when SpaceX suffered three successive failures during the first three launch attempts of their Falcon 1 booster. It was the nearly unanimous conclusion of pundits that the entire enterprise of getting into space commercially was simply a pipe dream that could never work.

Frankly, I find such negative attitudes puzzling—as well as ludicrously ill-informed, utterly lacking in any perspective, and incredibly shortsighted. Einstein once commented, when someone criticized him for not making much progress on a project, “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research, would we?”

Rocket science, like many other things in life, is not particularly easy. Failure is inevitable along the way to success. When Lindberg flew across the Atlantic and won the Orteig Prize in 1927 by flying the Spirit of St. Louis to Paris, it wasn’t as if he were the first person to make the attempt at flying a long distance. During the spring and summer of that same year, 1927, 40 pilots attempted various long-distance flights over the oceans, leading to 21 deaths.

Here in Lancaster California, our main street–Lancaster Boulevard–is designated as the Aerospace Walk of Honor. All along the street there are plaques set up to honor various pioneers in aerospace that worked in the Antelope Valley, at the nearby Edwards Air Force Base. Not a few of those test pilots honored by plaques died during the testing of new aircraft. Although each death was mourned, though each failed flight was a disappointment, no one ever thought to call the whole thing off. Instead, the engineers and pilots pressed ahead, pushing the development of technologies we now take for granted.

It would be very strange if new technologies worked the first time they were tested. Instead, failures, even repeated failures, are normal along the road to ultimate success. That Blue Origin had one of their test vehicles fail simply demonstrates that they are working hard to create something new. It doesn’t mean their enterprise is unworkable, it doesn’t mean that they will not succeed in their ultimate aims. It simply means they aren’t at the finish line yet. We don’t tell toddlers to stop trying to walk just because they fall down a lot. We don’t tell children to stop practicing the piano because they can’t play Mozart the first time they sit down behind the keyboard.

Edison tried three thousand different theories in connection with electric light before he finally found what would work well. He commented once that “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

We do a disservice to our children and our civilization if we allow the sense to predominate that failure means we have to stop. Whatever happened to the old adage, “try, try again?” It took me twenty years to finally get a book published by a major publishing company. What if I’d stopped trying after my first rejection? Or after my hundredth? Even J.K. Rowling had her first Harry Potter book rejected nine times before her British publisher, Bloomsbury, accepted it. And the first Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected 140 times. Steven King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected thirty times. In fact, King grew so discouraged at that point that he tossed it in the trash. His wife, Tabitha, saw the manuscript and rescued it. She read it and convinced him to keep trying.

Not every rocket company currently attempting to commercialize space will survive. Some of them will quit, some of them will run out of money. But the failures do not make the enterprise unworthy, nor do the failures say a word about ultimate success in the end. Setbacks are inevitable. Quitting doesn’t have to be.

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