Before something important leaves the ground, someone has to be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: What could make this fail?

That question takes on a different meaning when the “something” is a spacecraft.

During the development of NASA’s X-43A, an experimental hypersonic aircraft, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center received a dissenting opinion raising…

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, all the dithering about remote work stopped virtually overnight. Working from home wasn’t perfect, but people made it work.

At first, remote employees were triumphant as they checked off their personal and professional to-do lists from the comfort of home. But somewhere between the third surge of the virus, the fourth load of…

In this article I’ll be looking at the shape of this question regarding complexity that comes from Plato. In the Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates asks whether a thing is pious because the gods love it, or the gods love it because it is pious. If piety is defined by the gods’ love, it has no ground of its own; it’s only whatever the gods happen to prefer. If the gods love something because it’s…