I paused for several long beats. What to do? Prosecute my position, or just move on? I suddenly realized that even if I could win this debate between myself and the head of NASA, winning points wasn’t the point. We were there to get approval for a single, very big idea. That’s all that mattered. The case I was making wasn’t something I’d cooked up overnight when I found out we were going to be called to account. This was a case that the entire team had developed over a period of years. It had been approved by our review board from the Aerospace Corporation and by our own EDL review board as
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