Deane, an upbeat man with a big shaved head, has a background in civil engineering and fluid
mechanics. The hardest part of running the lab, he says, “is training people to understand that risk is
part of their job, and if they fail well, they will be given the license to fail again. If we try to spend
ten thousand dollars on our failures instead of ten million dollars, we’ll get the opportunity to do a lot
more things.” In this context, Deane says, failure “has to be recognized as a victory.”