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How is your work at NASA different from Google? What cultural differences did you find in these places? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Peter Norvig, Research Director at Google, on Quora.
NASA and Google share many things: they both have a collection of excellent dedicated and passionate people who believe in the mission they are working on. They both are pushing the boundaries of their respective technologies. So the culture on a specific project is often similar.
There are some differences. NASA's Gene Kranz famously said that "Failure is not an option." NASA often has multi-hundred-million-dollar missions in which one mistake can doom everything. Thus, a need to be extremely careful. Google's range of projects are often closer to Adam Savage's idea (echoed by Jeff Dean) that "Failure is always an option." Google accepts that a single computer can fail, and designs networked systems that can recover from that failure. Sometimes the recovery corrects the error before the user ever sees it, and sometimes an error leaks through and is corrected in a short period of time with an apology to any affected users; this is an option NASA rarely has.
In part because of this difference in the expected cost of failure, in part because of the astronomical costs (see what I did there) of space hardware, and in part because of the difference in government versus private bureaucracy, it is easier for Google to start brand new projects, and to move quickly on existing projects.
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