Solving The Right Problem

Paul MacCready won the Kremer Prize for human-powered flight in 1977, after the prize had been open for 18 years. Other teams spent years building aircraft, tested them once, crashed, and started over, meaning they had at most one learning cycle per year. MacCready reframed the problem. Instead of “how do I build a human-powered aircraft,” he asked “how do I build something I can crash and rebuild…