Elon told an Air Force general in 2020 that failure was irrelevant unless catastrophic. Boeing spent $4.2 billion learning what "catastrophic" meant. The frame: time is a fixed budget. Within that budget, you want the highest net useful output. Some attempts will fail. The math only breaks when a failure ends the program. Then run the experiment. In 2014, NASA awarded two fixed-price contracts to fly astronauts to the ISS. Boeing got $4.2 billion for Starliner. SpaceX got $2.6 billion for…