“To put this into perspective… The Sirius has 5,600,000 parts and close to a million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if everything was 99.9 percent reliable, that would still be 5,600 defects. It wasn’t a question of if something would go wrong on the way to the moon, it was a question of when and what.”
This book has been on my to-read list for years. I somehow never picked it up. That paragraph above is the perfect encapsulation of why I love this book so much. I will try to explain. But honestly I was hooked upon reading the first page.
I found a used copy at Boskone. I knew that the title and author were familiar, that I’d been meaning to read the book, but then I thumbed the thing open and… here, try this for your first two paragraphs:
Fistful of Wits 