A bunch of years ago someone took a prize for longest indoor human powered flight, with terms that seemed unlikely to ever be reached. He commented something a

A bunch of years ago someone took a prize for longest indoor human powered flight, with terms that seemed unlikely to ever be reached. He commented something along the lines of "Everyone else have been optimizing for the wrong problem. They were optimizing for the problem 'how to control indoor flight'. I optimized for 'how do I make tweaks and modifications to the craft and try again'. Then I kept modifying and trying till it worked. SpaceX figured out the same thing, but on a grander scale.