Inside Google X: lab reveals it experimented with space elevators and hoverboards
The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind The Secretive Lab's Closed Doors — Astro Teller is sharing a story about something bad. Or maybe it's something good. At Google X, it's sometimes hard to know the difference.
Context & Ripple Effects
When the New York Times first pulled back the curtain on Google's top-secret lab in November 2011, Google X was defined by what it hid. The Fast Company exclusive marks a different posture: captain of moonshots Astro Teller is now volunteering the lab's dead ends — space elevators, hoverboards — on the record.
The story travelled widely the same day, picked up by Business Insider, Quartz, BGR, 9to5Google and others, which suggests the disclosure itself is the event: Google X is converting its failure rate into public proof of ambition.
First-order effects
- Astro Teller gains control of the lab's narrative, framing killed projects like the space elevator as evidence of disciplined ambition rather than wasted spend.
- Google's rivals with internal research labs now face a disclosure benchmark: silence about failed bets reads as having fewer bets.
Second-order effects
- Publicized failure becomes a recruiting asset — engineers choosing between corporate labs can weigh a shop that shows its graveyard against ones that don't.
- Investor and press scrutiny of moonshot economics sharpens, forcing Google X to justify the portfolio alongside headline projects like self-driving cars and Glass.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the corporate moonshot lab institutionalizes celebrated failure as governance: killing projects loudly becomes the mechanism by which labs earn license to keep spending on long-shot research.
- Secrecy stops being the default posture for big-company R&D, replaced by managed transparency where the lab curates which failures it reveals.
The trend: Corporate research labs are shifting from secrecy to strategic disclosure, treating publicly admitted failures as currency for talent and legitimacy.