My argument (and I’m just thought experimenting here) is that without NASA’s rigor, their programmes would have failed. Public support, and thus the market for soace projects, would have dried up before SpaceX was able to “do it faster”.
(Feel free to shoot this down: I wasn’t there and I havn’t read any deep histories of the conpanies. I’m just brainstorming to explore the problem space)
Doing things right takes less time in my experience. You spend a little more time up front to figure out the right way to do something, and a lot of the time that investment pays dividends. The alternative is to just choose the quickest fix every time until eventually your code is so riddled with quick fixes that nobody knows how it works and it's impossible to get anything done.
I'm hoping that example holds up, but I'm not well versed in that area so it may be a terrible counter-example but my overarching point is this: overly engineered code often produces less value than quickly executed code. We're not in the business of making computers do things artfully just for the beauty of the rigor and correctness of our systems. We're doing it to make computers do useful thing for humanity.
You may think that spending an extra year perfecting a pace-maker might end up saving lives, but what if more people die in the year before you go to market than would've ended up dying had you launched with something almost perfect, but with potential defects?
Time is expensive in so many more ways than just capital spent.