I’m not even convinced it costs more to do things space-flight style. It just costs more up-front. Buggy software just hides the cost and amortizes it over more time.
What you're missing is that if you throw out the code before you've done all the work, that's work you saved.
Releasing without as much up-front costs lets you test more ideas. Getting your stuff space ready is a waste if your stuff doesn't actually have a market. There's a small margin of products where low initial quality kills the market, but mostly low initial quality is a pragmatic way to reduce cost of failure.
Sometimes it's a lot easier to do things the right way when the requirements are clear, and the best way to get clear requirements is to do it wrong and figure out why it was wrong.
Even this thread has people saying that all that matters is getting something to market, which I think is indicative of one of the major problems of modern software development.
I mean the reason we write code in business is to make money and continue to provide features/fixes at an efficient rate to continue to make money. If you can do it right the first time within the confines of the time allotted, go for it. But if it comes at the cost of making money/spending time, we aren't doing it for an esoteric reason.
