9 ms·

If you can send a building into space, land it on a postage stamp floating in an ocean... I have high-confidence you can solve production line scaling challenge

If you can send a building into space, land it on a postage stamp floating in an ocean... I have high-confidence you can solve production line scaling challenges.

rsynnott 9y ago
Yes, that's why the Soviet Union's lead on space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. Making a spacecraft work and making a production line work are completely different problems, and there's little reason to think that an organisation good at one is necessarily good at the other. I'm not saying Tesla WON'T sort out their production difficulties, necessarily, just that it doesn't follow from SpaceX being good at space launch.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  USSRs problems weren't that they couldn't make production lines work they were extremely good at manufacturing at scale. The problem was that they were really bad at figuring out what needed to be made and at what amounts because of the worst kind of planned economy you can imagine (take aby soviet era product hammer, clock, lock, radio w/e and you'll see a very peculiar thing a physical price tag embedded on it, if you were a factory you were basically told you are making X now, price, profits and all economic decisions were taken out of your hands). If anything their problem was that they produced way too much of pretty much everything on a whim. Additionally there was all the wrong kinds of competition in which the establishment was the selective force rather than the market. These aren't the problems Tesla is facing.
  - vkou 9y ago
    The Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era USSR had a fantastic understanding of what needed to be made. Refrigerators, radios, televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles. Things that the public very clearly wanted, and that politicians were very clear about the public getting. All of those things were consistently under-produced, and never met their quantity, or quality quotas.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      And that is the problem, politicians were keen on building a TV. You couldn't just build a TV there would be a great design competition and then a design will be selected. The selection will be political which means that designs were not selected by market forces which favor merit but rather the whim of a corrupt and inefficient political machine. The pricing also was an issue, economics in the USSR were screwed it was socialism bubble in a capitalistic world. Everything had a price but the price was completely detached from the cost and the value of the product (the designers themselves could not gauge the true costs of their designs, and quite often the design that would keep as many people employed would be favored which would cause even more inherent inefficiency) When your TV was priced at 50$ but cost 500$ to make there will be shortages. Additionally the USSR had a horrible problem with skilled labor despite probably having one of the better educated workforce in history. This was because again lack of meritocracy and a free market a rocket engineer would be making as much as an engineer working on bicycle gears. Unless you were well connected politically you also had very little choice on where would you be assigned to work. Because of this building skills in critical industries in the commercial and consumer sectors was very hard.
      - vkou 9y ago
        There were different appliance manufacturing companies in the USSR, and consumers very clearly expressed their preferences. Different Soviet brands commanded different prices, and had different levels of demand for them. Pricing was an issue for different reasons - some people had money that they couldn't spend, whereas other people had very little money. Food and housing were heavily subsidized but goods weren't, wages for different professions were very different (And rarely reflected the social/economic value of their work.) It wasn't some communist paradise where everyone was equally poor. There were absolutely class and wage distinctions. An engineer building rockets was getting paid more, and had access to better stores (And priority on high-end consumer goods, that were less, or not available to the public) then one building bicycles. One way to be 'politically connected' was to work in an important industry (Specifically, defense. Being a senior manager also qualified.) The Soviet rationing model rewarded both political parasites, and successful people[1]. A bit like 'meritocracy' works in many Western corporations, if you think about it. The serious problems in the Soviet economy were the absolutely insane military spending, corruption, bureaucracy, theft, inconsistent accountability, and extremely conservative commandments from central management that strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished innovation and optimization. [1] Unless you were a kolhoznik, or serf, tied to the land, a political problem, had relatives who were political problems, were one-quarter Jewish, etc.
  - azernik 9y ago
    They also had problems enforcing quality requirements across different organizations. Aside from the military, it was impossible for a downstream organization to reject the output of an upstream supplier for low quality or non-conformance to spec. Hence each organization was incentivize to produce at as low a quality and at as cheap an interpretation of the central plan as possible, practical usefulness be damned. Hence not just producing goods unsuitable to demands, but also shoddy build quality for anything that wasn't military supplies.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      That was an outcome of having "factories" rather than companies you could have be making razor blades on Tuesday and radios on Friday. Employment was also non selective you went to school, got your engineering degree did your thesis on jet engine blades and then sent to a factory across the country making mailboxes Many of the design decisions of Soviet era engineering are becuase of these conditions stuff was designed with high tolerances because it will likely be produced on repurposed tooling not design for it by people who'll be trained every 2 weeks to make something else.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Which, as crazy as it sounds resulted in some products that were extremely durable because of the huge tolerances allowed for in the design.
        icelancer 9y ago
        The Kalashnikov is the product of a perfect storm and a great symbol for that time period.
        greedo 9y ago
        This isn't unique to the USSR however. There are similar weapons in the US arsenal (M2 Browning for example) that are so well designed that is still in service 84 years after initial introduction. Back when engineers had to use slide rules, and metallurgy wasn't as sophisticated, designers had to over-engineer machinery (and buildings, and bridges).
  - foobarian 9y ago
    I visited the Czech Republic while they were still communist. The most hilarious thing I remember was a price stamped into loaves of bread. It appears they had official price brands distributed from a central point, since they looked the same everywhere. This means the price was probably unchanged for long periods of time.
    - flohofwoe 9y ago
      Prices for most common goods (especially food) were fixed by the government in Eastern Bloc countries, usually they stayed the same over decades. The quality, especially for imported stuff (like coffee) could vary drastically, but the price stayed the same. For 'bread buns, rolls' (or whatever they are called outside Germany) the price in Eastern Germany was fixed at 10 Pfennig since forever, and it was commonly called a "10er Semmel" because of this (or a "fiver" for the small version).
- Osmium 9y ago
  In fairness, SpaceX is going to have real production line issues of its own to sort out -- how many landed rockets do they have in warehouses now waiting for refurbishment? Both companies are going to need to get good at this.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    SpaceX already has one of the highest-volume production lines for boosters, upper stages, and fairings. They've got a lot more work to do, of course, but they're already done challenging things.
- zeroxfe 9y ago
  > Yes, that's why the Soviet Union's lead on space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. The Soviet Union's failing at national productivity was not because they couldn't scale their production lines.
  - vkou 9y ago
    It was not the sole failing, but it was a big one. None of the light-industry (Consumer goods)-focused 5-year plans managed to have any positive impact on production.
- Robelius 9y ago
  I’m finishing up school for a Manufacturing Engineering degree. It’s frustrating when people look down on the degree due to a lack of appreciation. So many people are so far removed from manufacturing that they think a company simply walks into a store, buy a few parts, and put them together just like a consumer would when in reality there’s an entire discipline dedicated to figuring out how stuff should be made.
  - corndoge 9y ago
    What's the usual sourcing process for large amounts of components? word of mouth? suppliers cold calling potential customers? how does company x that manufactures product y get in touch with part supplier z?
    - varjag 9y ago
      If you subcontract production, the service provider typically has supply chain specialists that source things on your BOM. Procurement people might do direct purchasing/negotiation (typically on special&pricier bits), or go to wholesalers for mass consumption items.
    - Robelius 9y ago
      In the organizations that I’ve worked at (around 100 people), sourcing is done by the purchasing department. After some quality engineers give the green light on a few shipments to make sure the parts are good, the vendor is trusted and more of their parts can be purchased. Manufacturers usually try and stay with the vendors they have for parts because the vendors are trusted to give quality parts, have relationships, and lines of credit already established. Basically reduces risk of getting junk and investing more time and money to find something that works.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    Cool, let me know if you are looking for a paid internship. We are an international team based in Shenzhen, China.
  - froindt 9y ago
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Maybe Russia just forgot to share progress downstream and kept space tech under military secrecy ? Or maybe too much resources allocated to space and none to the rest of society.
- kumarvvr 9y ago
  Ultimately, abundant production of consumer goods is an engineering and planning problem. Throwing a bunch of smart engineers at a clear goal will almost always solve the problem.
- taneq 9y ago
  > Making a spacecraft work and making a production line work are completely different problems SpaceX has a production line of spacecraft.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  > space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. That was deliberate though right? They didn't want to have the consumption economy that the West know suffers from.
cbanek 9y ago
By that logic, since Elon is a rocket scientist, I have high-confidence he'd be a great president.
- fleetingmoments 9y ago
  He would be a huge improvement over pretty much all other candidates at present.
  - nostrebored 9y ago
    Typically giving rent seekers political office is a terrible idea.
- amelius 9y ago
  He's hardly a scientist. He quit his PhD program after a few weeks to "concentrate on business". At least, that's what his Wikipedia page says.
- blorsh 9y ago
  He comes from a country called South Africa. He's literally an African-American. There would be a birth certificate issue. I suppose he could be president of South Africa.
maxxxxx 9y ago
Different set of skills needed. By that logic car manufacturers should hire the people who designed the Curiosity Rover to run their manufacturing lines. This won't work.
rtpg 9y ago
Doesn't Space X have basic production line timing problems? Like their entire schedule is months to years late?
- bryananderson 9y ago
  Their launch rate was previously a struggle, but they have hit their stride this year with 13 launches in a little over 8 months (they had 7 launches in all of last year).

If you can send a building into space, land it on a postage stamp floating in an ocean... I have high-confidence you can solve production line scaling challenges.

rsynnott 9y ago

Yes, that's why the Soviet Union's lead on space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. Making a spacecraft work and making a production line work are completely different problems, and there's little reason to think that an organisation good at one is necessarily good at the other. I'm not saying Tesla WON'T sort out their production difficulties, necessarily, just that it doesn't follow from SpaceX being good at space launch.

dogma1138 9y ago
USSRs problems weren't that they couldn't make production lines work they were extremely good at manufacturing at scale. The problem was that they were really bad at figuring out what needed to be made and at what amounts because of the worst kind of planned economy you can imagine (take aby soviet era product hammer, clock, lock, radio w/e and you'll see a very peculiar thing a physical price tag embedded on it, if you were a factory you were basically told you are making X now, price, profits and all economic decisions were taken out of your hands). If anything their problem was that they produced way too much of pretty much everything on a whim. Additionally there was all the wrong kinds of competition in which the establishment was the selective force rather than the market. These aren't the problems Tesla is facing.
- vkou 9y ago
  The Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era USSR had a fantastic understanding of what needed to be made. Refrigerators, radios, televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles. Things that the public very clearly wanted, and that politicians were very clear about the public getting. All of those things were consistently under-produced, and never met their quantity, or quality quotas.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    And that is the problem, politicians were keen on building a TV. You couldn't just build a TV there would be a great design competition and then a design will be selected. The selection will be political which means that designs were not selected by market forces which favor merit but rather the whim of a corrupt and inefficient political machine. The pricing also was an issue, economics in the USSR were screwed it was socialism bubble in a capitalistic world. Everything had a price but the price was completely detached from the cost and the value of the product (the designers themselves could not gauge the true costs of their designs, and quite often the design that would keep as many people employed would be favored which would cause even more inherent inefficiency) When your TV was priced at 50$ but cost 500$ to make there will be shortages. Additionally the USSR had a horrible problem with skilled labor despite probably having one of the better educated workforce in history. This was because again lack of meritocracy and a free market a rocket engineer would be making as much as an engineer working on bicycle gears. Unless you were well connected politically you also had very little choice on where would you be assigned to work. Because of this building skills in critical industries in the commercial and consumer sectors was very hard.
    - vkou 9y ago
      There were different appliance manufacturing companies in the USSR, and consumers very clearly expressed their preferences. Different Soviet brands commanded different prices, and had different levels of demand for them. Pricing was an issue for different reasons - some people had money that they couldn't spend, whereas other people had very little money. Food and housing were heavily subsidized but goods weren't, wages for different professions were very different (And rarely reflected the social/economic value of their work.) It wasn't some communist paradise where everyone was equally poor. There were absolutely class and wage distinctions. An engineer building rockets was getting paid more, and had access to better stores (And priority on high-end consumer goods, that were less, or not available to the public) then one building bicycles. One way to be 'politically connected' was to work in an important industry (Specifically, defense. Being a senior manager also qualified.) The Soviet rationing model rewarded both political parasites, and successful people[1]. A bit like 'meritocracy' works in many Western corporations, if you think about it. The serious problems in the Soviet economy were the absolutely insane military spending, corruption, bureaucracy, theft, inconsistent accountability, and extremely conservative commandments from central management that strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished innovation and optimization. [1] Unless you were a kolhoznik, or serf, tied to the land, a political problem, had relatives who were political problems, were one-quarter Jewish, etc.
- azernik 9y ago
  They also had problems enforcing quality requirements across different organizations. Aside from the military, it was impossible for a downstream organization to reject the output of an upstream supplier for low quality or non-conformance to spec. Hence each organization was incentivize to produce at as low a quality and at as cheap an interpretation of the central plan as possible, practical usefulness be damned. Hence not just producing goods unsuitable to demands, but also shoddy build quality for anything that wasn't military supplies.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    That was an outcome of having "factories" rather than companies you could have be making razor blades on Tuesday and radios on Friday. Employment was also non selective you went to school, got your engineering degree did your thesis on jet engine blades and then sent to a factory across the country making mailboxes Many of the design decisions of Soviet era engineering are becuase of these conditions stuff was designed with high tolerances because it will likely be produced on repurposed tooling not design for it by people who'll be trained every 2 weeks to make something else.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Which, as crazy as it sounds resulted in some products that were extremely durable because of the huge tolerances allowed for in the design.
      - icelancer 9y ago
        The Kalashnikov is the product of a perfect storm and a great symbol for that time period.
      - greedo 9y ago
        This isn't unique to the USSR however. There are similar weapons in the US arsenal (M2 Browning for example) that are so well designed that is still in service 84 years after initial introduction. Back when engineers had to use slide rules, and metallurgy wasn't as sophisticated, designers had to over-engineer machinery (and buildings, and bridges).
- foobarian 9y ago
  I visited the Czech Republic while they were still communist. The most hilarious thing I remember was a price stamped into loaves of bread. It appears they had official price brands distributed from a central point, since they looked the same everywhere. This means the price was probably unchanged for long periods of time.
  - flohofwoe 9y ago
    Prices for most common goods (especially food) were fixed by the government in Eastern Bloc countries, usually they stayed the same over decades. The quality, especially for imported stuff (like coffee) could vary drastically, but the price stayed the same. For 'bread buns, rolls' (or whatever they are called outside Germany) the price in Eastern Germany was fixed at 10 Pfennig since forever, and it was commonly called a "10er Semmel" because of this (or a "fiver" for the small version).
Osmium 9y ago
In fairness, SpaceX is going to have real production line issues of its own to sort out -- how many landed rockets do they have in warehouses now waiting for refurbishment? Both companies are going to need to get good at this.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  SpaceX already has one of the highest-volume production lines for boosters, upper stages, and fairings. They've got a lot more work to do, of course, but they're already done challenging things.
zeroxfe 9y ago
> Yes, that's why the Soviet Union's lead on space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. The Soviet Union's failing at national productivity was not because they couldn't scale their production lines.
- vkou 9y ago
  It was not the sole failing, but it was a big one. None of the light-industry (Consumer goods)-focused 5-year plans managed to have any positive impact on production.
Robelius 9y ago
I’m finishing up school for a Manufacturing Engineering degree. It’s frustrating when people look down on the degree due to a lack of appreciation. So many people are so far removed from manufacturing that they think a company simply walks into a store, buy a few parts, and put them together just like a consumer would when in reality there’s an entire discipline dedicated to figuring out how stuff should be made.
- corndoge 9y ago
  What's the usual sourcing process for large amounts of components? word of mouth? suppliers cold calling potential customers? how does company x that manufactures product y get in touch with part supplier z?
  - varjag 9y ago
    If you subcontract production, the service provider typically has supply chain specialists that source things on your BOM. Procurement people might do direct purchasing/negotiation (typically on special&pricier bits), or go to wholesalers for mass consumption items.
  - Robelius 9y ago
    In the organizations that I’ve worked at (around 100 people), sourcing is done by the purchasing department. After some quality engineers give the green light on a few shipments to make sure the parts are good, the vendor is trusted and more of their parts can be purchased. Manufacturers usually try and stay with the vendors they have for parts because the vendors are trusted to give quality parts, have relationships, and lines of credit already established. Basically reduces risk of getting junk and investing more time and money to find something that works.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Cool, let me know if you are looking for a paid internship. We are an international team based in Shenzhen, China.
- froindt 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
Maybe Russia just forgot to share progress downstream and kept space tech under military secrecy ? Or maybe too much resources allocated to space and none to the rest of society.
kumarvvr 9y ago
Ultimately, abundant production of consumer goods is an engineering and planning problem. Throwing a bunch of smart engineers at a clear goal will almost always solve the problem.
taneq 9y ago
> Making a spacecraft work and making a production line work are completely different problems SpaceX has a production line of spacecraft.
cakedoggie 9y ago
> space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place. That was deliberate though right? They didn't want to have the consumption economy that the West know suffers from.

cbanek 9y ago

By that logic, since Elon is a rocket scientist, I have high-confidence he'd be a great president.

fleetingmoments 9y ago
He would be a huge improvement over pretty much all other candidates at present.
- nostrebored 9y ago
  Typically giving rent seekers political office is a terrible idea.
amelius 9y ago
He's hardly a scientist. He quit his PhD program after a few weeks to "concentrate on business". At least, that's what his Wikipedia page says.
blorsh 9y ago
He comes from a country called South Africa. He's literally an African-American. There would be a birth certificate issue. I suppose he could be president of South Africa.

maxxxxx 9y ago

Different set of skills needed. By that logic car manufacturers should hire the people who designed the Curiosity Rover to run their manufacturing lines. This won't work.

rtpg 9y ago

Doesn't Space X have basic production line timing problems? Like their entire schedule is months to years late?

bryananderson 9y ago
Their launch rate was previously a struggle, but they have hit their stride this year with 13 launches in a little over 8 months (they had 7 launches in all of last year).