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I appreciate the long form response. This exactly what I was talking about - I think SpaceX has taken the classic startup model to a place nobody expected it to

I appreciate the long form response. This exactly what I was talking about - I think SpaceX has taken the classic startup model to a place nobody expected it to go, and the question I'm asking is, why have other people not done this? Especially Google should know how to release early and iterate, but really X has released no products to date that I'm aware of.

icelancer 8y ago
>> why have other people not done this A lot of big money is held by public companies who generally don't like these longshots. Elon talks about it all the time himself. It also should be a rare thing; they're moonshots, after all. The intersection between "has billions to spare" and "is insane enough to try things like going to space" is not large.
- jaggederest 8y ago
  The frustrating thing for me is not that they're not taking the risks, for sure. It's that the money is sloshing around in short term securities and cash-equivalents instead of being invested. It's pretty obvious that they can't find worthwhile ways to use the money, so either admit it and return it to shareholders or really take some big bites of fundamental world-changing R&D.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  I wouldn't call, say, SpaceX building the Falcon 9 as it exists today anything like a "moonshot". It didn't require an upfront cash injection of billions, and after getting out of the initial stage and into the viable business stage it's been generally cash flow positive. Tons of other orgs could have done the same thing with a comparatively modest investment. Again, this isn't moonshot territory, this is in the realm of crappy little startups doing crappy little questionably viable things who get a few hundred million in VC then mostly just fizzle out. There are a hojillion of those, and that's the scale of investment needed to start building a reusable rocket company. Nobody else is doing it not because it's exceptionally expensive, but rather because they don't know how.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Building a highly capable rocket company like SpaceX is one of those things that seems like an obvious process but for various reasons is surprisingly not. One common way to go about it is to get a bunch of money together, hire a bunch of aerospace engineers with relevant expertise, come up with a design, then build that design and parlay that into a business. This works, but it's not as effective as you'd think. It's hugely expensive, it's slow, it has a lot of traps and pitfalls for the unwary, it often leads to highly compromised and undertested designs that are often kind of mediocre in one or multiple respects. And, again, it's expensive, it leads to expensive rockets and expensive launch costs. Ironically, developing for lower cost launches is seemingly even more expensive in up front costs due to the extra engineering, lower margins, etc. Additionally, one of the dirty little secrets of the rocket business is that very, very few organizations actually have any current practical experience in creating new rockets from scratch. It's one thing to run through all the machining, assembly, etc. for a rocket that's already been designed, built, proven, etc, it's quite another thing to start off with a blank piece of paper and build a rocket starting from nothing. So the smart way to build rockets isn't the above "obvious" way, it's an inherently iterative (agile) approach. Step 1 isn't building a rocket, it's building a team that can build a rocket. And you don't just iterate through improving the capabilities of your rocket design you also iterate through leveling up the skillset (at individual and organizational levels) of your company. It's a sort of tick/tock cadence, and each side is just as important as the other. Then, you build out a "minimum viable business" so that you can get revenue (and profits and investment capital) rolling in, keeping the company afloat, paying for new engineering and the development of new capabilities. Then you iterate and iterate and iterate your way to bigger and better things. This model might seem extremely familiar and extremely obvious to the silicon valley set but it really is kind of foreign in the aerospace world (there's actually a bunch of interviews on youtube from NASA engineers working with SpaceX being amazed at what they were able to do and how much their process differed from the bureaucratic norms in the field). And, to be fair, plenty of New Space companies have followed similar models (Armadillo Aerospace, X-COR, Masten, several others) but for one reason or another none of them had the capabilities or the capital to jump to the level of success of SpaceX (so far). In any event, this is precisely what SpaceX did. They started out with a dead simple (decades old) rocket design, they built a team that built a small rocket capable of getting some launch business. They streamlined the company by vertically integrating to allow faster iteration and lower costs. They iterated like crazy, they made a few mistakes here and there, had some bad luck here and there, but they managed to scrape through the choke points. They were able to launch a payload and get enough business to stay afloat, they were able to get investments and development contracts for future business that would allow them to fund further iterative improvements to their rockets. They relentlessly managed risks in an incredibly savvy way that should be taught in business schools and were able to operate an R&D program that made use of about a billion dollars in aerospace hardware for a fraction of the cost to the company itself. A lot of this stuff is textbook modern software dev technique. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Feature flags (to let you test new code works doing the "old" job before testing that the new code also performs new features). You'd think a big company like Google would be able to get this right, but it requires a level of commitment and an acceptance of loss ("failures" during R&D) that big, established companies are often reluctant to take on.
hef19898 8y ago
Lately I read an article from a french space guy (the french are actually pretty good at stuff like that as well) raising the question why one would work on developing a reusable first stage. His theory was that it doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment. Also he raised the question to which degree SpaceX is subsidizing commercial launches with government and military ones. Sounded reasonable enough to not discard it out of hand, I didn't have time to dig deeper into it so. That being said, SpaceX really showed other companies, like Ariane Space, that you don't need 50k + people in three countries and 15+ years to get a new rocket to LEO.
- ovi256 8y ago
  >doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment That's very interesting, what were his reasons ? I can see how the price reduction of reusable stages is much more attractive to commercial launches, whereas military launches are much less price sensitive. Military launches could benefit from the mass launch (dozens to hundreds of payloads in a critical week) capability that a dozen reusable launchers give you.
  - hef19898 8y ago
    What he suggested was that technically it made perfect sense if you wanted to launch or landing something from a place without atmosphere. I really have to look it up again think about it. I'll post a link ti the article if manage to dig it up again. EDIT: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-agenda-between-pentagon-space-x-jean-francois-geneste/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-agenda-between-pentago... There you go. At least the financing part seems reasonable.

icelancer 8y ago

>> why have other people not done this A lot of big money is held by public companies who generally don't like these longshots. Elon talks about it all the time himself. It also should be a rare thing; they're moonshots, after all. The intersection between "has billions to spare" and "is insane enough to try things like going to space" is not large.

jaggederest 8y ago
The frustrating thing for me is not that they're not taking the risks, for sure. It's that the money is sloshing around in short term securities and cash-equivalents instead of being invested. It's pretty obvious that they can't find worthwhile ways to use the money, so either admit it and return it to shareholders or really take some big bites of fundamental world-changing R&D.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
I wouldn't call, say, SpaceX building the Falcon 9 as it exists today anything like a "moonshot". It didn't require an upfront cash injection of billions, and after getting out of the initial stage and into the viable business stage it's been generally cash flow positive. Tons of other orgs could have done the same thing with a comparatively modest investment. Again, this isn't moonshot territory, this is in the realm of crappy little startups doing crappy little questionably viable things who get a few hundred million in VC then mostly just fizzle out. There are a hojillion of those, and that's the scale of investment needed to start building a reusable rocket company. Nobody else is doing it not because it's exceptionally expensive, but rather because they don't know how.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

Building a highly capable rocket company like SpaceX is one of those things that seems like an obvious process but for various reasons is surprisingly not. One common way to go about it is to get a bunch of money together, hire a bunch of aerospace engineers with relevant expertise, come up with a design, then build that design and parlay that into a business. This works, but it's not as effective as you'd think. It's hugely expensive, it's slow, it has a lot of traps and pitfalls for the unwary, it often leads to highly compromised and undertested designs that are often kind of mediocre in one or multiple respects. And, again, it's expensive, it leads to expensive rockets and expensive launch costs. Ironically, developing for lower cost launches is seemingly even more expensive in up front costs due to the extra engineering, lower margins, etc. Additionally, one of the dirty little secrets of the rocket business is that very, very few organizations actually have any current practical experience in creating new rockets from scratch. It's one thing to run through all the machining, assembly, etc. for a rocket that's already been designed, built, proven, etc, it's quite another thing to start off with a blank piece of paper and build a rocket starting from nothing. So the smart way to build rockets isn't the above "obvious" way, it's an inherently iterative (agile) approach. Step 1 isn't building a rocket, it's building a team that can build a rocket. And you don't just iterate through improving the capabilities of your rocket design you also iterate through leveling up the skillset (at individual and organizational levels) of your company. It's a sort of tick/tock cadence, and each side is just as important as the other. Then, you build out a "minimum viable business" so that you can get revenue (and profits and investment capital) rolling in, keeping the company afloat, paying for new engineering and the development of new capabilities. Then you iterate and iterate and iterate your way to bigger and better things. This model might seem extremely familiar and extremely obvious to the silicon valley set but it really is kind of foreign in the aerospace world (there's actually a bunch of interviews on youtube from NASA engineers working with SpaceX being amazed at what they were able to do and how much their process differed from the bureaucratic norms in the field). And, to be fair, plenty of New Space companies have followed similar models (Armadillo Aerospace, X-COR, Masten, several others) but for one reason or another none of them had the capabilities or the capital to jump to the level of success of SpaceX (so far). In any event, this is precisely what SpaceX did. They started out with a dead simple (decades old) rocket design, they built a team that built a small rocket capable of getting some launch business. They streamlined the company by vertically integrating to allow faster iteration and lower costs. They iterated like crazy, they made a few mistakes here and there, had some bad luck here and there, but they managed to scrape through the choke points. They were able to launch a payload and get enough business to stay afloat, they were able to get investments and development contracts for future business that would allow them to fund further iterative improvements to their rockets. They relentlessly managed risks in an incredibly savvy way that should be taught in business schools and were able to operate an R&D program that made use of about a billion dollars in aerospace hardware for a fraction of the cost to the company itself. A lot of this stuff is textbook modern software dev technique. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Feature flags (to let you test new code works doing the "old" job before testing that the new code also performs new features). You'd think a big company like Google would be able to get this right, but it requires a level of commitment and an acceptance of loss ("failures" during R&D) that big, established companies are often reluctant to take on.

hef19898 8y ago

Lately I read an article from a french space guy (the french are actually pretty good at stuff like that as well) raising the question why one would work on developing a reusable first stage. His theory was that it doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment. Also he raised the question to which degree SpaceX is subsidizing commercial launches with government and military ones. Sounded reasonable enough to not discard it out of hand, I didn't have time to dig deeper into it so. That being said, SpaceX really showed other companies, like Ariane Space, that you don't need 50k + people in three countries and 15+ years to get a new rocket to LEO.

ovi256 8y ago
>doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment That's very interesting, what were his reasons ? I can see how the price reduction of reusable stages is much more attractive to commercial launches, whereas military launches are much less price sensitive. Military launches could benefit from the mass launch (dozens to hundreds of payloads in a critical week) capability that a dozen reusable launchers give you.
- hef19898 8y ago
  What he suggested was that technically it made perfect sense if you wanted to launch or landing something from a place without atmosphere. I really have to look it up again think about it. I'll post a link ti the article if manage to dig it up again. EDIT: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-agenda-between-pentagon-space-x-jean-francois-geneste/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-agenda-between-pentago... There you go. At least the financing part seems reasonable.