3 ms·

> MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the start

by foobar1962 7y ago

> MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. Being able to analyse existing solutions and previous attempts (successful or not) is a luxury that the first people to attempt a solution don't enjoy. It's much, much easier taking an existing solution and improving it than it is to develop the existing solution.

simonh 7y ago
The Everyday Astronaut had a great interview with Elon Musk after the Starship presentation a few days ago. They spent a bit of time talking about how much progress the team had made in very little time, and Musk's take was that it took them an awful long time to finally ask the right questions - years. Once they had formulated exactly what they were trying to do and what the actual relevant constraints were, finding the right solutions and making very rapid progress was actually not all that complicated. He talked about the tendency really good engineers have to spend a lot of effort optimising the design of things that shouldn't be there at all. Finally he banged on hard about always questioning your design constraints. He pointed out that if you get given some design constraints by another team, you should always consider their validity since it;s very unlikely they are optimal. The converse assumption would be that they are always perfect, so looking at it that way there's no reason you should assume they are right from the start. For anyone who worries about the sunk cost fallacy, bear in mind it was only about a year ago they decided to throw away all the investment they'd put into building a composite body, including a huge main body tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg
- martyvis 7y ago
  I came here to write this same comment as well. I think Elon has great insight how to very quickly build from conception to reality, pruning off undesirable paths before they consume resources. In that one interview with Tim, he explored very deep concepts about cross team collaboration, engineering process and project management that extend well beyond the rocket science I was expecting to hear about

simonh 7y ago

The Everyday Astronaut had a great interview with Elon Musk after the Starship presentation a few days ago. They spent a bit of time talking about how much progress the team had made in very little time, and Musk's take was that it took them an awful long time to finally ask the right questions - years. Once they had formulated exactly what they were trying to do and what the actual relevant constraints were, finding the right solutions and making very rapid progress was actually not all that complicated. He talked about the tendency really good engineers have to spend a lot of effort optimising the design of things that shouldn't be there at all. Finally he banged on hard about always questioning your design constraints. He pointed out that if you get given some design constraints by another team, you should always consider their validity since it;s very unlikely they are optimal. The converse assumption would be that they are always perfect, so looking at it that way there's no reason you should assume they are right from the start. For anyone who worries about the sunk cost fallacy, bear in mind it was only about a year ago they decided to throw away all the investment they'd put into building a composite body, including a huge main body tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg

martyvis 7y ago
I came here to write this same comment as well. I think Elon has great insight how to very quickly build from conception to reality, pruning off undesirable paths before they consume resources. In that one interview with Tim, he explored very deep concepts about cross team collaboration, engineering process and project management that extend well beyond the rocket science I was expecting to hear about