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> What I love about SpaceX is that they truly take on the start-up approach of fast iteration, in complete opposite to most of their competitors. I won't call
by orbital-decay 7y ago
> What I love about SpaceX is that they truly take on the start-up approach of fast iteration, in complete opposite to most of their competitors.
I won't call their approach a "start-up" or even unique one, especially considering they made a huge component of this (Raptor) in a pretty standard way. Building in a "tent" just means they don't need anything more than it being a tent right now, not that they won't ever need more.
For some reason, rocket engineering has that reputation of being a complete waterfall process. It isn't deserved and doesn't make sense. Rapid iterative development and quick discarding of failing prototypes in the early phase is as common in space industry as it is everywhere. It just doesn't usually make headlines and isn't that visible.
- vvanders 7y agoYeah, one of the things that struck me when reading about the development of the SR-71 and F-117[1] was how a lot of what we consider "start-up" culture has already existed in one form or another. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003 https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...
- sunstone 7y agoYeah, there weren't many waterfalls in the skunk works.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThere weren't many management layers either.
- brmgb 7y agoThe good parts of Agile are pretty much taken verbatim from the approach taken by project Mercury in the 60s. The space industry pretty much gave birth to iterative and incremental development
- kazen44 7y agoiterative development goes back much further. The industrial revolution made iterative design possible because it made the time and effort of producing something far cheaper.