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Blue Origin doesn't need to be worried about lack of cash. As long as Bezos is willing to burn billions they will keep on going. But that also means they don't

Blue Origin doesn't need to be worried about lack of cash. As long as Bezos is willing to burn billions they will keep on going. But that also means they don't have fear of failing, so they keep on doing things slowly. Elon on the other hand was and still is relentlessly pushing his companies to a breaking point. Model 3 production hell was a great example - do or die for Tesla, with crazy production lines in tents, flying machines from Germany in matter of days etc. Starship program is also managed as if the world was ending tomorrow with every other prototype ending with a big boom. The big pivot from carbon fiber to steel is example of agility, not failing for sunken cost fallacy and optimizing for rapid development speed.

jpgvm 6y ago
SpaceX is a company that understands, respects and capitalizes on failure. Their entire development process is based around failing early and often in order to prune the search space of viable solutions as quickly as possible. Proper Agile development, but for rockets.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Not quite. SpaceX isn't just throwing random designs at the wall and using some gradient descent to find a good rocket design. They are starting with competent designs and well thought out systems. The most interesting aspects to their rockets is how boring they are. The Falcon 9 basically uses a Beowulf cluster of Merlin engines. The second stage uses yet another Merlin engine. All use RP-1/LOX so there's minimal cryogenics involved in fueling and defueling the rocket on the launchpad. The Falcon Heavy is a Beowulf cluster of Falcon 9s. They didn't happen into any of those designs. They've existed from the beginning. Where SpaceX accepts "failure" is in their integration tests, these are their more visible "failures". All of their subcomponents have been bench tested before their integration tests and are known to work correctly. Their integration tests are literally testing their large scale integration, the things that can't be bench tested. Their process is waterfall AF. They might take iterative steps in the process but they're not stumbling around looking for good designs.
  - Isinlor 6y ago
    Dan Rasky, Senior Research Scientist at NASA gave great description of SpaceX processes and how they differ from Old Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E

jpgvm 6y ago

SpaceX is a company that understands, respects and capitalizes on failure. Their entire development process is based around failing early and often in order to prune the search space of viable solutions as quickly as possible. Proper Agile development, but for rockets.

giantrobot 6y ago
Not quite. SpaceX isn't just throwing random designs at the wall and using some gradient descent to find a good rocket design. They are starting with competent designs and well thought out systems. The most interesting aspects to their rockets is how boring they are. The Falcon 9 basically uses a Beowulf cluster of Merlin engines. The second stage uses yet another Merlin engine. All use RP-1/LOX so there's minimal cryogenics involved in fueling and defueling the rocket on the launchpad. The Falcon Heavy is a Beowulf cluster of Falcon 9s. They didn't happen into any of those designs. They've existed from the beginning. Where SpaceX accepts "failure" is in their integration tests, these are their more visible "failures". All of their subcomponents have been bench tested before their integration tests and are known to work correctly. Their integration tests are literally testing their large scale integration, the things that can't be bench tested. Their process is waterfall AF. They might take iterative steps in the process but they're not stumbling around looking for good designs.
- Isinlor 6y ago
  Dan Rasky, Senior Research Scientist at NASA gave great description of SpaceX processes and how they differ from Old Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E