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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
by 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 agoNot 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 agoDan 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