>But the special case here is that if you can eliminate part of the process entirely, you no longer have to pay for reducing false negatives in it. I don’t dis

>But the special case here is that if you can eliminate part of the process entirely, you no longer have to pay for reducing false negatives in it. I don’t disagree, I was just asking for a concrete example. In the abstract it’s a bit of hand-wavey marketing speak, but I’m not clear on what part of the process would be cut out. You’d still need traceability and pedigree regardless of how the part was made. That is what I pointed out drives so much of the cost. I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion on reducing costs through quality control. Having worked at different times in process design and quality control in both automotive manufacturing and aerospace, using excess inventory to try to drive down costs is generally a bad practice. But I may an old codger stuck in my ways, so I’ll leave that discussion alone. As a specific SpaceX example, they had a strut failure because of poor supplier quality control. Their remedy wasn’t to cut more out of the process but rather layer more quality control into it. I don’t know for certain, but I have to think that made it more expensive, not less.