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This is exactly what I find fascinating about the company as well. It's not like it's some secret technology nobody else has - why hasn't any other company don

This is exactly what I find fascinating about the company as well. It's not like it's some secret technology nobody else has - why hasn't any other company done this before? How much of a part is played by the exceptional ambition flowing from the top?

chasd00 3y ago
> It's not like it's some secret technology nobody else has Well to be fair, there’s a lot of technology at spacex no one else has. One example, the Raptor engine’s combination of size, efficiency, and thrust is just not available to anyone other than SpaceX. Even if exact schematics were stolen you’d still need to obtain the recipes for the alloys used and how to manufacture them. Companies gave up on full flow staged combustion as just not feasible but SpaceX figured it out and is on v3 of perfecting it.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Yes but SpaceX is a relative newcomer, so why did they manage to do this when anyone could have? Seems like a combination of ambition, incentives, and just chance I guess as another comment pointed out.
  - tekla 3y ago
    A brilliant and crazy chief engineer that hired the best, wasn't afraid to get dirty, and got shit done.
  - kiba 3y ago
    The relative newcomer is becoming less and less relevant as years passed. The Falcon 9 reusability and cadence was years in the making. Same for their raptor engine and Starship. What's happening is that other companies are slow to wake up and adapt.
  - martindbp 3y ago
    We all know why, but I guess we're not allowed to attribute any success to the tenacity of its founder because of his political views
    - kiba 3y ago
      There's a lot of justifable hatred for Musk, which makes it easy to disparage his accomplishment.
nickpp 3y ago
My guess is pure ambition. Tends to attract ambitious people who in turn have a higher chance of making those dreams a reality.
dotnet00 3y ago
I think a large part of this lead comes from the way the engineering responsibility is distributed (at least for the R&D side), where the engineers responsible for certain parts are in the internal tracking system so that engineers responsible for other parts can just look them up and work with them directly about changes they could make to their parts to improve things for the other part. I think most other organizations have a lot more bureaucracy involved in making changes, which makes them slower and more expensive. Plus, SpaceX doesn't try to spread out its operations across the US to act like a jobs program, while the other big space contractors have advertised their presence in every state as a reason they should be picked, which obviously increases costs.
nordsieck 3y ago
I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of companies are cost-plus government contractors first and sell rockets to the civilian market as an afterthought. Which means that their internal structure and processes are optimized for that use case - not really caring so much about costs, but putting a lot of effort into documenting. So when someone comes along that optimizes on cost and velocity and eschews cost plus contracts, that can be very difficult to deal with. Also, as other people have mentioned, they pretty clearly do have exceptional tech - they routinely land orbital class boosters which has only been done with prototype rockets (it's very different landing when you can hover vs when you can't). And Raptor and Merlin are among the best rocket engines that have ever been made. And even more impressive than specific components is their production and operational expertise. Being able to launch so many rockets flawlessly is a truly astounding feat. In a couple of years, Falcon 9 might even beat out the RD-108/107's total accumulated flight time record, which I thought wouldn't happen for a very long time. Edit: for context, the RD-108/107 are the engines used on the Soyuz, which (as a family) has a truly astounding number of flights. To be fair to SpaceX, though, Soyuz accumulated those over many decades.

chasd00 3y ago

> It's not like it's some secret technology nobody else has Well to be fair, there’s a lot of technology at spacex no one else has. One example, the Raptor engine’s combination of size, efficiency, and thrust is just not available to anyone other than SpaceX. Even if exact schematics were stolen you’d still need to obtain the recipes for the alloys used and how to manufacture them. Companies gave up on full flow staged combustion as just not feasible but SpaceX figured it out and is on v3 of perfecting it.

foobarian 3y ago
Yes but SpaceX is a relative newcomer, so why did they manage to do this when anyone could have? Seems like a combination of ambition, incentives, and just chance I guess as another comment pointed out.
- tekla 3y ago
  A brilliant and crazy chief engineer that hired the best, wasn't afraid to get dirty, and got shit done.
- kiba 3y ago
  The relative newcomer is becoming less and less relevant as years passed. The Falcon 9 reusability and cadence was years in the making. Same for their raptor engine and Starship. What's happening is that other companies are slow to wake up and adapt.
- martindbp 3y ago
  We all know why, but I guess we're not allowed to attribute any success to the tenacity of its founder because of his political views
  - kiba 3y ago
    There's a lot of justifable hatred for Musk, which makes it easy to disparage his accomplishment.

nickpp 3y ago

My guess is pure ambition. Tends to attract ambitious people who in turn have a higher chance of making those dreams a reality.

dotnet00 3y ago

I think a large part of this lead comes from the way the engineering responsibility is distributed (at least for the R&D side), where the engineers responsible for certain parts are in the internal tracking system so that engineers responsible for other parts can just look them up and work with them directly about changes they could make to their parts to improve things for the other part. I think most other organizations have a lot more bureaucracy involved in making changes, which makes them slower and more expensive. Plus, SpaceX doesn't try to spread out its operations across the US to act like a jobs program, while the other big space contractors have advertised their presence in every state as a reason they should be picked, which obviously increases costs.

nordsieck 3y ago

I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of companies are cost-plus government contractors first and sell rockets to the civilian market as an afterthought. Which means that their internal structure and processes are optimized for that use case - not really caring so much about costs, but putting a lot of effort into documenting. So when someone comes along that optimizes on cost and velocity and eschews cost plus contracts, that can be very difficult to deal with. Also, as other people have mentioned, they pretty clearly do have exceptional tech - they routinely land orbital class boosters which has only been done with prototype rockets (it's very different landing when you can hover vs when you can't). And Raptor and Merlin are among the best rocket engines that have ever been made. And even more impressive than specific components is their production and operational expertise. Being able to launch so many rockets flawlessly is a truly astounding feat. In a couple of years, Falcon 9 might even beat out the RD-108/107's total accumulated flight time record, which I thought wouldn't happen for a very long time. Edit: for context, the RD-108/107 are the engines used on the Soyuz, which (as a family) has a truly astounding number of flights. To be fair to SpaceX, though, Soyuz accumulated those over many decades.