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The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs th
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that.
The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it.
It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
- Retric 13y agoI think the secret to Space X is there an engineering company in a bureaucracy heavy industry. It reminds me of a technical problem a friend was dealing with he had a basic design for a toy that he was trying to get manufactured and spent a few weeks emailing back and forth why the design was impossible, until he went over and discovered the issue was a base he said should be about 1 inch thick needed to be 1/4 an inch thicker and they just looked at the constraints and said impossible. It's great for rockets to have more effecency, be lighter, and carry more cargo, but it's hard to balance the design around what is overall cheaper and more efficient rather than just chasing better specs.