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Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

Love this, very inspirational and pragmatic. I like how down to Earth Masten comes across in the article (pun intended). Reminds me of the lesson learned in the restaurant business - over-estimate the wait time, deliver early, and let people enjoy!

I think it's something about the inherent risks and rewards of flight that are a great challenge and temptation for advancement - space being a dream for so many from childhood. Maybe it makes us feel a little more important in such a grand universe.

The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. They beat out the entire world into manned, powered flight. Creativity, some resources, and tenacity can do wonderful things.

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There's an important insight in there that I think a lot of people miss. It reminds me of the old, probably apocryphal, story about the maintenance guy who comes out to visit some machine that's malfunctioning, hears about what's wrong, then goes and hits it with a hammer, causing it to start working again. The business owner complains about the bill, since anyone can hit something with a hammer, so the technician creates an itemized receipt, wherein "knowing the right spot to hit" is the majority of the cost.

So much of anything is knowing the right thing to build and the right way to build it. Everything else tends to be much easier problems to solve. The same thing is true in rocketry. And that's what's so exciting about these startups, they're not just trying to fill the shoes of past generations, they're innovating, they're doing research. They're developing the knowledge base and experience base that will serve as the foundation of a tremendous amount of future work. Once you've developed the fundamental technology components and figured out an optimum vehicle design then you just have scaling up and iterating (as SpaceX has done, for example), which is a lot more straightforward.

The crafty engineer was Charles Steinmetz, and the business owner balking at the invoice was Henry Ford [1]. EDIT: Maybe not so true after all [2].

I had never heard of Maston Space Systems. It's amazing they were able to compete with such massive names in Boeing, and Lockheed.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinm...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10389203

There are real life examples though, my father being one. On one job he did, he flew from Australia to Malaysia, walked into the factory, turned a single valve on to get a major machine working, then walked out job done.

Apocryphal: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

...but it was told at a MIT commencement address: http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/com99.html

Very cogent point, as it seems one of the threads of the article is about reining in ambition - hence, as you note, innovating through looking acutely at the problems to solve. In line with scientific approaches, repeatability is critical. Getting lucky once? Put that champagne away! Wisdom - knowing which spots to hit, why and how - is not gestated by throwing cash and minds at a problem, in my opinion anyway. It's about taking all kinds of disparate inputs, making often unexpected mental connections and relationships, and somehow seeing a way around the problem. In my experience, that's usually in the shower.

It is also not lost on me that using his personal means and keeping the company "scrappy" has enabled the longevity thus far. That, and pursuing grants in the narrow field where there still, well, there's still money to be obtained through such channels (not true of all sciences in the US). This article is probably the closest thing regarding "hype" in the business plan. I doubt there's a marketing budget in that warehouse!

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