100% automation was a gamble that didn't pay off
For now.
When they have a solid product, and a lot more money in the bank, I'd expect them to be at the forefront of automation, and then it will pay dividends, they just tried to do it too soon.
For now.
When they have a solid product, and a lot more money in the bank, I'd expect them to be at the forefront of automation, and then it will pay dividends, they just tried to do it too soon.
Nobody went in the direction of landing boosters, despite rocketry existing for decades.
'Nobody is doing it', is more often than not, an argument for 'it' instead of against.
Often nobody's doing it, because "it" is truly stupid. What Musk is doing, is applying a formula for discovering when the majority are mistaken.
Of course they did, but they only wanted to do it on DoD money. When that wasn't further forthcoming they pivoted to other projects that were funded.
Landing rocket as a stalled idea wasn't due to lack of technical foresight, it wad a result of big companies lacking financial foresight. I give credit to Space X for making that business leap, even though landing their boosters was actually an ad hoc response to their initial failure to secure cheap Russian engines.
And now Arianne Space is having a serious look at it with Arianne 6.
They had decades of experience in the industry and the software guys (Apple and Google) drove them to bankruptcy.
Also look at SpaceX - he’s not a complete novice at complex manufacturing, and knows how to assemble and motivate a good team, and is used to competing against even more entrenched incumbents.
I’ll be interested to see how this works out but I think Musk was just too early and trying to do too much at once; he’s not wrong that automation is the future.
Also, building mostly single use rockets, reused boosters are pretty new even for SpaceX, in comparatively small number is totally different from building and running factories that spit out hundreds of thousands of cars. But I can understand why Elon might have thought he knew better. But drawing lessons from an industry like aerospace and rockets which had only a hand full of defacto state subsidized players to one as competitive as automotive was, it seems, a bad idea.
Yes, I fully agree that Elon wanted too early and too fast. And having the timing wrong still means you're wrong. And in that case this mistake and the underlying culture and way of thinking can very much doom the whole company. And that would really be a shame, wouldn't it?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mercedes-...