Hacker News Reader

Comment by strainer | Hacker News Reader

I do find this to be actually legendary. At a target rate of about one per month, he is set to produce stainless steel, rapidly reusable, 150-ton-capable Mars transports. And is doing this using currently "about 5%" of the resources of his own commercially built satellite launch company, grown from scratch in a decade or so and out-performing every other nations satellite launch programs - by a large margin.

His presentation is noticeably a little self-concious, but not so much as to obscure his enjoyment to be standing in front of the first massive shimmering yet wielded and dented together rocket ship, which is due to demonstrate lift off and landing in a month or so.

View on HN

I think he's beating even his own expectations with SpaceX. This company is just wildly successful in reaching seemingly impossible goals that they keep setting for themselves.

I think it mainly shows just how ineffective and inept the established players have become. The companies and organizations that got us to the moon 50 years ago still exist but seem to have lost a lot of their ability to get things done.

Now that other countries are landing on the moon, the pressure is on to deliver the next persons to the moon and ultimately to Mars. Working backwards from that goal and the goal of going to Mars, Elon Musk has done what Nasa has not been able to get done for decades at a fraction of the budget they've consumed not getting there; or even deciding to go there. Better still, he's turned that into a profitable company.

One of the crucial factors in getting SpaceX going and becoming profitable was and is the funding from that budget you're talking about. NASA and SpaceX are not in competition, they have different goals; getting the private industry to produce cheaper rockets so that NASA can spend more on the actual space exploration (69 ongoing missions!) is one they are achieving with these bets on SpaceX.

> I think it mainly shows just how ineffective and inept the established players have become. The companies and organizations that got us to the moon 50 years ago still exist but seem to have lost a lot of their ability to get things done.

This is assuming the moon landing's objective was space exploration. If instead you think of that as a gigantic muscle flexing and chest thumping intimidation exercise, that ultimately led to the USSR's losing the arms race and the Cold War, then it was a very efficient allocation of resources.

> seemingly impossible goals that they keep setting for themselves

John Carmack made this point on the JRE podcast when talking about his failed Armadillo Aerospace, that a rocket company needs to have outrageous goals, otherwise you'll waste ten years accomplishing nothing (think Amazon Blue Origin).

Do not underestimate Blue Origin. They work quietly that's why it is easy to think they don't make much progress. In fact they do.

I would actually give the opposite advice - I think people continue to overestimate Blue Origin based simply on Bezos' deep pockets and the success he had with a non-engineering online business (Amazon). Best way to judge Blue Origin is on what they've achieved and that is actually very little.

I think SpaceX's recent accelerating success has caused BO to change their model a little to be more like SpaceX, which combined with Bezos's deep pockets might let them be a real competitor

Do you think this is because the people at SpaceX are incredibly motivated by what they are working on, because of the inspiring leadership of Elon Musk, because they actually have enough money/funding, because of some unique agile way of working that SpaceX has developed, because they don't have to deal with (or have found a way to deal with) as much stifling regulation, or some combination of all of the above?

I am genuinely trying to understand it as an outsider to SpaceX. It seems like either SpaceX has figured out a formula for organizational success that we all need to learn from, or it also seems like there's a possibility something else is going on. I really can't tell.

EDIT: If anyone has any books or reading material on this topic, please share!

I don't think money is the issue. NASA has a much larger budget than SpaceX, courtesy of taxpayers. But NASA is a government agency, with more red tape and bureaucracy than necessary. SpaceX doesn't have to go through a 6 months approval process to order a part.

SpaceX also benefits from a constant, unbroken vision: develop cheap, reusable rockets -> lower launch costs -> build a spaceship to go to Mars. That's roughly the plan, and they've stuck to it since their founding. NASA, meanwhile, sees every new administration flip the table and change the mission, because every president wants to have their Kennedy "We choose to go to the Moon" moment". This makes long term planning impossible, and budgets are cut when Congress gets impatient.

NASA is still riding on the coattails of the Apollo program, but it takes more than that to inspire people to work for you. No doubt that NASA remains a desirable employer full of bright and motivated people eager to contribute to the larger goal, but NASA just doesn't have this "it" factor anymore. If you asked someone on the street what NASA is doing back in 1970, they would say "send people to the Moon". But today? NASA is involved in a plethora of projects, from the Mars rovers to aeronautics to climate change monitoring, which is nice, to be sure, but also sucks time and resources from the kind of "Moonshot projects" that SpaceX and other private actors are working on.

> I don't think money is the issue

Interesting reading the Wikipedia entry regarding SpaceX's funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_...

Seems to be a lot of capital 'raised' which I usually read as money out of thin air, or money otherwise provided because of a certain hype attached to the company.

NASA is basically a jobs program at this point. Congress keeps funding it primarily as a way to direct federal money to certain states. There's no vision.

There are lots of good people at NASA and they manage to do some great work, but they could do much more with the budget they have if they weren't subject to the political whims of two branches of government.

ESA/Ariane are in a similar situation. They rejected reusable rockets a couple of years ago explicitly because they were afraid of the effect it would have on the jobs on their production line--the calculus is purely political, and jobs won out over not being left behind with an overpriced single-use launch platform. To their credit they recently walked that back and are now developing a reusable launch platform.

Hit the nail on the head. If Starship/Superheavy succeeds the contrast will be stark, with the relative inefficiency of ESA/NASA making them look like employment schemes that do space as a side-effect. If they care about remaining relevant in rocketry both organisations need to wake up, smell the coffee and start disrupting themselves before SpaceX becomes the only game in town (ESA efforts notwithstanding). This is very much what I would love to see, it's 2019 and we should have at least a moonbase by now.

So true, India's ISRO is the only well performing govt agency, and even that's too little compared to SpaceX (considering the budget that's been poured into it for the last 70 yrs). The rest of the govt companies in India couldn't even make a decent aircraft. It's sad to see people join them only to get a 'safe job' and not really to create phenomenal stuff with the massive budget.

They take big risks. Also known as 'innovation'. People forget that innovation is a gamble.

This is also why there are no shortage of people always saying 'this thing Tesla or SpaceX is doing is not going to work'. Those people are correct in a sense, in that there's definitely a chance that the various things Musk is attempting will fail (FSD etc). Thats why he's attempting them. If they were sure bets, someone else would have done them already.

I don't think it's necessarily Elon, but the goal. Elon and SpaceX are aiming to colonize Mars. That is something that is inspiring, ambitious, and will radically change our species forever. It's going to attract people who also want to see this goal achieved and are going to work to make that happen. By contrast when companies don't really have a goal, outside of making money, they're going to attract employees who also don't really have goals, outside of earning money.

There was a really awesome multi-part piece on SpaceX and WaitButWhy [1] that was proposed by Elon and made with his input. It covers pretty much everything and provides a really great overview alongside lots of nice little insights.

[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-...

Skunkworks, if you haven't yet. Less relevant, but another good read is the Robert Coram biography of John Boyd.

A skunk works is what happens when you decide to remove bureaucratic obstacles, it requires team consensus, political sheltering, and subterfuge.

Boyd managed to get things done without this consensus.

Musk simply eliminates all bureaucratic obstacles from the top.

Cool, thanks for the recommendation! Definitely have read the Boyd book and it was thoroughly enjoyable to see what an impact he had on aerospace.

Right at the end of Q&A session, he seems to spell out his methodology to achieve gigantic proportions: 1. If designing is taking long time to build then it's wrong design and unnecessarily complex. Undesigning is the best thing. 2. Best process is no process. It weighs nothing and costs nothing. 3. Best part is no part. 4. If the schedule is long then it's wrong, if it's tight it's right.

He's undeniably a big factor in all of the wacky things he's done with this and other companies. He's also been a big factor in picking people to delegate to that got all of this done.

There are a few other entrepreneurs involved in space and they each have their own successes to brag about. But none even close to "I launched a car one of my companies built in the general direction of Mars using a big rocket that my other company built".

That kind of ballsiness, for lack of a better word, is what makes the difference to say Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or Nasa.

Another possibility: it's only moderately hard to do, but government space agencies are massively inefficient. Some reasons to prefer this theory include:

- NASA got to the moon in a decade with slide rules and wire-wrapped guidance computers. It'd be surprising if we couldn't much do better now.

- While large amounts of bloat is tolerable in many public works projects (you can build a dam with twice as much concrete and it only costs double) a rocket can barely afford any bloat. The Space Shuttle pushed the limits of feature creep and bloat so much they could only launch about 4 per year.

- When public projects go down a wrong road, they're structurally unable to backtrack. The Shuttle, the F-135, the Denver airport baggage system, the War on Drugs. If these were projects run by a private company with a CEO, they would've been shut down and re-thunk long ago.

- If SpaceX is right about welded stainless steel being the right tank material (a very surprising claim) it's an example of backtracking that a public project could never manage.

About steel construction: Visually, the Starship looks like a pile of junk. Like someone's Burning Man installation. I think that's inherent in the steel panel construction. You can imagine that, if NASA has started building something like that in the 1970s, the public would complain that it doesn't look spaceworthy. Private companies have the luxury of doing something that looks silly until it works, while public projects don't.

Alternatively the established players have become incredibly good at what they do - it's simply something different. Elon is motivated ideologically by a desire to colonize Mars. By contrast this [1] is the current head of Lockheed Martin, this [2] was the head of Boeing until 2015 when it became clear they were losing by most of every metric to SpaceX. Exact same story in both cases: 0 tech background + MBA.

These people are not aiming to achieve anything, just to make more money in general, and specifically to extract more taxpayer money. And they are extremely good at that. For instance ULA (an anticompetitive joint venture between Boeing/Lockheed) managed to get the government to pay them $422 million per rocket launch. [3] The only reason this ended was because of those pesky kids, SpaceX in this case - who are charging $83-$97 million for a comparable launch capability. And that's at the inflated government price - private commercial launches go for about $65 million. SpaceX have a big picture goal. Boeing/Lockheed exist only to make more money.

Perhaps my favorite example of ULA's success is the 'launch assurance capability subsidy.' ULA managed to get the government to give them about $1 billion of taxpayer money per year, to do literally nothing but exist. [4] Elon's taken flak because of astroturfed articles suggesting he feeds on government subsidies when they tend to be little more than tax rebates (in other words the government taking less). But this is literally getting the government to write you a check for $800 million, just to make sure you have your vehicles ready to accept their $420 million check later on. ULA, for their part, refers to it as an "innovative contracting mechanism." Whatever it is, getting the government to spew taxpayer money to you is what they're trying to do, and yeah - again, they are very good at it.

The examples are endless here. For instance Lockheed Martin is also behind the maligned F-35 program (works out to an average of about $29 billion a year of taxpayer money, for the next 50 years), the SLS launch vessel, perpetually 3 years out on the horizon, draws billions per year and a large chunk of NASA's entire annual allocation, so forth and so on.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney

[3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/air-force-budget-rev...

[4] - https://spacenews.com/u-s-air-force-looks-at-ending-ulas-lau...

> Exact same story in both cases: 0 tech background + MBA.

As I have said many times: the MBA is the Western equivalent of the Soviet apparatchik.

Elon should not be quite so remarkable. He seems superhuman only against a field of apparatchiks and bureaucrats.

I had the same thoughts watching that.m - it’s been 17 years, but the company is amazing. Each rocket contains as much pressurized space as the ISS.

I do however think the “rapid reusability” thing is going to be a challenge. He mentioned 20 flights a day for the booster and 6 (or so) for the starships. I expect 1 per day tops, still exceedingly impressive, but once one of these blow up (or hopefully before) they’ll have heavy pre-flight inspections.

Starting off id hope for heavy inspections, then following a period of no error inspections could be reduced.

Agreed. There are software companies that can't get iteration down to less than a month and this guy is going to do with rocket ships - absolutely amazing.

I’m impressed by all this. I was apprehensive about the direction NASA took after they EOL’d their shuttles. I’ve also been suspicious of Musk’s Tesla being able to enter the automotive industry. But it seems like we can see the light at the end of this transition to commercial space flight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com