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Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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