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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

What I love about SpaceX is that they truly take on the start-up approach of fast iteration, in complete opposite to most of their competitors.

This is a silly loss, as it sounds like it was a test procedure error and not a valuable experimental failure. But even then, how much is lost? The rocket was built on-site in a tent, welding some cheap steel together. They've got more test articles being built. The engine is probably salvageable. This is a month or two set-back at worst.

And just like when our software fails in a silly way, I'll bet you there will be new automatic tests, procedures, etc, so that this kind of error can't happen again. They'll learn, iterate, and continue to move fast (and break things).

With nearly all of their competitors, any kind of failure like this would be millions of dollars lost, months or years of setback. This fundamental difference is why SpaceX is slowly coming to dominate the industry.

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The vehicle didn't even have any engines on it when it failed. SpaceX was planning to perform cryogenic pressure tests with simulated engine thrust, then if that was successful, mount three Raptor engines and perform static fire tests and flight tests.

> What I love about SpaceX is that they truly take on the start-up approach of fast iteration, in complete opposite to most of their competitors.

I won't call their approach a "start-up" or even unique one, especially considering they made a huge component of this (Raptor) in a pretty standard way. Building in a "tent" just means they don't need anything more than it being a tent right now, not that they won't ever need more.

For some reason, rocket engineering has that reputation of being a complete waterfall process. It isn't deserved and doesn't make sense. Rapid iterative development and quick discarding of failing prototypes in the early phase is as common in space industry as it is everywhere. It just doesn't usually make headlines and isn't that visible.

Yeah, one of the things that struck me when reading about the development of the SR-71 and F-117[1] was how a lot of what we consider "start-up" culture has already existed in one form or another.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...

Yeah, there weren't many waterfalls in the skunk works.

There weren't many management layers either.

The good parts of Agile are pretty much taken verbatim from the approach taken by project Mercury in the 60s. The space industry pretty much gave birth to iterative and incremental development

iterative development goes back much further.

The industrial revolution made iterative design possible because it made the time and effort of producing something far cheaper.

Every bit of negative Elon Musk oriented news brings out an apologetic post excusing failure and painting it positively, with a pile of democratic support.

This is a failure, and failure is perfectly ok working on something like this, but what drives people to volunteer their time to spin such things as positively as possible or even signal boost ? I can’t believe it’s purely investor driven. It’s almost as if people are finding personal purpose in sacrificing their time to this cause.

Why do people cheer for sports teams? Many nerds avoid team sports, but we share some of the same psychology as the more typical.

Many people like to dream big, but most of the time life is mundane. SpaceX's efforts are the embodiment of sci-fi fantasy with a chance of becoming real. Why not cheer?

I have for years thought of SpaceX as my sports team to cheer for. I get just as excited watching their launch livestreams as many get watching football games.

Space is fun and rockets are cool.

Let people enjoy things.

Repeated exposure to the idea that anything wrong with one of Musk's projects is the end of the world could probably produce an extreme opposite response, even if they weren't interested in Musk at first.

Because people admire their courage in being so transparent about failing publicly. That's undoubtedly helped in building their audience over the last decade not because they want to see SpaceX fail, far from it but because it reminds us that they too are only human and failing is normal no matter how much others try to hide or gloss over their failures.

I think it's much less likely that it's all those people who are wrong than that you don't really understand how people work.

I also love how fast SpaceX iterates but it does come at a cost. If one design fails, they can quickly iterate to a different design that works. But sometimes that means they aren’t investigating the science behind the failure. Great from an operational engineering perspective but less good from a fundamental science perspective. To their credit, I don’t think the latter is their main role.

Regarding the cost, the aerospace industry needs some scrappy young start ups. However, quality pedigree is a large chunk of the cost of flight and SpaceX has shown some gaps in the past. I think a big question is whether they can keep that scrappy startup up culture while also building processes robust enough to meet space flight quality standards

If they don't investigate the science behind "why" how do you think they come up with new ideas and improvements? I'm sure they don't discard their learnings!

I probably didn’t explain well.

Say they have a check valve in their titanium system that fails. They could spend a lot of research dollars on the fundamental science of why that valve failed or just replace it with a burst disk. From an operational engineering point, they may feel like they solved the problem. But from a scientific standpoint we haven’t learned much other than “check valves are bad”.

It’s akin to the old joke about a mathematician, physicist, and engineer trying to find the volume of a cow. The mathematician tries to formulate a triple integral for the cow’s shape. The physicist drops the cow in water and measures the displacement. The engineer says, “let’s suppose the cow is a sphere...”

Point being, often in engineering they’re shooting for “good enough to get the job done” not to increase fundamental understanding

You can do both though. Replace the valve with a burst disc now, just so testing can continue. Investigate the valve in parallel with testing, and place it back in whenever you think you've solved it, if you still need it.

What I’m saying is that I don’t get the impression they do the latter for a variety of reasons. I.e., they solve the engineering problem and move forward. However, I think NASA may move forward with the research part

You can, but it is expensive. SpaceX definitely does some research, but they are also definitely not in it for researches sake. If it isn't necessary to get to mars, and it isn't going to make them money to figure out why, they're probably just going to drop it.

As I've heard that joke, it's the engineer who suggests measuring displacement and the physicist who wants to assume the cow is a sphere. The joke is that physicist's models oversimplify reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

Maybe I got I wrong, but then again I originally heard it from a physicist so they may have deliberately changed it :)

(Theoretical) physicists would throw out data to simplify, engineers would throw out theory.

Over half of all startups fail within 5 years. In the space industry it's much much worse. Although as long as SpaceX has cash I guess they'll just keep on trucking.

SpaceX has been around for 18 years, so I guess they're doing ok with not failing before 5 years. :)

My point was that hard and fast startup tactics don't guarantee success (WRT the starship project), and mostly have little to do with whether a project succeeds or fails at all.

>What I love about SpaceX is that they truly take on the start-up approach of fast iteration, in complete opposite to most of their competitors.

What has convinced you that this is optimal, or even "good", in either software or space technology?

>This fundamental difference is why SpaceX is slowly coming to dominate the industry.

They're making progress in the industry, sure. But dominating it? In what sense is this true?

They make up over 60% of the launch market now: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a27290/one-ch...

> They're making progress in the industry, sure. But dominating it? In what sense is this true?

In addition to capturing most of the commercial market that makes sense for them.

They are NASA most trusted partner, for both cargo to ISS. They will be the first private company to fly humans into orbit.

They are by far the cheapest, and even the rockets that are in development can't really compete against their lineup.

They are operating the largest launch vehicle on the planet.

They are universally considered to be the global leader in rocket engine design as both their Merlin and Raptor engines break many records and did stuff people thought was not possible.

They are in prime position to capture the single most valuable space market, LEO internet.

They are clearly the dominant player in the industry, every other player has admired it. Russian are out of commercial launch, Europeans are spending 2.5 billion to develop the Ariane 6 (who already has problems finding missions), ULA is dropping both their Atlas and Delta rocket to have a chance against SpaceX, and they have a very clear strategy to focus only on military and NASA launches.

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