Space Companies at Y Combinator

    Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if an intelligent person gives you the requirements, as you may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”
    Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.
    Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.
    Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”
    Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.

SpaceX has built on top of lots of existing ideas - commerce instead of government services, simplicity instead of performance, vertical integration instead of spreading orders, testing philosophy, re-use...

You need to use materials to make something, and that thing needs to fulfil a purpose. But until you have an objective and try to make the thing and work out what the thing is, you don’t even know what your requirements are. That’s why engineering projects like Apollo and the shuttle drove materials science advances.

If you put the materials first you run the risk of creating a carbon fibre composites company to make giant space rocket hulls, just as the people actually making the rockets decided for their project they’d use steel.

Operating rockets and satellites, and using them to provide services back on Earth—is about $400 billion industry and is only going to grow. There will be plenty of companies that make a fortune in a market that size with relatively few players.

Maybe soon you'll pop open the window on one of these new suborbital flights and skydive from the black back to Earth!