then why does spacex have superior outputs?
Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.
So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."
You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
It's not possible to keep making good decisions indefinitely. Every organization eventually regresses towards mediocrity. Maybe incentives ruin things, maybe administrators learn how to game the system, or maybe the environment changes and the way the organization operates is no longer adequate.
If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have their own goals instead of being mindless cogs in the machine. SpaceX is still young enough that it may not be showing clear signs of stagnation, but it's hard to see that from the outside. Google is a few years older and clearly suffering from conflicting interests.
This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.
Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.
Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.
Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.
And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.
SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.
I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.
> Elon himself said that Starlink would fail without Starship. Or is believing what he says situational?
Elon is well known to make dramatic statements to motivate people. He said that many years ago and the company is totally fine, Starlink is doing well. SpaceX still has the cheapest launch by an order of magnitude.
* The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power.
* Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to
Absolutely makes a difference. My point is that hard work alone was not enough to make it happen -- "fail fast" was key.
And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.
If you have more people willing to work longer hours... you win, thats it. It's pretty simple really.
Musk specifically went to Silicon Valley because that's where the opportunity were.
But he was only one of many who tried to make it big. Just because the US is a big country doesn't magically create rockets that can fly to space.