Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

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Hard to draw super hard conclusions. Could also be that the bets made on Falcon turned out to be particularly good, vs a more methodical approach Blue Origin took. The highly iterative approach _may_ be faster, but I don't see any evidence yet that it will _always_ be faster. Just depends on how good your bets are and how much in-flight testing you happen to have to do based on a design.

Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.

Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)

People need to remember that New Glenn is completely artificial in market terms. Blue Origin had literally infinite money, and if not sponsored by the richest man on the planet it could never exists. And New Glenn even if its 'better' then Falcon 9 (yet to be demonstrated) will likely never make back its development cost.

I think people just don't understand what an absurd amount of cash burn Blue had for the last 10+ years.

So when it comes to iterative vs methodical, this is a perfectly clear case. SpaceX did it faster and for an amount of money that is so much less then Blue that its hard to even compare the numbers.

Go back and just look at how many people worked at Blue, and then do the math on what their cash burn rate was just for people.

Rocket Lab is also taking a more methodical and less iterative approach with Neutron, which should be ready some time next year. If they make that work well, that will be another point in favor of a methodical approach.

There should be an in depth academic study on their two approaches, it seems like it'd be valuable.

To me at least, given the (probably) positive affects iterative dev has (overall) had on software development, my personal feeling is it'd be useful for most other types of engineering. But (as someone else also pointed out) iterative is much more expensive in hardware fields, given the high cost of materials, and you need to have a lot more funds to build hardware this way.

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