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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

>"According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines."

This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reasons that cars are such an amazing value. It seems like Musk's remarkable ability to achieve cost reductions (at least in the aerospace context) is attributable to his pursuit of vertical integration. Airframers (aeronautical vehicle designers & manufacturer) are bound by the costs dictated by their component suppliers, especially after a configuration has achieved regulatory approval. SpaceX has managed to avoid being 'held hostage' by pseudo-monopoly suppliers.

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Vertical integration is one thing SpaceX does but its not unique and magical as many other space companies have tried the same without achieving results similar.

I will not attempt to break all the reasons for SpaceX success in this post, but its certainty more complex then just vertical integration. And vertical integration isn't absolute, in some cases they reversed their vertical integration again.

Team building by Musk, consistent having engineers work on hard project after hard project, willing to invest in a next generation even if the existing system works in the current market context (canalizing yourself), believing in increasing scale overtime (only when planning to build 100s of engine iteration makes sense) are just some of the relevant parts of SpaceX success as an organization.

People claiming Musk has nothing to with this or is just some irrelevant figurehead money guy are idiots. At the same time, the brilliance of the team he build ultimately is far more important then his own suggestion about ideas with engines.

In case of the engine its actually Tom Mueller who basically off hand suggested to him that to reach his goals, he would have to design something nobody had ever done on a large engine, and was only used for smaller engines (phase shut off). Musk jumped on that and imitatively said that this is what they should do. Mueller said he wasn't sure if it could be done, but since they knew of no other way to achieve the goals, the team went off and eventually achieved it.

Mueller himself said he thought going after this was a mistake and a less aggressive simplification should have been done, but said he proved himself wrong and it was a massively important innovation.

This shows some important aspects of Musk. Not that he is some genius that magically design an amazing engine. Rather that he listened to his engineers and gave them the finances and confidence that they could achieve outlandish targets, and continued to support them even if they couldn't hit the target instantly. We see this again with Raptor, they had a target in mind and followed every line of design to achieve something close to as good as a 2 fuel engine is going to get.

One can argue that this is just blind optimism and then throwing money at the engineers, and that is certainty partly a fair critic of this approach. It did not work with self driving in the same way at Tesla. But the difference is that with evolution of Merlin and Raptor he listen to engineers who proposed challenging ideas that were still iterative and he supported them.

I have followed Space for a long time. Musk isn't some magical unique genius, but he certainty isn't do nothing idiot some of his haters want us to believe.

SpaceX success deserve series study and SpaceX without Musk is basically really understandable as an institution.

yes and no. Like you said, automotive and aviation industries are bound by a lot regulatory and path dependent constraints.

Elon's strength is his willingness to pull the plug and transition away from suboptimal solutions. This is bolstered by his willingness to double down.

Imagine if Boeing said "screw all this recertification technical debt for the 737 MAX airframe, we will start fresh. Customers can take it or leave it"

This is exactly correct in the context of the decision as it played out, but stretches and re-engines are very common in commercial airlines. Changing that decision without reinforcing the safety culture probably would have ended in the same place.

Wasn't the whole point of the MAX that they had reached the limit of what their existing design had, but due to the demands of the airlines, as well as their current position in the market, they felt it was an easier idea to extend the lifespan of their already tired design by using software to overcome the physical limitations of the aircraft? I do understand that the airplane would have flown fine without the MCAS system, but then it would not have satisfied all their requirements.

Taking a step back, I think it's more than that. It's just the company structure. It remains to be seen if SpaceX and Tesla survive long term. But if they do, a lot will be attributed to the company structure that Elon designed. When you have a company that does stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1InUlHXv718

Compared to Airbus: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KS9Xt6hmbTU

You just think to yourself, even if the airplane was completely safe, and they are incredibly safe, this is just not a great look. Both doors accomplish the task but little thought was put into the operator of the door. The little things matter and I notice them more and more everywhere I go with a lot of legacy American companies.

My point was more too highlight his approach to problems, not make the argument that this would have been successful or profitable for Boeing.

In fact, I would say there's probably a very narrow set of circumstances where his back to the drawing board approach can be deployed successfuly.

That said, the 787 Dreamliner remains statistically one of the safest widebody long-haul aircraft in commercial aviation history, which I think is a Counterpoint. It achieves this despite any more globally diverse supply chain, and moving production out of unionized Boeing manufacturing plants.

Safety by Design and design for manufacturability can help eliminate the possibility of quality issues during production.

> very narrow

He applied it to Tesla and SpaceX, which are very very different.

Sure, that is no accident. Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation.

His approach probably wouldn't work as well if you threw him in as CEO of a random company like JC penny or Pizza Hut. Other CEO's are good at different things - like squeezing the extra 0.1% out of a 40 year old brand or product line

Now I'm thinking about him firing the pizza cooks and bringing in a crack team of engineers to redesign the concept of Pizza from first principles.

> Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation.

I.e. products that everyone else dismisses as impractical/impossible. And then people complain when he's late delivering the impossible products.

Yes

That's basically what happened at DOGE, there was a hilarious quote from one of the software engineers he brought in that they thought the government would be full of useless and overpaid people, like silicon valley.

I mean, they're not wrong, but it's a harder problem for real reasons. A lot of over constrained problems leaning to bizarre Solutions

The decision to re-engine the 737 rather than design a new airframe saved the airlines a vast amount of money.

According to a version I heard, Boeing engineering did say more or less just that, at which point Southwest, the near-monopoly in some regions, said something like, "Oh yeah? Then we'll plan to leave it."

And Boeing upper management overruled the engineers.

Color me skeptical.

There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good.

Unfortunately, two of the 3 crews did not understand the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. The 3rd crew did, and landed safely, and the media never reports on that.

The runaway stab trim procedure is a "memory item", meaning pilots shouldn't need a checklist to deal with it.

> The runaway stab trim procedure…

But doesn’t apply to MCAS because the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct.

The MCAS system wasn’t documented, pilots weren’t trained on it, it didn’t indicate anything distinct in the cockpit, and it could rapidly put the plane into an unrecoverable attitude where pilots no longer had the physical strength to overcome the forces involved.

I know how the stab trim system works. I worked on it (for the 757) for three years.

Yes, it applies to MCAS.

> the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct

Nope. MCAS failure manifests itself as runaway trim, and the emergency procedures for it are exactly what is needed to recover from it.

1. the stab trim switches override the MCAS signals. Override. That means the pilot can trim to normal using the column mounted trim switches. The column switches will power the trim back to normal. No physical strength is required.

2. there's a "stab trim cutoff" switch on the console. That turns off the trim system. MCAS cannot bypass it.

The proof is the 3rd MCAS incident. The pilots trimmed it back to normal, and turned the stab trim system off.

That's all they had to do.

This is supposed to be a "memory item". The other two crews did not remember the memory item. Boeing even sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating this information. It was ignored by the EA pilots, who did everything wrong (including overspeeding the airplane at full thrust).

The narrative you wrote is the typical one in the mass media, which is utterly wrong. The proof of that is they ignore the 3rd incident which didn't fit the narrative.

I've talked with two 737 pilots about this. They agree with me, though I knew I was right anyway.

Food for thought: ever wonder why the stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent place on the center console in easy reach?

You just took Boeing adding a secret system that can cause a plane to crash and then blamed the pilots who were unfortunate to be a victim of malfunctioning sensors and then put all the blame on them because pilots who didn't want to die inside a deathtrap aircraft figured out how to avoid their own death the moment they realized that the MCAS crashes were not an isolated incident?

What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of? That they had some perverse incentive to die?

> put all the blame on them

Nope. I wrote: "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"

> What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of?

Not following the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. This is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning a checklist is not required.

There were 3 MCAS incidents:

1. crew trimmed to normal with the thumb switches, then turned off the trim system. Flew the rest of the flight, landed safely.

2. crew trimmed it back to normal at least 11 times (if I recall correctly) and never turned off the trim system. Crashed.

3. Boeing Emergency Airworthiness directive was sent to all MAX pilots. In a nutshell, it says to restore normal trim using the thumb switches then turn off the trim system. EA pilots instead turned off the trim system while the airplane was pointed down at full throttle. Crashed.

The two 737 pilots I talked to about this both asserted pilot incompetence.

Personally, I assign half the blame on Boeing and the other half on the pilots. Flying is not a joke. Not paying attention to an Emergency Airworthiness Directive is not acceptable.

> "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"

It was purposefully deceptive -- Boeing management actively decided to hide its existence from pilots.

The narrative that the pilots were at fault was Boeing leadership covering their ass.

The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.

MCAS would also re-activate with a five second delay, just long enough to confuse pilots.

More importantly, deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.

This is a Catch-22 scenario: Activate the electrics and be killed by MCAS, or deactivate the electrics and be killed by physics.

I could go through each of your comments in this thread and point out how NTSB crash investigators proved that Boeing was directly or indirectly at fault in almost every aspect, but I don't want to write out ten pages. Others have done so already, more eloquently, and often with more colourful language. Most professional pilots were rightly furious with Boeing.

Boeing's arguments have been mutually exclusive with each other: "Just remember how to operate MCAS... which we hid from you!" and "Just disable the electric trim... which will pit you against forces you can't overcome"... "Which is not a problem because you can turn electric trim back one... but then MCAS will try to kill you again"... "It won't do that because it is dual redundant... an option... that nobody purchased... and we didn't even tell most customers about."

I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths -- I know one of each and I'm now intimately familiar with the self serving arguments that make no sense, especially in combination.

> The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.

I'll pick this one. I've heard it before. Runaway trim is uncommanded movement. It does not have to be continuous, it can stop and start. That behavior can certainly happen with a short circuit or faulty wiring. It's like the speaker connections on my home stereo - the connectors corrode over time, and the sound cuts in an out randomly.

The MCAS behavior absolutely presents as runaway trim behavior. Remember I worked for 3 years on the 757 stab trim system. I know what runaway trim is.

> deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.

That's why the instructions provided to the pilots said to use the thumb switches first to restore normal trim. All three crews had managed to do just that to restore normal trim. The second instance the pilots restored it ELEVEN TIMES and it never occurred to them to then turn off the trim system.

You might want to review the first incident. The MCAS system came on 2 or 3 times, and each time the crew used the thumb switches to restore normal trim. Then they turned off the trim system. The flight continued and they landed safely. They knew nothing about MCAS - they just followed the runaway stab trim procedure.

> I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths

Being nasty doesn't lend credibility to your arguments.

>This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reasons that cars are such an amazing value.

You say that and then a company like Ford releases this as their EV to show the world that they are competitive with Tesla.

[1]: https://youtu.be/C1dQtlrI7uU?t=70

How does something like this happen despite Ford knowing all the 'secrets' a company like Tesla or the Chinese know? I have a few guesses:

1. Its the structure of the company. In this video the presenter talks a lot about all the hoses and clamp connectors etc. The cooling department thinking they had to stay relevant made sure the car incorporated a design that had all this nonsense.

2. Maybe they didn't put their 'A' engineers on this car. Its plausible: the F-150 is their massive money maker. However this car was supposedly developed under some skunkworks program and yet here we are.

3. Maybe there was sabatoge from elsewhere (suppliers, middle management etc.) You watch a movie like Ford vs Ferrari and while im sure a lot is dramatized, I can't help but think man they were talking about the dysfunction of Ford way back then?!

Then we have Youtube documentaries like this one about the Ford Taurus SHO talking about how they screwed up so much that they had one chance left to get serious...like what? Shouldn't they be serious every day? Thats what the Chinese are doing.

[2]: https://youtu.be/5VTRhCC3gZI?t=56

The presenter further added how they had to ship entire engine blocks to Japan so that they could 'fix' them and unlock 80 more horsepower that Ford just left on the table. If factual, this should be a total embarrassment: You had to send your handiwork to a entity with a better reputation so that they could 'fix' your mess?

[3]: https://youtu.be/5VTRhCC3gZI?t=212

At some point, you have to acknowledge that the naysayers were wrong: Thinking (especially among the short community) was that Tesla had some cool ideas but their implementation was horrific, they couldn't just make up for 100+ years of institutional knowledge that the legacy companies had. The Tesla cars showed some of this thinking: quite poor build quality, poor after sale support, poor parts network. These things improved over the years but still isn't perfect.

But at the same time you have to acknowledge that the legacies suffer from their own problems that dont put them as far ahead as newcomers as you'd think. Sometimes a lot of that institutional knowledge becomes a liability when a paradigm shift occurs.

You can always get help from subject matter experts.

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