Here’s an example: five years ago, Elon Musk was working on his reusable rocket, the one that can take off and then land on the same pad it launched from — and it didn’t work, it blew up. At the time, the leadership of the Air Force said to me, “Steve, he’s reckless,” but they weren’t looking closely enough at his process.
Musk discovered the problem landing the rocket wasn’t the computation involved, but the amount of hydraulic fluid being used in the system. That discovery cost him about $50 million and took 10 weeks. It would have taken the government 10 years and a billion dollars to discover the same thing.
… That’s what took Musk so long to get where he is today — the government wanted control and didn’t trust him. Now that he’s succeeded, NASA has started to trust him, and I hope the Space Force will do the same, but right now they still do not.
That was Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast (ret.) being interviewed by Tim Ventura, The Promise & Peril of the Emerging Space Economy. Kwast estimated that it would have taken government 20x the cost and 50x the schedule to achieve the same capability of landing a rocket. Chief Software Officer recently estimated that it would take the government 50x the number of software developers to do the same thing. There are two independent estimates in different domains returning a similar magnitude of cost-effectiveness.
I think a lot of the difference isn’t just doing the same thing for less. The decision making process in SpaceX results in different courses of action. For example, the government wouldn’t have created an MDAP for landing a rocket, let alone deciding on the way to solve the problem once decided upon.
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