Imagine if you had gone to work at Space X in 2005 and gotten in the ground floor of the Falcon 1 program, or imagine if you’d gone to NASA in 2005 and gotten it on the ground floor of the Orion spacecraft. Say your 22 year old engineer. You’re brilliant. Now, 16 years later, Space X is flown 110 missions. They’ve done cargo dragon, crew dragon, they operate more satellites than any country or company in the world. They flown Falcon 1, Falcon, 9, Falcon Heavy. They’re doing Starship. And Orion has flown one mission uncrewed — a boilerplate spacecraft to about 3,600 miles above the surface of the earth. It may fly a second mission, next year.
If you went to Space X, you know, you weren’t working a 40 hour government job, but you also, weren’t sitting behind a desk filling out paperwork or sitting in meetings or dealing with insane levels of bureaucracy. You were out there building hardware, touching hardware, and the things that you were doing, you could see those going into space months after you’ve worked on them. In the case of the Starship program, it’s weeks. They’re rolling out these steel barrel, stacking them and then, blowing them up weeks after they’re built. You can see that you’re making a difference.
That was from a great episode of China Talk podcast with Eric Berger, author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days. Listen to the whole episode.
Of course, Berger cites cost-plus contracts as the primary incentive causing poor outcomes in government, with the linear process of development as an added dagger. Here’s another good part:
Elon gave me a great quote. He said, “In most companies, you have the chief engineer over here and the CFO over here, and the engineered says something, ‘do this,’ and he’s got to go convince the CFO it’s necessary. For Space X, the CFO and the engineer in the same head and the CFO already knows to trust the engineer.” I think that’s just one of the many ways that they’re able to move quickly.
And commentary on Bezos’ New Origin:
So blue origin has had a really difficult job scaling up. For the first five to seven years, they were really kind of a hobby shop where they were looking at alternative ways to get to orbit. And then they started tinkering with small engines and then Bezos got more serious about 2012 or 2013 started pushing forward the New Shepard program. At the same time, he was also starting to get much more interested in Amazon Prime and Hollywood, and sucked into that. And so he was spending less time at Blue Origin. As he was spending more money on Blue Origin, he started hiring more traditional industry people. In my mind, it’s kind of the oldest new space company. You can imagine they’re very much acting like a traditional space company, now trying to go out and get government contracts.
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