Here’s the excellent Bent Flyvbjerg and Atif Ansar’s latest article, Speed-to-Market for SpaceX and NASA. Note that the efforts tracked by Bent include Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon, Falcon Heavy, and Starship, as well as various iterative updates to the merlin, kestrel and raptor engines. The Merlin alone has at least six rapid iterative updates.
On average SpaceX projects took 49.2 months (~4 years) whereas NASA’s took 82.3 months (~7 years). This difference is statistically significant. As its platform has stabilized, SpaceX’s speed-to-market has been persistently trending lower towards 2 years:
In contrast, NASA’s speed-to-market is trending back upwards, towards 4 years and above.
It’s interesting in the NASA chart that you can see the impact of it’s Better-Cheaper-Faster initiative in the 1990s, but it also looks like that trend started in the 1980s. Ultimately, it’s hard to tell from the NASA scatterplot what’s going on. What is the content of a NASA capability fielded vs. SpaceX?
One thing to note is that SpaceX has more of a family of systems that build off each other and use enterprise information technology rather than building each from scratch. Another thing is that SpaceX is vertically integrated whereas NASA farms out development to teams of contractors and subcontractors. Elon Musk criticized how NASA developed the next generation spacesuit with 27 different vendors.
The authors note that they gave NASA the benefit of the doubt by excluding pre-planning for the final investment decision/contract close, which would have increased NASA’s timelines by more than SpaceX.
Here’s more from Bent and Atif:
The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have been launched 137 times (including one in-flight failure) and reflown 78 times more than the NASA Space Shuttle in its thirty-year history from 1981–2011…. SpaceX’s pace in bringing new systems and iterative upgrades to the market has been nothing less than stunning compared with NASA.
… the Space Shuttle program’s paperwork began in earnest from September 1966. It was not formally kicked off until August 1968 when a request for proposal (RFP) was put to the market. Contracts were signed with General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and North American Rockwell by December 1968.
Honestly, that planning, RFP, and source selection timeline is crazy fast compared to normal DoD programs. Of course, that was the 1960s. Still, the Space Shuttle didn’t turn out so great in the authors’ eyes:
The first flight took place in April 1981. The Space Shuttle flew 135 times — with two fatal accidents, Challenger upon launch in 1986 and Columbia upon re-entry in 2003 — until the programme’s retirement in 2011. Therein lies the bigger issue with the Space Shuttle programme — conceived as a big one-off, bespoke project, the system could not be updated. A space vehicle designed in the 1960s and 1970s did not meet 21st Century standards and despite having spent $221 billion (in 2012 dollars) on the overall programme, the Space Shuttle had to be scrapped. The retirement of the Space Shuttle locked the US out of human space flight. It was only with the SpaceX Crew Dragon that this capability was recovered in May 2020.
Here’s another good article from Bent and Atif on this subject, bespoke requirements vs. platform based strategies.
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