What Makes Elon Musk Move So Fast
By: Frederic Filloux
Tags: Spacex, Elon Musk, New Space Market, Starship

This episode was supposed to be about the funding of the New Space, but I still need to secure a couple of interviews. Plus, I wanted to share new findings on the “Elon Musk method.” The idea emerged from a two-hour video featuring the SpaceX founder touring its South Texas facility where the megarocket Starship is being assembled. The erudite YouTuber Tim Dodd had a chance to walk through the huge tents, buildings, and launchpad, guided by Musk.

There are reasons to be fascinated by the size and scope of Musk’s latest endeavor: the Starship rocket is 120 meters high, the equivalent of an almost 40-story building, taller than the iconic Saturn V. Except this one will be fully reusable and quite versatile, as it will be able to put 100 tonnes in orbit. That’s four times Falcon 9’s capacity, and it will also ferry astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars. Last week marked a milestone, with, for the first time, the two parts of the rocket being stacked upon each other in a spectacular fashion:

What is even more stunning is the pace at which SpaceX is putting together all the components: buildings, such as the 400-foot metallic structure that will capture the first stage of the rocket upon landing, are built and assembled in parallel to various iterations of the rocket itself. As it was running out of hangars, the company deployed huge tents to host the most critical phases of manufacturing. No wasted time here.

Tim Dodd’s video features an unpolished Elon Musk, sweating in the early evening heat of South Texas, sleep-deprived, afflicted with serious back pain, uncaring about his physical appearance but always intense and obsessive. As geeky as it is, the interview definitely has a documentary value.

But in addition to that value, there are other things that we can mention about how the Musk method applies to building a giant spaceship. Here are five arbitrarily chosen clues into SpaceX’s culture and method.

1 . Musk’s Engineering Philosophy

I already covered the Musk method for making cars in the Monday Note series about EVs (read How Tesla cracked the code of automobile innovation), but SpaceX founder made some adaptations for rocket manufacturing:

“Step one: Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. It’s particularly dangerous when they come from an intelligent person, as you may not question them enough. Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time. All designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”

“Step two: try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, [it means that] not enough parts are being deleted. The bias tends to be very strongly toward ‘let’s add this part or process step in case we need it. Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can”.

“Step three: simplify and optimize the design. This is the most common error of a smart engineer, to optimize something that should simply not exist”.

“Step four: accelerate cycle time. You’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”

“The final step is: automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing. I have personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. In making Tesla’s Model 3, I literally automated, accelerated, simplified and then deleted”.

2 . Attention to detail, from the top

Musk seems to know everything about his rocket. It looks like he can’t be fooled by anyone on the shop floor. He can quote the weight of the enormous launch stand (270 tonnes, in case you wonder), explain with great precision the distribution of the heat load on the vehicle upon reentry in the atmosphere, the challenge posed by the heat tiles, and the difficulty to protect the hinges of the rocket’s tiny wings. He is deep in the trenches as with Tesla during the worst moment of the Model 3 “production hell”. That is a stark contrast with Boeing’s SVP for Space and Launch, Jim Chilton, who is a 37-year veteran with a bird’s eye view on the development of indefinitely-delayed Starliner, which looks like the offspring of a decade-old committee.

3 . Failure is a compulsory step

Elon Musk harbors surprisingly low expectations for the first Starship orbital flight in the fall:

“Our goal is to make it to orbit without blowing up. If the booster even does its job and something goes wrong [right after launch] with the ship, I’ll still count that as good progress. Actually, to be totally frank, if it takes off without blowing up the stand, — ‘stage zero’ [the tower, tanks, etc.] — , which is much harder to replace than the booster, that would be a victory. That’s my number-one concern”.

Again, this is part of the Musk principle. According to him:

“Everything you see here is a work in progress. What was said last week might be untrue next week. It could be an error, a miscommunication or we had a better idea”.

It applies to Tesla, whose cars are subject to constant upgrades, including for critical elements such as the autopilot (again, see episode 5 of our Future of car series: Code on Wheels). Owners don’t care, but in an editorial rant, the New York Times defended a less adventurous perspective denouncing the beta-testing culture that put half-baked cars on the roads. Risk-taking is not widely shared: in France, many go as far as wanting the “principle of precaution” carved in the Constitution to prevent any excessive risk, including in science and tech…

4 . Iterations — multiple ones (unlike the space shuttle)

Asked by Tim Dodd about Nasa’s approach to the space shuttle, Musk said:

“The shuttle had almost no room for iteration because there were people on board. So you couldn’t be blowing up shuttles [in tests]. That’s a big problem. In fact, a lack of iteration was the problem. Because [Nasa’s engineers] were aware of a lot of the issues, but people were too afraid to make changes”.

“There was a risk/reward asymmetry: big punishment for it — you make a change and something goes wrong. But if you make a change and it goes right, you only get a small reward. The biggest problem with the shuttle was that its design froze. Due to all space shuttle missions being crewed, design changes were high risk and low reward. Starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up. It’s really helpful.”

The same thinking applied to SpaceX manned missions:

“SpaceX has polar opposite design methods for Starship and Dragon [which carries crews as well as cargo to the ISS]. Dragon can never fail, and it must be tested in extreme amounts and has tons of margin. However, to develop the world’s first fully and rapidly reusable rocket, SpaceX must iterate rapidly, which leads to lots of failures. Falcon is in-between, where SpaceX can afford to have a landing failure, but cannot experience a failure during ascent”.

5 . Everyone must get The Big Picture

At one point Musk addresses the delicate and often divisive question of encouraging the staff to comprehend and carry out the company’s big picture. A principle that is at the cornerstone of many tech companies such as Netflix’s culture:

“You really want everyone to be chief engineer. It means that people need to understand the system at a high level to know when they are making a bad optimization”, said Musk.

Again, all of this was delivered not in a comfy TED talk, but as the creator of SpaceX was frantically striding a strange and cluttered shop floor. That’s the place where he is literally reinventing space exploration.

— Frederic Filloux

Previous episodes:

01: Creating an AWS in Orbit. Nothing Less.

02: The Delicate Politics of New Space Nations

Episode 04 will be about the dreaded ambitions of Big Tech into Space. Funding New Space will follow later. Don’t forget to subscribe.