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An Inside Look At the SpaceX Rocket Factory
Dave Bullock writes "The folks at SpaceX are working hard in their Hawthorne labs, cubicles and factory, building rockets that will hopefully bring future astronauts to the International Space Station. At the behest of Wired, I toured the former 747 factory which is now a rocket assembly line. 'Eschewing the traditional startup trappings of two college grads eating ramen, watching Adult Swim and coding until the wee hours of the night, SpaceX instead employs hundreds of brainiacs and builds its rockets in a massive hangar that once housed a 747 assembly line. Started in 2002 by PayPal founder Elon Musk, SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) brings a startup mentality to launching rockets into orbit, which until recently was almost exclusively government turf. The hope is that minimal bureaucracy, innovation and in-house manufacturing and testing can be used to put payloads into space at roughly one-tenth the cost of traditional methods.'"
Some parts of the 747 may have been produced in Hawthorne, but the 747 is (and always has been) assembled in a Everett, WA. The article mentions the Hawthorne facility having a "massive hangar". The real thing is gigantic (eg: 90' ceiling).
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/facilities/
Wired are just writing to their reader base. That's what magazines do.
Even at a large multinational there is a direct chain of command that stops with the president or the board, in the US there are 536 people who sit on the board when you have a gov't contract or are a gov't agency and each one of those 536 people have multiple Brunos to keep happy.
insert inflammatory comment here!
To be fair, the article is talking about a Silicon Valley startup headed by the guy who started a very successful dot com business.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!