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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.'"
I'm all for minimal bureaucracy and maybe minimal in-house manufacturing would be good but is it a smart idea to have minimal innovation and testing?
increase productivity. Everyone knows ramen is brain food and people code better when sleep deprived.
"Eschewing the traditional startup trappings of two college grads eating ramen, watching Adult Swim and coding until the wee hours of the night"
What a surprise. A company that isn't an IT company doesn't behave like an IT company.
Get your head out of your ass Wired, that's only 'traditional' for companies whose products rely on code. Caterers don't code all night. Cabinetmakers don't code all night. Organic farmers don't code all night. Graphic artists don't code all night. And that's only a handful of the startups by friends and family over the years - not one of which involved coding all night. Only two of them are college grads too... The caterer graduated from culinary school and the organic farmer just got her doctorate - in history. And not one of them was under thirty.
There's a hell of a lot more to the business world than IT. There's a hell of a lot more people in the business world than college graduates.
Making a design that lasts is a challenge; a "working" design is easy.
Are they making this a design that lasts? (like it was massively over-engineered). Are they making this a design that is safe? (as in not blowing up or falling apart). And are they making this a design that is easier to build and maintain? (think old VW or Chevy).
Or are they making this cheap? (as in quality), or "good enough" (as in design)? Are they testing every aspect? (stress tests in newer alloys, or even the little things like o-rings)
Sure, doing this on a tight budget is important, but... I'd take my chances with the 42-year-old Soyuz design before overcoming my skepticism. And Soyuz is still operational!
Here's to hoping they know what they're building, instead of making the next high-maintenance toy. I'd rather them take the time to do it right, instead of rushing to mediocrity.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
increase productivity. Everyone knows ramen is brain food and people code better when sleep deprived.
Definitely. I'm sleep deprived and I can say that my code is excellent. When I can get it to compile. And after that, when I'm looking for bugs and stupid programming mistakes, like failing to initialize pointers prior to use or checking for buffer overflows, but hey, I like working for Microsoft's quality assurance department.
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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/
I still am amazed that anyone else is shocked that a private company can do something for cheaper than the gov't. In the company there is one boss and he sets the vision of the company.
Never worked for a large multinational, huh?
This is why most gov't projects cost more than the original contract.
The real reason is is that Bruno has to eat. See, you wouldn't want to Bruno to go hungry. Oh, no. See, Bruno can get very, very cranky when he's hungry. And you wouldn't Bruno to be cranky, now would you? *slam* *smash* See what I mean?
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You realize that the folks who are doing all the work, and getting paid, for those "gov[ernmen]t projects [that] cost more than the original contract" are all in private industry, and that they are the ones with the cost overruns? Most cost overruns are not due to changes in government requirements; they are due to the original contractors underbidding and overpromising.
The slashdotter-utopian idea that all corporations are lean-mean-producing-machines is naive. Most corporations (even small startups) have their own internal politics that are just as complex and productivity-draining as the politics within a government agency; and government agencies, unlike private companies, do not have to make a profit.
Who does the writer think make the current crop of rockets - some bureaucrats in DC?
Space X is just another space vehicle manufacturer, same as Boeing and others.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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!
And each of those 536 congress-critters has their own agenda and suffers from a chronic lack of long term vision or commitment. Their only concern is making their next election cycle, keeping the lobbyist money flowing into their Swiss bank accounts and catering to the very narrow interests of their own constituencies (as they perceive them).
Just from the NASA perspective, look at how the Apollo program was cut off midstream. They canceled the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle in 2002 when congress decided they wanted the money back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-38
With the military now congress has cut off the funding to the F-22, "while-we-are-building-an-operational-fleet". They canceled the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter in 2004 so they could have money to pay for refurbishing the Vietnam era UH-1 helicopters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAH-66_Comanche
It would suck to work at NASA where you dedicate 5-10 years of your life to a project to have the rug yanked out from under you at the last moment. It is not surprising that there are not long lines of aerospace scientists and engineers at the doors of SpaceX, hoping for the opportunity to have something you worked on actually make it into space.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=766
If you are a programmer, how would you feel if everything you ever did was for naught and was never deployed?
Tisha Hayes