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.'"

Comments

Minimal?

[grommit]

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?

No Sh!@

[DerekLyons]

"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.

Hopefully...

[Celeste R]

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.

747 assembly plant?

[oddaddresstrap]

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/

Re:A comapny with a vision

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Government Turf?

[flyingfsck]

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.

Re:Government Turf?

[jollyreaper]

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.

By that logic, Google circa 1999 was just another computer company. The key difference I think is a younger company with less entrenched bureaucracy. It seems inevitable that companies will grow, expand, and become bureaucratic in time. Our defense conglomerates were once innovative and cutting edge but you get corporate mediocrity infecting any mature company. Boeing built the B-17 on spec because they felt the Army Air Corps would need it, there wasn't a contract. Think something like that would happen today? I think a part of this is the benign dictatorship of the company founder at work. This sort of influence can make or break companies to be true but it's certainly not going to be seen in risk-adverse corporate environments.

Google probably won't be immune to this sort of thing. Give it another 30 years and the founders will retire, then the management will be by consensus with corporate types who really don't understand the business and technology trying to make the safest decisions possible to keep the gravy train going. Everything will be decision by committee and there will be enough red tape to stifle the brightest minds they can hire, snuffing out anything smacking of vision and innovation. That's what we're seeing at Microsoft right now. The only question is how long this sort of shambling, zombie-like existence can be maintained before the rotting skull is smashed in. With the American car companies, I'd say the rot set in by the 60's but wasn't fully apparent until the 80's when the Japanese started eating their lunches. After that point, the only question was how long it would take for them to fail. Turns out it was still a damned long time.