Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.