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Elon Musk Shakes Up SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Division By Firing a Bunch of Managers (reuters.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company's growth. Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites. Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX's first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.
The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX's spokeswoman Eva Behrend offered no comment on the matter. Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," one of the sources said. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."
The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX's spokeswoman Eva Behrend offered no comment on the matter. Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk's famously short deadlines. "Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites," one of the sources said. "Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner."
And it takes them AGES to get anything approved and everything goes through 100 hands.
It doesn't come as a surprise that short deadlines and pressure is a massive culture shock.
Unfortunately there is a fairly tight deadline which isn't mandated by spacex but rather by the FCC. The license for the satellite constellation requires them to launch at least half of their satellites within 6 years of approval. SpaceX has applied for an exemption to this rule, but AFAIK it has not been granted. While it seems likely that the FCC will grant them some leeway as long as they make good progress, that still means that they can't afford any excessive delays.
There's a reason you can't pick up a cheap Cessna, and why you have to go through certifications, and why pilots are decrying the use of drones outside of their (heavily restricted) legal limits.
Nobody cares about what happens to your satellite. It's what it crashes into that's important. A rogue / malfunctioning satellite could easily take out anything - and orbits are getting more and more packed every day and just launching 10,000 things up there carelessly will end in disasters that won't just have you go "Oh well, launch another 10,000" but be brought before people with billion-dollar space programs demanding you never be allowed to launch anything ever again.
You've only got to hit something quite unimportant in the same orbit, and you could bankrupt the company overnight. Hit something that you didn't even really "know" was there and you could be looking at militaries (your own, or foreign) breathing down your neck.
Space is a controlled environment. Media stunts like launching cars on joke orbits aren't really compatible with that. We haven't got to the point that we can de-regulate ordinary airspace, so literally the only thing keeping you "safe" up in space from amateur idiots and commercially-produced tat is sheer volume of space. As that narrows, things get more and more stupid and dangerous.
You can't make cars without abiding by manufacturer regulations. You certainly can't build saleable aircraft without a shed-ton more regulation. Just lobbing things up into space isn't a behaviour that will be tolerated for very long once the first mess-up is made.
P.S. It took SpaceX years and dozens and dozens of test landings where they destroyed drone-boats, rockets, broke off their landing legs, abandoned landings to just plunge into the sea etc. before they got a landing that you can coo over. This stuff isn't "easy" and certainly isn't reliable.
Applying the same principle to something that might share an orbit with an component from your rivals that's so expensive that it might cost your company every profit it's ever made (yeah, right) in order to put something equivalent back up there in reparation? That's not "a different mindset". That's "commercial suicide".