I thought this was an absolutely masterful explanation of engineering design thinking. If I may, I would also like to add to this list another thing he mentioned: "each requirement must have a name attached to it."
I believe he was referring to the first step. And "Name" was really "a person" as opposed to "a department." This was his way of saying DRI all the way down to each individual requirements, to force someone to be accountable for it. His example was that SpaceX interns previously listed requirements, that were later assigned to a department (e.g. avionics), and when prompted, no one in that department really knew why it was there.
* the quip about people spending a lot of time to optimize something unnecessary,
* the quip that you must be wary about recommendations made by smart people, because you will tend to trust smart people too much and they can still make mistakes.
Also leadership through humbleness and vulnerability: "I myself made that mistake, I followed the process exactly backwards and wasted a lot of time."
Also leadership by storytelling. Don't say what you want, tell a story that shows people what you want, so they can envision themselves doing what you want.
"If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted."
I am struggling to understand this one.
Is he saying that you should remove parts on a routine basis, like a "remove parts/processes" meeting every month and then re-adding them back in once you find they're needed.
Or is he saying when you get a list of requirements, remove parts/processes related to those requirements and then re-add them once you find they're needed?
He’s talking about physical parts and manufacturing processes. For example laser etching a part number might might not be worth it. If nobody can justify why it’s needed then why not skip it.
> Musk overviewed his five step engineering process, which must be completed in order:
> 1. Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if someone who is smart gives them the requirements, as one may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”
> 2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.
> 3. Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.
> 4. Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”
> 5. Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.
I remember watching "Everyday Astronaut" live with less than 1000 other people. Today, the numbers are over 100K. He is a great guy, who is very interested in and passionate about everything around space exploration and his articles and videos go very deep, the same for answering questions live. Only if more YouTubers were like him.
Shouldn't they have been wearing helmets when filming that segment? It was a quite busy work site with high altitude work (so a risk of dropping tools etc).
In the beginning of the video they were high up and I feared Elon could fall to his death and that would bring "all of human's progress to a halt". They not only work 24 hours and 7 days a week (In 12 hour shifts: 3 days and 4 days in a row, then 3/4 days off), but they also rush things, with tight deadlines, ofc. top-notch workers/engineers, but still. No fatalities while working like this (I googled it the other day) - It all looks dangerous.
He is very proud of it in the video, combing through it with his hand all the time. Especially with his current new hair-style: Short on the sides, long on the back and top - a rebell, cyberpunk, cybertruck-t-shirt on.
He looks great,... today. Gone are the years where he was bullied keeping his nose in the books and -though coming from a modelling-family (his mother)- being (looking) rather nerdy/"average"... a bit sleepy (when he was younger), going from a "nerdy" looking teenager to losing his front-hair as a young man.
I envy people that can fix their appearance with a beauty surgery. Most can't and of those that try, a lot do not look so good afterwards.
I was surprised how Elon talked "in depth" about technology and engineering in this video with Tim, since Elon often uses relatively simple things to talk about to reach the masses, like "rockets must be fully reusable", "we need sustainable transportation (and they are electric cars)", etc. Elon likes to use simple language and paint big pictures. But he (and his team) must have evaluated thousands of interdependent complex factors and found the one solution (e.g. Methane-propelled Starship) before reaching to these simple "big pictures" (which he then likes to talk about and present to the public) and ofc. it's the right thing to do and there is nothing wrong with it.
Elon is the new Steve Jobs, informing and educating us about the future, just like Steve did it. This time with cars and space exploration, which is just "next" (Steve Jobs informed us about the iPod and the iPhone). When Steve wiped out Nokia with the iPhone, I thought that someone from Silicon Valley would do the same for cars and there are a couple of contenders now with Tesla leading. But it's a big market with a lot of companies, and instead of wiping one out, there are just many suffering now - more or less, or still doing fine.
Though there are very much details, which he is aware of and trading/evaluating... at least with his engineers and which he does in this video, which is nice, refreshing and new information (for us and from him).
I really like Tim Dodd, though he comes from a background of "I wasn't good at school and am still excited and knowledgeable about rockets today [and so can you(everyone)]", he is sometimes over-explaining simple things imho. I have also the feeling that Tim Dodd might be a sub-par interview partner for Elon in this video, but Elon manages it fine and I think he likes Tim for everything he achieved despite not having an academic background.
Tim Dodd reminds me of Andy Weir. They're both trying to explain things that are fairly complicated to an audience which is interested but might be starting from zero. That's actually really hard to do and then they add to the degree of difficulty by not being afraid to release the minimum viable product to that end.
For me it makes both of them fun to watch because you can see them getting better. As a novelist Weir is - in my opinion - improving his craft with each novel. Same with Dodd when it comes to the videos he's making. Both really impress me.
I have a bet with a friend that James Cameron will be one of the first private citizens to go to the moon, and that he will bring an IMAX camera to fund the trip.
> Musk’s target price is essentially a rounding error compared to the budgets of Gravity or The Martian.
Do we even know Musk's target price for a return-trip to the moon? It's very hard to extrapolate from the $10/kg figure ($1M/launch) that keeps getting quoted, as a return-trip to the moon without discarding a Starship (which will blow up the cost enormously) will involve a lot of launches. Even the HLS architecture, which leaves Starship stranded in lunar orbit and uses Orion to get the astronauts back, needs 10 launches.
Even if we're very generous and assume 20 launches at $1M/launch, that's ~20% of the budget of these movies. But that's very aspirational: for HLS, which is already ambitious, NASA paid $2.89B for development & 2 launches. If we assume 80% is development, you're still looking at $289M per trip.
Roughly, I think his plan for a Mars ticket (move there, optionally come back later) is the price of a modest home in California, say $300-500k or something. And a ticket from like London to Singapore on the E2E Starship idea would be about business class prices today, which I don't know, but let's guess $10k.
So I think using this silly method, I would personally expect the price of a moon round trip to be maybe $100k. That's just market-pricing guesses though, I do not know what the costs of such a trip would actually be. But again, Elon does like to set a price target for the public and then do the engineering and production required to meet that target, so I would be surprised to see something less than an E2E hop or more than a Mars ticket, to go to the Moon and come back.
"The privately chartered flight will be commanded, funded and led by 38-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman, and aim to support St Jude Children's Research Hospital."
Um. Wow. Lots odd there. How can a charted flight be "commanded"? Are they renting the spacecraft or chartering a flight? How does this support the hospital? Is this a stunt to gather donations? I applaud billionaires who do cool stuff. I say have fun. But I don't feel any urge to send money. Now if he did something dangerous and/or humiliating in the style of Comic Relief, then I'd think about donating. How much of my [brother's] netflix subscription is paying for this flight?
Richard Branson driving a Ferrari while asking for money? No. Richard Branson ice bucket challenge ever hour until the hospital gets a new MRI machine? Sign me up.
I looked into this previously, so Jared Isaacman not only is a billionaire from a payments gateway startup he founded, he also is the biggest private owner of military jets and owns a company that actually trains pilots for the USAF, USNavy and foreign airforces. He is a very accomplished pilot from what I gather. (He's 38 btw, so kudos to him)
So, while the Dragon capsule is autonomous there is some 'commanding' that is needed to be able to fly the thing, especially if some of the autonomous features fail - he has been having astronaut training for that and such is 'commanding' the vessel.
How does this support the hospital?
He sold one of the tickets for a lot of money, I think it was to the guy who is listed as an Air Force vet but is actually a data scientist I believe.
Look, he has to donate and generate a large chunk of cash to charity - it's fair optics, esp given the backlash Jeff Bezos had for not using his wealth philanthropically. Here the peanut gallery, we can't have it both ways either we pop at billionaires using their private wealth to go into space or we celebrate the ones who do something for a good cause..?
He bought a second ticket for a (former) St Jude patient who survived (to eventually become a nurse at St Jude).
She'll be the "medical officer", which I'm not sure is a civilian title or crew one.
Lots of "survivors can do anything" PR, plus there's an angle that space x is making space travel safe/common enough that you don't need to be medically perfect to qualify (she still has some sort of prosthesis from her treatment).
It's a pretty brilliant PR campaign all around.
She'll also become the youngest person ever to fly to space.
From what I remember a donation to the hospital made you enter the pool from which a winner for a seat on the flight was drawn. The planned spaceflight is called "Inspiration 4" and has a Wikipedia entry already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspiration4
Ah, that flight. It is a purchased flight. My understanding is that while they can throw the word "commander" and "pilot" around, that this will be a purely automated/ground-controlled exercise.
Indeed, even though that has not been that different on the crew rotation flights to ISS. Doug Hurley (iirc - might have been Bob Behnken instead?) got to fly Crew Dragon manually during the first crewed mission "Demo 2" but the spacecraft is meant to bring people where they should be all by itself (and with help from ground control).
The ISS is a special case. That requires a pilot who can take manual control should the docking system go wrong. A stuck jet on approach could shatter the station and so you need someone who can take over and make very fast avoidance decisions. The recent incident with a docked module was a huge reminder of those dangers.
>The ISS is a special case. That requires a pilot who can take manual control should the docking system go wrong.
Yes, but the criteria for being that pilot has changed. Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur were Crew-2's commander and pilot. NASA hired both as mission specialists; neither would ever have been hired as shuttle pilots, as they don't have high-performance jet pilot experience (100% a requirement since NASA Astronaut Group 2) and neither went to test pilot school (not always a requirement, but pretty close to being so). I don't see any mention of fixed-wing flight experience in Kimbrough's NASA biography, something many mission specialists do have on their own.
SpaceX has enough confidence in its systems to have people like Kimbrough and McArthur piloting spacecraft, which is a testament to their training and SpaceX's fly-by-wire systems. But the piloting they do is very simplified to what shuttle and previous NASA spacecraft required.
When was the last time a crew that orbited earth were all first timers?
I think all of the SpaceX launches so far have been almost all experienced people who have ridden on the shuttle or soyuz. I remember being amazed that we had such a deep pool of experienced astronauts.
> When was the last time a crew that orbited earth were all first timers?
Shenzhou 7 in September 2008.
The Russians did it last in April (launch) and October (landing) 2008, while for the US you have to go back all the way to the second Shuttle flight in 1981.
>Totally makes sense why we'd basically always want someone who has done the trip before. I wonder if that was actually the thought process?
Yes. Besides the shuttle flight denvercoder9 mentioned,[1] there was one Skylab mission with all-rookie astronauts, and a few Gemini two-man flights. So one shuttle flight out of 135, and about four other NASA missions before that. (Obviously I'm excluding the six Mercury one-man flights that were by definition flown by rookies.) NASA always prefers having the commander (the actual pilot), at least, to have flown in space before. The upcoming Crew-3 is unusual in having a rookie commander, but at least the pilot (i.e., copilot) has flown in space before.
This is why NASA has always chosen people with very high-performance aircraft experience as pilot astronauts; it's the best known way to predict beforehand how someone will do at piloting spacecraft, an inherently dangerous and high-stress environment with complex tasks.
Most of the recent news coverage over the "Mercury 13" was nonsense, but especially the stuff about how the women who participated in that endeavor were "trained as NASA astronauts" or "qualified as NASA astronauts". NASA didn't restrict the selection process for the Mercury 7 to exclude women, but to select the best from the US's pool of active-duty military fixed-wing pilots who had graduated from test pilot school. Yes, no women had attended test pilot schools or flew combat military aircraft, but neither did the vast majority of its soldiers, military officers, or even military pilot officers. (Army, too. There has never been a US Army pilot astronaut,[2] and the first Army mission specialists wasn't selected until 1978.)
[1] And even here, Joe Engle was a NASA rookie but had flown to space on the X-15
[2] The most unrealistic part of I Dream of Jeannie is Roger Healey as a 1960s NASA astronaut who is an Army officer
What I've been surprised about is that Elon isn't going on either this mission or just one of his own seeing as SpaceX could presumably have two commercial flights.
Given the 'length comparison games' that Branson and Bezos have been up to with their 'near space' escapades it's a massive F U for Elon to do a trip like this which will actually be one of the furthest distances humans have gone from Earth since the moon landings (the orbit is higher than low-earth orbit where the ISS and Chinese space stations are). There's no question these people will become fully fledged astronauts.
I was wondering if shareholder issues and risk could be the problem - but it's not like Elon seems to care about that and Elon is already saying he's going on Virgin Galactic anyway.
Elon, Grimes and two friends going up on a Dragon X capsule for 3 days would be a hoot.
I'm not sure he cares to be honest. Why would he? His goal is to have humans populating the universe, strapping himself to a rocket for an ego trip would be a rather pointless risk.
I'd say the fact that his company has absolutely destroyed both competitors to date wins any dick waving contest around "but I personally went to space first". I'm not even an Elon fan, and I think he's got a million character flaws, but he seems to be sticking true to the purpose of space-x and tesla and neither one is about bragging to his rich friends with a "LOOK AT ME!".
He might care because he wants to go to Mars and so presumably it's totally reasonable to assume he might have the opportunity to go to space more than once. He might want to do a 3 day tour of the Earth as the beginning of that.
He might just because he's the kind of guy who pretty much makes loads of his decision 'because he can'. Plaid? Model's S 3 X Y (sexy)? acceleration speeds that are almost unsafe for normal drivers to be handling? A lot of his decisions are outside the norm, which is why (some of us) love him.
I think the explanation is simple. Musk is a notorious workaholic and does not want to leave Boca Chica at this stage of Starship development. The activity at Starbase is frantic right now and will likely be frantic for some months to come.
This is exactly right. He could not imagine delaying the development of Starship for the ~week it would take him to train for, orient on, and fly the mission. It would be a huge distraction for him and everyone in the company. Once the Starship trips are normal, operational, and for sale, my bet is he'll take a jog around orbit.
Unlike Blue Origin or Virgin Atlantic SpaceX is not an amusement ride. He doesn't need to prove anything, because he isn't looking for passengers that would pay $250k for a 10 minute ride.
and since there are 4 people, it ends up being only $11.5k per minute per person.... cheaper per minute than Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic's amusement park rides
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw