Everyday Astronaut
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2025
17:06 · 3.2M views · Oct 1, 2019
Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut talks with Elon Musk right after Musk's 2019 Starship presentation. Musk discusses Starship's design, why SpaceX favors conventional engines over aerospikes, and how deleting parts and processes speeds up development.
HN commenters cite it as evidence of Musk's engineering thinking, on questioning requirements, organizational errors mirroring product errors, and Conway's Law, and to argue about whether he is a strong engineer.
14 comments from Hacker News
The Everyday Astronaut had a great interview with Elon Musk after the Starship presentation a few days ago. They spent a bit of time talking about how much progress the team had made in very little time, and Musk's take was that it took them an awful long time to finally ask the right questions - years. Once they had formulated exactly what they were trying to do and what the actual relevant constraints were, finding the right solutions and making very rapid progress was actually not all that complicated. He talked about the tendency really good engineers have to spend a lot of effort optimising the design of things that shouldn't be there at all. Finally he banged on hard about always questioning your design constraints. He pointed out that if you get given some design constraints by another team, you should always consider their validity since it;s very unlikely they are optimal. The converse assumption would be that they are always perfect, so looking at it that way there's no reason you should assume they are right from the start. For anyone who worries about the sunk cost fallacy, bear in mind it was only about a year ago they decided to throw away all the investment they'd put into building a composite body, including a huge main body tool. this video
Agreed! It's also worth highlighting the bit where he asks Elon Musk: this video I've internally asked this question so many times, like, guys, shouldn't we maybe do an aerospike? Musk focused on the high combustion efficiency of traditional combustion chambers, combined with the high efficiency of having two stages, as the reason why they won out. Jettisoning irrelevant fuel-containing mass as you go is great for efficiency and as a bonus it makes it easy to put sea-level-optimized nozzles on the bottom stage and vacuum-optimized nozzles on the top stage.
Here's an interesting interview the author did with Elon Musk: this video Fun to see how interested Elon is with the engineering of rockets, looks like he could talk for days if he had the time.
> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." this video He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal constraints. But, my take was that there needs to be a LOT of communication between departments and an ongoing debate between them as well. Edit: The more that I think about it... This might a big reason why Musk companies defy the odds, and why it is so difficult for incumbents to catch up. The over the air updates of Tesla are a good example of hardware & software departments working together to make something very difficult to compete with (if you're a regular old school siloed company).
> water-fueled space transport After watching an Elon Musk interview in front of his starship he was saying - If anyone can show us that aerospikes are the way to go then please, do it. It'll be a gift. this video This other company Arca has a 25-video series starting 2 years ago about their journey to build a hydrogen/oxygen (water) areospike engine. Really worth the watch. Skip to the last videos if you want to see live engine tests. [LINK]