Everyday Astronaut
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2021–2024
53:17 · 7.1M views · Aug 3, 2021
Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.
HN cites it as evidence of Musk's hands-on engineering depth and for his advice to question requirements and not optimize things that should not exist.
20 comments from Hacker News
Everyday Astronaut's walk and talk with Elon Musk where he attempts to explain his management process, starts at 13:30 of part 1: this video Here's a rough summary: 1. Make requirements less dumb. 2. Delete part or process steps. If you're not occasionally adding things back (he says 10%) (ideally in improved versions), you're not removing things often enough. 3. Simplify, optimize, solve. Everyone's trained to jump to this because the educational process requires you to answer a question as posed, when often the question is dumb and shouldn't be dealt with as-stated. 4. Accelerate process 5. Automate Those tend to blur together at the edges. I'm sure if he formalized this and wrote it down for mass consumption it'd be presented differently, but it's his current mental model. Process testing - remove unnecessary in-process testing after production line debugging is done. Obviously there are nuances, he's not saying to do no in-process testing, but rather to remove testing which was intended to reveal information once that's already been collected and addressed. He cautions about false positives from in-process testing, and notes most testing can be done end of line with acceptable results. Finally, it's important to understand the context. The part about part/step deletion in particular, when things get added back 10% of the time, is not appropriate for all development processes. That would have to be adjusted a the specific product and market objective.
If I had to choose between network television and YouTube, I would choose YouTube every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I mean, I enjoy Seinfeld too, but on the whole YouTube is both more entertaining and vastly more useful and educational than network television. Not because the content has the highest production values, but because the content matches my interests and needs. That's the true power of targeted advertising. It allows creators to focus on niches that can't be served by content produced for a mass audience. Even large 'niches' get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for network television. Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is fine for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can. And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist. [1] Leno: [LINK] [2] Dodd: this video
This short video clip quickly makes evident why SpaceX has become so dominant, now sending more than 90% of all global cargo to orbit every year. In short: Musk is operating from first principles, questioning everything from the ground up, willing to try things that others are unwilling to consider or have not even thought of before -- there are no sacred cows. The result is that SpaceX is leaving conventionally run competitors saddled with increasingly outdated, higher cost, less scalable systems and processes. Whenever I watch interviews of other CEOs of other space exploration companies (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Allience, etc.) or CEOs of other satellite internet service providers (Viasat, Eutelsat OneWeb, Hughesnet, etc.), I come away with the sense they're so far behind they are not even properly competing against SpaceX. --- PS. If you enjoyed this video clip, you'll also want to watch Musk's tour of Starbase: this video [LINK]
Maybe I'm a particularly dull engineer, but I've taken several aspects of personal advice from what he has said in interviews (the especially technical ones, not the ones aimed at a mass audience where he repeats his standard canned speech) and found them useful for myself personally. Here's two examples I've found particularly insightful that shows he has some ability to talk about engineering details. This example where he talks about the choice of steel for Starship as opposed to any other metal, something that would be an otherwise unsual choice: [LINK] This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his "five step process" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): this video
Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept. 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, "your question is dumb", or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. this video