[iknowstuff]

The original Elon Musk biography describes how a legacy aerospace engineer joined spacex and was tasked with a part:

> He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’”

[heavyset_go]

This is a terrifying anecdote.

[willis936]

From some perspectives, yes. From others it's not so bad. I love having cover from the top to do engineering and qualification to have better solutions. Normally it's "we don't have time or resources to make it, get back to the spreadsheet mines".

For LEO you can scoot by pretty easily with non-hardened solutions and better systems engineering and software. For deep space you'll need to be more clever.

[Kon-Peki]

> It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell.

https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc... (Page 3)

[wolverine876]

These are self-reported stories by one of the most extreme self-promoters in business. Let's not take it too seriously.

[Kon-Peki]

I wouldn’t take them seriously, except that SpaceX has a full decade of very reliable launch services at a fraction of the cost. You might ask how they did that, and SpaceX says “here are some examples”. It’s not just reusing rockets.

[wolverine876]

> You might ask how they did that, and SpaceX says “here are some examples”.

Right, but why would you believe what they say? I believe they know how to launch rockets, but that doesn't mean they are telling you the reason. They may not want it public, they may want to kiss someone's a-.

[baq]

If there’s any company you should pay attention to when they report successful cost cutting, it's spacex. You can hate or love Musk but Gwynne Shotwell is the real deal there. Not sure how she keeps Elon from blowing the whole business up but somehow she does and quite successfully at that.

If she says you can keep cool whatever needs cooling for 10% of the Boeing price, you’d better believe it.

[wolverine876]

I'd better? Or else what?

That's not persuasive. People make things up all the time, especially stories that show how smart <powerful person> is.

[tazjin]

Consider how many governments signed 8+ figure contracts to develop apps. Why would this kind of waste be any different in other industries? It's humans all the way down ;)

[wredue]

Dude. It’s nowhere near just governments that sign comically inflated contracts.

Anyone dealing with oracle, ibm, sas, hp, Microsoft and hordes of others are not strangers to seeing a $500,000 bill for basically nothing in B2B.

We hear about the government ones cause duh.

[xedrac]

$500k in government is chump change. As ridiculous as some of these business deals are, they are not even on the same planet as government contracts.

[dev_tty01]

Not sure I understand your response. There is a tremendous amount of launch data from several years of launches (and landings) that demonstrate whatever approach to design and manufacture SpaceX is using results in incredibly robust and capable space systems. I think rather than fear, a better response is to see what can be learned from SpaceX and see if it can be applied elsewhere.

[ThrowawayTestr]

You're talking about the $120k price tag right? Considering the reliability of Falcon 9.

[baq]

It is, but for different reasons to different people.

[robocat]

That depends on the validation and QC of their internal engineering. It is just as terrifying to spend USD120000 on a part that might be no better that what you can design&build in-house.

Here's the background:

  There were numerous ways in which SpaceX's strategies diverged from space industry norms, and almost all of them had direct implications for the cost of its launch systems. First, whereas most aerospace companies give their designs to myriad third-party contractors who create the hardware for them, SpaceX produced roughly 80% of its launch hardware inhouse. SpaceX builds its own motherboards and circuits, vibration sensors, radios and more. In most industries vertical integration increases the costs of firms by not enabling them to benefit from competitive bidding between efficient suppliers. In the aerospace industry, however, the entrenchment of norms around using parts specialized for the space industry ("space grade"), and the bureaucratic rules defined by government contractors, had kept supply costs high — very high. SpaceX decided instead to build many of its own parts, or to buy parts not considered "space grade" and modify them to achieve "space grade".For example, rather than paying $50,000 to $100,000 for an industrial-grade radio, SpaceX was able to build its own for $5,000, and shaved 20% of the weight off at the same time.

  SpaceX's willingness to produce their own parts came as a shock to suppliers. For example,Tom Mueller recounts a time when he asked a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve: "They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we're like, 'No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.' They go, 'Good luck with that,' and kind of smirked and left." Mueller's team created the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants. "That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months," Mueller said, "and then they called us back: 'Hey, we're willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?' And we're like, 'No, we're done.' He goes, 'What do you mean you're done?' 'We qualified it. We're done.' And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock." As noted, a big factor driving savings at SpaceX is that it often builds its components out of readily available consumer electronics rather than equipment alreadydeemed "space grade" by the rest of the industry. Twenty years ago "space grade" equipment would have had far superior performance characteristics compared to consumer electronics, but today that is no longer the case-standard electronics can now compete with more expensive, specialized gear. For example, at one point SpaceX needed an actuator that would steer the second stage of the Falcon 1. The job fell to engineer Steve Davis to find the important part, and since he had never built a part like that before he sought out suppliers who could make it for them. Their quoted price for the device was $120,000. As Davis recalls, "Elon laughed. He said, 'That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.'"20 Davis ended up designing an actuator that cost $3,900. Another example is provided by the computers that provide avionics for a rocket. Traditionally NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory bought expensive, specially toughened computers that cost over $10 million each to operate its rockets. Musk told engineer Kevin Watson that he wanted the bulk of the computer systems for Falcon 1 and Dragon to cost no more than $10,000. Watson was floored,noting, "In traditional aerospace, it would cost you more than ten thousand dollars just for the food at a meeting to discuss the cost of the avionics."21 Watson was inspired by the challenge, however, and ended up creating a fully redundant avionics platform that used a mix of off-the-shelf computer parts and in-house components for just over $10,000. That same system was then also adapted for use in the Falcon 9.

About the actuator:

  Steve Davis, the twenty second hire of SpaceX, needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon1. He went to find some suppliers and got a quote a $120,000. “Elon laughed”. Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator and the final actuator approved by Musk ended up costing $3900.

Seems like they don't include the engineering time in the part cost calculations - so cheating a bit!

I've experienced building something in-house that is far better than what you could otherwise get. Back in the 00's I wrote a JavaScript framework because the existing ones were all crappy in a variety of ways. Even as a one-person effort (and I'm no 10x engineer) I could write something that was wayyy better in a bunch of important ways (albeit not pretty enough design). My work was engineered better than the open source and commercial frameworks that I evaluated/used. Better loading, better recovery from network and other errors, better memory behaviour, better size, better speed, better integration, better diagnostics, better browser support, better user interface, customised for our needs. It did exactly what we needed for our project and mostly worked flawlessly.

[wolverine876]

I'm sure Musk's biography says lots of things. Do you still take it a face value?

[iknowstuff]

I see the results of spacex’s work. Are you blind?

[wolverine876]

That's got nothing to do with the story. Maybe people can have different perspectives than you.