A conversation with Elon Musk about Starship

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. [VIDEO]

Elon Musk is also a huge fan of Douglas Adams, as he mentioned again in his latest interview with Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut: [VIDEO]

> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." [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).

Here's an interesting interview the author did with Elon Musk: [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.

In the end of this video [VIDEO] he is more relaxed that I have ever seen. I don't think there is any acting in his presentations

Thanks, you're right. At the end, when he's talking geek-to-geek - so to speak - his thought process and speech seem much more aligned. [VIDEO]

Also Gmail 1 day for the first prototype. An an aside I found Musk interesting talking about how they get the Starship type projects to progress quickly: [VIDEO] >And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to delete parts and processes. etc

Agreed! It's also worth highlighting the bit where he asks Elon Musk: [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.

> 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. [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]

Elon said it well in an interview regarding Starship development, “most common problem in engineering is optimizing something that shouldn’t have been built in the first place”, [VIDEO] Broaden your view. You are not put on earth to write great code, but to solve real world problems. Software development is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Reminds me of this interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about Conway's Law and how they mitigate it at SpaceX: [VIDEO] It's very hard to design an efficient system when the people writing the requirements and the people implementing them don't really understand or talk to each other.

In Tim's interview with Elon Musk, Elon mentioned[1] low combustion efficiency as one of the major disadvantages of aerospike engines compared to the more traditional bell nozzles used on Raptor. I wonder if Pangea has done anything in an attempt to solve that problem. [1]: [VIDEO]

He seems to combine a number of skills. Everyone seems to agree he's a good salesman and fundraiser. And he hires good people. But contrary to many peoples view I think he's a good manager and engineer. You can see him on video here talking about getting Starship done and judge for yourself [VIDEO]

If you see video of him talking about spacex he's obviously reasonably smart eg. [VIDEO] In fact in that video from minute 1-7 you can pretty much see how he beats the likes of Boeing and gets stuff out faster and cheaper than NASA. It's hard to say - ah that's a good idea, that's how he beats the other rocket scientist guys and then argue he's stupid. At least when it comes to rockets. Politics I'm less convinced.