Commenters credit Musk's part-elimination drive for cost cuts
6 Sep 18 7:19 PM · 5d ago · 4 comments · 1 source · development 6 of 6
Hacker News commenters, citing Isaacson's Musk biography, argue that Musk's habit of challenging the necessity of every component, combined with vertical integration, explains much of the cost and complexity reduction seen across Raptor versions.
“This is how he managed to reduce the costs by 90%.”
WalterBright
Elon Musk SpaceX CEO
Tory Bruno Then-CEO of United Launch Alliance
Gwynne Shotwell SpaceX presidentSpaceX Company
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What people said 5 voices · best of 6 · verbatim
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> According to Isaacson's biographyIsaacson’s “biographies” are glorified puff pieces. Musk is as unrecognizable in his as Jobs was in his.Both Tesla and SpaceX had teams keeping Musk busy on bs just so that the engineering teams could do their work.The second he took control, we got the cybertruck and the starship, the worse products both…
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>"According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines."This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reasons that cars are such an amazing value. It seems like Musk's remarkable ability to achieve cost reductions (at least in the…
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Slight aside, he also has driven capability that was challenging to justify existence for, and was later removed re: Dragon 2 propulsive landing via SuperDracos, landing legs, and the ballast sled. I'm sure the Dragonfly programs matured their abort programs, but surely, that was a ton of time and effort wasted.You win some, you lose some.
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It’s extremely premature to celebrate something which hasn’t been shown to work in its intended application, nor at the original specs.
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I've been inspired by that to refactor my code so that function parameters are minimized (many pass TMI).
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