David Senra

Standardization allowed the volume to make that control profitable.

Without all three, the system breaks.

They work together so that each flight makes the next one cheaper.

What does this sound like?

A flywheel.

Lower costs enable lower prices, which capture market share, which increases volume, which drives costs lower still.

The incumbents understood this too late.

They optimize components locally.

Better engines, lighter materials, incremental gains.

SpaceX optimized the system for cost, accepting component-level compromises for system-level dominance.

This flywheel relies on high volume.

Competitors couldn't even imagine there was even a market for so many rockets.

And they weren't willing to take the risk of spending all the money just to find out.

In a world where atoms are cheap and processes expensive, the real innovation was not a single engine or material, but the decision to redesign the entire stack around the economics of cost.

But a cost target doesn't build itself.

first principle strategy says what to build it doesn't say how to build it without catastrophic mistakes along the way on to the next subheading the engineering if the strategy is to rethink everything from first principles how do you actually execute that without major consequential failures the standard answer is to analyze exhaustively before building so he's going to describe the standard answer and i love how he talks about spacex literally inverted this

Traditional aerospace follows this path religiously.

A NASA report on the Commercial Crew Program noted that Boeing utilizes a well-established systems engineering methodology targeted at an initial investment in engineering studies and analysis to mature the system design prior to building and testing.

Must be really fun to read these kind of reports.

Plan extensively, freeze requirements early, minimize test failures.