David Senra

But each came after achieving partial objectives, such as clearing the pad, passing the max queue, reaching near orbital velocity.

Then finally, the famous catch of the super heavy booster, which is the equivalent of catching a 20-story building that's falling from the edge of space.

Each subsequent flight incorporated design changes based on telemetry from the previous one.

Where traditional aerospace might take years to go from flight anomaly to design change, SpaceX was doing it in between flights.

Next subheading, have a high production rate.

Iteration only works if you can afford many attempts.

This is where SpaceX's hardware-rich approach becomes essential.

This is what Elon says about this.

A high production rate solves many ills.

He has said this repeatedly.

He continues.

Any given technology development is how many iterations do you have and what's your time and progress between iterations.

So if you have a high production rate, you can have a lot of iterations.

You can try a lot of different things.

If you have a small number of engines, then you have to be much more conservative because you can't risk blowing them up.

SpaceX builds many cheaper prototypes, hardware-rich fleets of test articles.

They'd rather have 10 rough versions to blow up than one polished version they're afraid to break.

This can lead to specific design decisions like using stainless steel for Starship, which is cheap, easy to weld, and can be welded into a tent, by the way, instead of carbon fiber, which is expensive and requires giant autoclaves.

Vertical integration really helps enable this.

When you own the factory, you can build fast without waiting on vendors.