David Senra

The cultural expectation is honesty about what's not working and relentless effort to fix it.

Meme number three, scrappiness.

Cost-sensitive resourcefulness over bureaucratic process.

This goes hand in hand with the low-cost provider mentality.

SpaceX's replacement for NASA's Heritage docking system was prototyped with bike shocks and catalog parts.

Crude prototypes let you test ideas before committing to expensive development.

The scrappy approach extends everywhere.

Reuse test hardware, hacking tools together, building ground support equipment from industrial components instead of aerospace-grade systems.

Small teams build end-to-end instead of handing off between specialized groups.

Engineers are expected to design, build, and test what they own.

Elon calls the alternative ivory tower engineering.

Design something, throw it over the wall, and let someone else figure out how to actually make it.

At SpaceX, the person who drew the bracket is the person who welds it.

Meme number four, question requirements.

Every constraint, customer, regulatory, internal, is treated as a hypothesis to interrogate, not a fact to accept.

This is the embodiment of first principle thinking.

Here's an example.

Falcon 9's grid fins were originally designed to fold like traditional aerospace grid fins.

The folding mechanism reduced drag during ascent, which seemed obviously necessary.

SpaceX questioned whether it was worth the mass and complexity.