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]

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.

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.

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).

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