After years of acceleration, has SpaceX finally reached its speed limit?

SpaceX has long had a hard-charging culture. Is it now charging too hard?

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[ddesideria]

You see, motivation is very important in doing any jobs. And you know what destroys a lot of motivation? ... yes, you know

 

[Hacker Uno]

The problem is obvious: Musk is too busy playing Prime Minister to King Trump.

 

[Lars A. Gundersen]

Or maybe, when you realize your boss is hellbent on destroying the fabric of society, it just puts a damper on things and you just stop striving for excellence?

 

[Shitpostradamus]

People excel for leaders who are excellent, or who they can believe are excellent. That illusion is gone for good people, and the only ones who still believe in musk are clearly not able to pick up the slack.

 

[shawnce]

Wooden shoes come to mind as a potential factor.

 

[grimwall]

I don't know, Musk not paying attention to SpaceX might be a good thing, saner minds can probably handle these kind of issues better.

 

[Solidstate89]

The nazis also had a big problem trying to create a successor to the V2 rocket.

 

[ampersandroo]

But it is also flying circles around its competition.

Ellipses, surely?

/dadjoke

 

[jonah]

Which is it?

Is Musk a distraction for SpaceX, as many were claiming six or twelve months ago, and having his attention elsewhere was good because it removed that distraction?

Or is he important to SpaceX's success?

Don't get me wrong, I think the guy should hop onto that next Starship flight and take her out for a spin, but the cognitive dissonance in this area has been strong lately.

 

[Not_an_IT_guy]

I agree with the above posters. SpaceX has a culture of hiring young, idealistic engineers and pushing them to burnout. Thing about idealists is that they are more vulnerable to things that affect that idealism.

We thought Elon was the Henry Ford of our generation. It turns out he is the Henry Ford of our generation.

 

[Smartyflix]

Over the years, a number of astute people have asked the question, "Couldn't it be dangerous if SpaceX was the only company capable of providing access to space?" It seems we're well on our path to finding out an answer to that question, especially with the CEO of SpaceX currently working to sabotage all other players and agencies in the space.

 

[ThatEffer]

I think the company would perform better if the CEO was hardcoring in the office at least 5 days a week. Maybe he should type up a bulleted list of five things he accomplished last week so that it can be fed into GrokHR and then it will decide whether he should still have a job or not.

 

[LordJeanliness]

No discussion on the impact that Musk's activities may have had on their hiring and retention of qualified, motivated individuals?

A "relentless culture" can give good results if the individuals doing the actual work are strongly motivated to put their everything into it. It does not work if those people don't believe in the work they're doing. They will slow down, do shoddier work, or quit.

 

[TehRoot]

It's interesting that there's no mention that employees might be affected by that their effective company president/leader (all credit to gwynne where due, ofc) and his seemingly accelerating slip into drug use and detachment from reality

Goal motivation only takes you so far if your effective company spokesperson/leader/etc. is losing his grip on reality

No mention that this also might effect who is drawn to work at the company and the types of people those are....are we hiring the best of the best? are we hiring people drawn to elon companies for other reasons? I see very little interest in working at spacex besides trying to pipeline new/young engineers into the meatgrinder.

 

[EvolvedMonkey]

They’ve been lucky to date on technical issues, and the company culture hasn’t been detrimental. Now the question is if they can pivot to deal with these issues effectively; or if the executive leadership just apply the same mentality but push harder and more aggressively on their engineers. Both approaches will ultimately yield results technically, so at present I wouldn’t expect any social life if you’re a SpaceX engineer for next 3 months.

 

[torp]

I thought the reason SpaceX was doing so well was that Musk isn't involved in running it.

 

[randomuser42]

The problem is obvious: Musk is too busy playing Prime Minister to King Trump.

Honestly that gives him too much personal credit.

 

[numerobis]

You see, motivation is very important in doing any jobs. And you know what destroys a lot of motivation? ... yes, you know

There's a straight arm from the heart to a fair chunk of demotivation.

 

[Talion]

The nazis also had a big problem trying to create a successor to the V2 rocket.

Did they?

Pretty sure they just had a slight delay while relocating across the Atlantic…

 

[mangoslice]

I appreciate the one paragraph acknowledging Musk’s… involvement in US politics. That’s (I think) the most Eric has written about Musk’s other “ventures” recently.

You cannot only take the parts of Musk that you like and ignore the rest. above comments have said it well. I, for one, cannot hold my nose and root for SpaceX’s success, and I’m sure at least a portion of its workforce feels the same.

 

[Erbium68]

The problem is obvious: Musk is too busy playing Prime Minister to King Trump.

The original title of the Prime Minister was First Lord of the Treasury.
But he could only keep the job with the consent of the elected representatives, not the King.

 

[Excvbgi89765]

Not sure what the root cause is, but I hope they continue to fail until they rid themselves of Elon Musk.

 

[Dioptase]

I don't mean to get too technical here, but has SpaceX considered is could be a combination of karma and bad juju?

 

[numerobis]

On February 1, a second stage deorbit burn failed after a Starlink launch. This led to propellant tanks from the stage crashing into western Poland, causing property damage but harming no one.

Musk firing shots at Western Poland, specifically, after his enthusiastic gesture and other such political dealings is just way too on the nose. I'm certain it was unintentional, but the symbolism is freaky nonetheless.

 

[Erbium68]

I agree with the above posters. SpaceX has a culture of hiring young, idealistic engineers and pushing them to burnout. Thing about idealists is that they are more vulnerable to things that affect that idealism.

We thought Elon was the Henry Ford of our generation. It turns out he is the Henry Ford of our generation.

This is unfair, he hasn't written an anti-Semitic book. Yet.

 

[EricBerger]

No discussion on the impact that Musk's activities may have had on their hiring and retention of qualified, motivated individuals?

It's a good question, but I haven't seen any data (or even qualitative information) to say one way or the other. Most of the people I know at SpaceX seem reasonably happy with their jobs, and jobs are a little more difficult to come by with some of the recent layoffs in the aerospace sector. On the other hand, yeah, you would think some of them would be at least uncomfortable with what is happening.

 

[numerobis]

This is unfair, he hasn't written an anti-Semitic book. Yet.

He's posted enough on twitter, which is what the cool kids do these days.

 

[MichalH]

Karma.

 

[SinclairZX81]

It strikes me that the back-to-back failures of Starship, both involving harmonic resonance issues in the feedlines of the Block 2 Ship, are probably related to the "stretch" the Ship received in this latest iteration. The Block 1 Ship didn't suffer this issue.

The lengthened feed pipes, in their current vacuum-jacketed configuration, are resonating at some harmonic of the vibration from either the sea-level Raptor engines or the R-VAC vacuum-optimized engines. The fact that it wasn't revealed by the extended ground-fire of the latest Ship (Flight 8) probably had the vibrations damped by virtue of the ship being bolted to the test stand. Just dumb bad luck on both counts.

They need to either change the resonant frequency of the feedlines or somehow damp or change the vibration of the engines that's exciting that frequency. The former seems more easily done, but we'll see what they end up doing.

 

[The Real Blastdoor]

The more SpaceX rockets blow up, the less Musk is worth. The lower Tesla sales, the less Musk is worth. The fewer people who go on X, the less Musk is worth.

The less Musk is worth, the less power he has to damage the country.

SpaceX rockets blowing up == good for America.

 

[Embattle]

If the space programs teach us anything then it teaches us the effort to get anything in to space and then return it to earth is immensely difficult, the kind of bluster and bullshit that surrounds tech bros attitude to everything else won't improve the situation.

 

[numerobis]

The more SpaceX rockets blow up, the less Musk is worth. The lower Tesla sales, the less Musk is worth. The fewer people who go on X, the less Musk is worth.

The less Musk is worth, the less power he has to damage the country.

SpaceX rockets blowing up == good for America.

TSLA is down more than 10% today, nearly 40% YTD. It is now below where it was in the days before the election.

 

[Sajuuk]

This is unfair, he hasn't written an anti-Semitic book. Yet.

I'm pretty sure you could hit enough pages with his aggregate Twitter output.

 

[Wernher von Grün]

"Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint."
I hope they charged Space X for that.