SpaceX’s willingness to blow stuff up and learn from the failures has propelled it from a cash-strapped startup to one of the world’s most valuable companies (and kick-started a commercial space revolution along the way).

The development of the Falcon 9 rocket was achieved over a relatively short period in space-industry time. That success was built on SpaceX’s willingness to test, fail and repeat rapidly. The Falcon 1 rocket failed three times before reaching orbit on the fourth try in 2008 just before Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s money ran out. SpaceX blew up a couple of rockets on the way to Falcon 9 reaching orbit, while Musk helped popularize the phrase “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

This unique engineer-led culture is a reason that buy-side analysts have justified valuations for Musk’s space venture that are, well, out of this world. SpaceX is adept at building complicated hardware and manufacturing almost all components in-house.

This culture of move fast, break something and learn while picking up the pieces, however, is bumping up against two formidable obstacles that may force it to reconsider its strategy.

The first is the sheer size and massive cost of Starship, the fully reusable rocket that SpaceX is about to test for a 13th time, as early as Thursday afternoon. It’s hard to iterate quickly on something that stands more than 400 feet tall and can haul 100 metric tons. That’s almost twice the height of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and more than four times the payload capacity.

In........

© The Japan Times