SpaceX’s VP of launch shares the company’s special “algorithm” for innovation

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Amid much fanfare, SpaceX started landing its Falcon 9 rockets in 2015, and it began reusing them less than two years later.

SpaceX briefly studied recovering the second stage of the Falcon 9 but concluded it was not feasible without major modifications that would have greatly reduced the rocket's payload capacity.

Originally, the company's engineering team reasoned that they had to catch them with a net before hitting the ocean, said Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch at SpaceX.

So the SpaceX engineering team developed a complex recovery process, and the company caught its first fairing in January 2020.

"The reality is, most of the time, it's a choppy hot mess with 7- to 9-foot waves, a super short period, and a ton of wind," Dontchev said.

As part of his talk, Dontchev spoke about the "algorithm" that SpaceX uses when it designs new technology to solve problems.

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3 comments

The last quote is such a flex.
"We have more fairings than we have space," Dontchev said. "Fairings are a thing we don't even come close to talking about when it's time for launch. They're always ready, no problem."
Other rocket companies have some serious work to do to try to catch up on reuse.
- It used to be such a big problem to catch these fairings for them. Until they said, fuck it, let's just fish them out instead
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amid much fanfare, SpaceX started landing its Falcon 9 rockets in 2015, and it began reusing them less than two years later.
SpaceX briefly studied recovering the second stage of the Falcon 9 but concluded it was not feasible without major modifications that would have greatly reduced the rocket's payload capacity.
Originally, the company's engineering team reasoned that they had to catch them with a net before hitting the ocean, said Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch at SpaceX.
So the SpaceX engineering team developed a complex recovery process, and the company caught its first fairing in January 2020.
"The reality is, most of the time, it's a choppy hot mess with 7- to 9-foot waves, a super short period, and a ton of wind," Dontchev said.
As part of his talk, Dontchev spoke about the "algorithm" that SpaceX uses when it designs new technology to solve problems.
The original article contains 806 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!