Interesting. My impression is that SpaceX has delivered some extraordinary results by throwing out a lot of conventional wisdom and starting over from first principles. This anecdote suggests they’re humble enough to re-adopt standard practices when experience shows their value.
Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.
What, in that example, do you think is the first principle they were working from?
It seems to me that they were missing the principle of quality of “trust but verify.”
This is a risk to SpaceX that I don’t think gets talked about much. They are able to take risks and throw out conventional wisdom to streamline, but sometimes it’s easy to conflate being lucky with being good. But each time their luck goes bad, they lose a little bit of that edge by having to layer on bureaucratic process (like additional quality checks) to mitigate that previously unrecognized risk. Do that enough times and you start to look just like the dinosaurs they’re replacing. If the lose a human life, it may come even faster.
Seems like a good approach… if the cost of failure is manageable.