The Production Strategy
Not to be left out of all the excitement about Tesla’s upcoming Master Plan Part 3 announcement, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX hit another milestone last week - completing a crucial 31 engine static fire test, while company President Gwynne Shotwell spoke about the behind-the-scenes work SpaceX staff have been focusing on for the last year.
Shotwell spoke at the FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation conference in Washington, D.C. on February 8th - the day before the big static fire test. Gwynne spoke about their goals for the first flight test of the company’s Starship prototype, and about how she’s not concerned about getting the rocket to space.
“We know how to get to orbit,” She said.
But it was her comments on what SpaceX is focusing on that were the most interesting. Apparently, the company hasn’t been overly concerned about IF Starship could fly - not just because SpaceX has gotten very good at getting vehicles into orbit - but because the real goal of the company has been in sharpening up the production side of things. Shotwell says;
““Why can’t we build a rocket every day? That’s what we’re focusing on with Starship, is attacking every part of the production process to be able to build lots of these machines,””
And for any of us who have been following the progress of Elon Musk’s companies, this definitely makes sense.
Tesla’s goals have always been to help move people away from fossil fuels by making affordable electric vehicles, green power-generation, and storage. This has been achievable only because Musk has made a big focus on the production side - working constantly on the efficiency of the production pipeline, from raw materials to automated manufacturing.
So if SpaceX is working towards a sustainable and affordable future for the space industry, it stands to reason that they would be working on the thing that causes the most expense in rocketry - constructing the rockets themselves.
Suddenly, all of those new Starship test vehicles we’ve seen make sense. Starship 24 is the most likely candidate for the first test flight - whenever that gets the FAA approval to happen - but shots from the Starbase production facilities in Boca Chica have seen glimpses of Starship vehicles in production and testing from S25 all the way up to S28!
SpaceX needs a bunch of test vehicles for tuning the final designs, but if they didn’t also need to refine their production techniques, they likely wouldn’t have built so many.
Gwynne went on to mention that currently, Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule is what’s making SpaceX their money. Contracts are coming in regularly, because those vehicles have proven reliability and an amazingly quick turnaround. That plus the reusability of the boosters makes them very cheap by rocketry standards.
And everything SpaceX wants to achieve inside the next decade hinges on the success of Starship. The Artemis missions, the Polaris program, Starink’s new V2 satellite deployments - all of that and more will sink or swim with the world’s most powerful rocket - and its ability to exceed Falcon 9’s operational speed.
Focusing on the company’s ability to produce new vehicles as quickly as possible is exactly what they should be doing.