How to Save SpaceX…From Itself!

Summary: After numerous embarrassing setbacks, both with Starship and its legacy Falcon 9 system, it’s clear that something is amiss at SpaceX. Like many large, complex organizations, Elon Musk’s pioneering space technology firm is succumbing to a kind of engineering culture decay that risks undermining its ability to complete important projects. It’s time for an intervention to save SpaceX from itself!

Transcript:

How to Save SpaceX…From Itself!

Welcome to the Edge of Space

I’m your host, Randall C. Kennedy.

Lately, a lot of digital ink has been spilled over the recent failures of Starship Integrated Flight Tests 7 and 8. And while many theories have been posited as to what caused these eerily similar, back-to-back anomalies, most popular analyses have ignored the real elephant in the room: That SpaceX has an engineering culture problem.

From miscues with multiple Falcon 9 second stages to the sudden fragility of Falcon booster landing legs to last week’s REPEAT Starship fireworks show, SpaceX is having the kind of “run of bad luck” that puts many companies out of business.

And while it’s tempting to make excuses for their mounting tally of unfortunate outcomes – after all, SpaceX IS launching incredibly complex rockets nearly every other day – doing so only serves to gloss over the glaring scale of the underlying problem.

No, this is more than just bad luck. This disastrous period for the world’s most important spaceflight company is indicative of a state of organizational decay, the kind that often plagues firms that reach a certain size, and which are tasked with achieving seemingly impossible to reach goals.

During my 30+ years in the IT industry, I worked with several large companies at various stages of their ascendancy or decline. At IBM in the early 90’s, I encountered a firm on a downward spiral, where competing priorities and business units tore at each other, undermining what should have been a cohesive strategy. And at Intel Corporation in the early 2000s, I ran into an entrenched engineering culture that viewed performance through a single-threaded lens, blinding them to fundamental changes in how future software and hardware would interact.

At SpaceX, I see signs of an organizational structure that has become stretched too thin. And one of the first things to slip when a firm tries to do too many things too fast is Quality Control, especially within their more mature core businesses, which in this case is Falcon 9.

The pressure to maintain a rapid commercial launch cadence, coupled with the need to continuously to grow the Starlink constellation and its ever-expanding feature set – which now also includes direct to cell service and airline industry integration – has the company producing new Falcon 9 second stages at an unsustainable pace.

Meanwhile, that same rapid launch cadence is also pushing the limits of the Falcon 9 Block 5 booster architecture, which was originally designed to support up to 10 flights but now regularly sees vehicles pressed into service 20 or more times, with a highly streamlined, minimalist refurbishment process in between flights.

In such a high-pressure, fast paced, multi-faceted production environment, the temptation to cut corners or make assumptions can become overwhelming. After all, if you check something a thousand times and it’s always negative, it can seem reasonable, or even logical, to bypass that checklist item when faced with a looming deadline or conflicting priority.

Likewise, if an organization becomes too attached to a particular engineering design or concept, it’s tempting to dismiss any one failure as a random anomaly. Such was the case with IFT-7 and Ship 33. SpaceX was confident in its Block 2 design, so much so that it chose to take a symptomatic approach to its postmortem review of Ship 33’s destruction instead of seeking a root cause to the now infamous “sympathetic response” phenomenon.

The net result was a nearly identical sequence of unexpected “energetic events” in or around the propulsion systems of Ship 34, leading to a loss of control and the complete destruction of the prototype.

Given SpaceX’s comments after IFT-7, and the various “band aid” solutions they incorporated into Ship 34, it seems clear that they believed Ship 33’s malfunction was a one-off and that their overall design for Block 2 – which deviates somewhat from Block 1 but not dramatically – was sound.

The events of IFT-8 will no doubt disabuse them of this notion, but not before giving the entire program a serious public relations black eye, the kind that can cause outside parties to entertain doubts about the particular horse they’ve bet on.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Musk can use his new-found public gravitas to suppress calls from NASA or Congress to reassess the country’s reliance on SpaceX. However, regardless of the fallout – or lack thereof – from IFT-8, it’s clear that changes need to be made to right the ship (pun intended) at SpaceX.

When the military is faced with myriad similar, yet seemingly coincidental, failures it often orders a stand down of the relevant commands or equipment. SpaceX needs to do a similar stand down for its entire spaceflight business, from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy to the Starship program. The company then needs to do a thorough review of its QC processes to weed out any slack or improper practices that could undermine vehicle flightworthiness.

In the case of Falcon 9/Heavy, this means more time spent during booster refurbishment and a complete review of pre-delivery checklists and how they’re executed for each new upper stage. Because the last thing SpaceX wants is for a second stage to fail during a Commercial Crew mission.

That would be VERY bad.

And for the Starship program, this means a comprehensive reassessment of their entire Ship design philosophy, especially as it relates to modifications made post-Block 1 – for example, the new multiple downcomer design, as well as the structural intersection points for the repositioned common domes that define the revised tank layout.

Special attention needs to be paid to potential differences in the performance of materials and construction processes in an on-orbit setting versus within Earth’s atmosphere and gravity well. Because, as we saw with Ship 34, simply extending a static fire test on Earth is insufficient to detect whatever common on-orbit anomalies affected both it and its older sibling, Ship 33.

But beyond the aforementioned practical steps, there also needs to be a reengagement by Mr. Musk with the day-to-day development of the Starship system. Right now, the man is pulled in a thousand directions, with DOGE as his top priority along with Tesla, and to a lesser degree, Starlink.

And as long as he remains relatively “hands off” at SpaceX – at least compared to the early days of Falcon and Dragon – the company will continue to succumb to dysfunction. Musk’s regular presence in the halls of SpaceX is a powerful motivator for employees to take every task seriously and to avoid cutting corners while the “big boss” is watching.

Bottom Line: SpaceX can be saved. But the process won’t be easy. The current streak of spectacular failures, born of lax QC practices and myopic design decisions, is indicative a deep, cultural “rot” that must be rooted out and cleansed before the organization can become healthy again. And no matter where you stand on the subjects of SpaceX, its role in the Artemis program, or the proclivities of its founder, it is still very much in the world’s interest that this most important of space technology companies is saved from the crushing weight of its overwhelming responsibilities, both to the spaceflight industry and the future of humanity.

Anyway, thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, tell the world by hitting the like button and subscribing to the channel. And don’t forget the notification bell so you’re alerted to our next space-related rant.

In the meantime, don’t look up! Because Starship is only the most recent bit of SpaceX debris to fall from the sky.