SpaceX Veteran Reveals Three Iterations Needed For Tight Raptor Engine Design
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@MollySOShea You don’t gain confidence from the first build; you gain it from the repetitions. Iteration is how ideas mature, systems stabilize, and leaders learn what actually works. Clarity compounds when you’re willing to build again.
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2 postsSpaceX's 1st employee Tom Mueller @lrocket on the chart showing Raptor's design progress: "It was amazing." "It took 3 versions of Merlin to get it to be really tight, and it took 3 versions also of Raptor." "It takes 3 iterations to get to a really, really tight product."
Former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner says you don't really know if something works until you've built it 3 times: "To me, this is the second example of building what [Senra Systems] built in Redondo." "And until you've built it 3 times, you don't know if what you've built will replicate itself." "Like @lrocket with 3 different versions of the engine: the first one just got you going. The second one you learned from the first, but not enough. And the third one it's like, 'All right, I finished fixing this.' And then it's just incremental tweaks from there." @elonmusk
Former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner says you don't really know if something works until you've built it 3 times: "To me, this is the second example of building what [Senra Systems] built in Redondo." "And until you've built it 3 times, you don't know if what you've built will replicate itself." "Like @lrocket with 3 different versions of the engine: the first one just got you going. The second one you learned from the first, but not enough. And the third one it's like, 'All right, I finished fixing this.' And then it's just incremental tweaks from there." @elonmusk
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