My guess based on reading anecdotes like these and Berger’s books is that the algorithm is a vast improvement over anyone else’s engineering practices, but it alone doesn’t tell you what else you need to run a company. Maybe systems engineering is the missing piece, maybe some other management philosophy.
If you look at the major SpaceX programs, they are: Falcon development, operations, Starlink, and Starship. The first three were wildly successful, and Starship is late but technically and operationally superior to other companies (e.g. Raptor engines are double the chamber pressure of BE-4 and there have been 10x the test flights), with successes directly traceable to each step of the algorithm, and wasted energy due to not doing something else when appropriate. Raptor 3 engines are only possible to make as cheaply as Elon wants because they had a vast number of parts deleted; yet they also “accelerate”d to build hundreds of Raptor 2s which are now obsolete.
My guess based on reading anecdotes like these and Berger’s books is that the algorithm is a vast improvement over anyone else’s engineering practices, but it alone doesn’t tell you what else you need to run a company. Maybe systems engineering is the missing piece, maybe some other management philosophy.
If you look at the major SpaceX programs, they are: Falcon development, operations, Starlink, and Starship. The first three were wildly successful, and Starship is late but technically and operationally superior to other companies (e.g. Raptor engines are double the chamber pressure of BE-4 and there have been 10x the test flights), with successes directly traceable to each step of the algorithm, and wasted energy due to not doing something else when appropriate. Raptor 3 engines are only possible to make as cheaply as Elon wants because they had a vast number of parts deleted; yet they also “accelerate”d to build hundreds of Raptor 2s which are now obsolete.