Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

by Eric Berger

The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt.

“We were always fighting for the recursive, nonlinear approach, which is best early in a program,” Metzger said of his NASA experience. “To adopt this method, you have to let people see you fail, and you have to push back when the critics use your early failures as an excuse to shut you down.

After Musk hired a few experienced hands to lead his propulsion, structures, and avionics departments—Thompson, Mueller, and Koenigsmann—he mostly brought on recent college graduates. Most had no significant others pulling on their time, asking when they’d be home for dinner. They lived in apartments, not houses with lawns to mow. They had no children to look after. So they worked long, hard hours as Musk squeezed everything out of them that they had to give.

Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.

in the long run, talent wins over experience and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.” Too often in the modern aerospace world, he added, bureaucracy, rules, and a morbid fear of failure “poisoned” the workplace.