Starship

“It was the first time in history, a rocket was sent to orbit and then caught out of mid air.”

“The lesson isn't be like Elon. Hero worship is the wrong takeaway. One person didn't build Starship. The lesson is that structure matters more than the hero. Get the system right and the results follow.”

“The crucial distinction is between development and operations. SpaceX runs both, but with completely different risk profiles. So for the Dragon, it carries crew. It can never fail. So there's large margins of safety, there's exhaustive testing, there's conserv…”

“This can lead to specific design decisions like using stainless steel for Starship, which is cheap, easy to weld and can be welded in a tent, by the way, instead of carbon fiber, which is expensive and requires giant autoclaves.”