I've been mulling over
this article on the recent bout of SpaceX failures, particularly the Falcon 9 stage 2 and booster recovery issues. Had some thoughts that might get more discussion here than in the far dregs of the main article comments which are (understandably) focused on Musk's politics.
QC is a Hard Problem, especially for the most sophisticated, high performing, and low-margin pieces of engineering known to humanity. I wonder if SpaceX is having issue transitioning from
development of shiny new technology to
operations of a staid, boring old thing. Part of that has to be related to the working culture of SpaceX - young engineers might be willing to work ridiculous hours for exciting new projects, but it's a little less compelling to do so for manufacturing Upper Stage #485 or Booster Recovery Operation #276. Similarly, spotting and troubleshooting issues might have been more successful when the engineers and technicians that were around for early development contributed to the day-to-day operations.
But SpaceX has infamously high turnover - maybe we're now seeing the effect of attrition of institutional knowledge, as the "old timers" with 5-10 years of experience are checking out and moving on to other roles? That might be internally - some amount of "superstar" engineers moved from Falcon to Starship I'm guessing. And externally there are plenty of SpaceX's former top employees working at the new round of exciting startups, more traditional aerospace companies, or elsewhere in tech.
Maybe a company that will remain reliable at launch #500 or #1000 needs to transition to a bit more of an old-space culture. That may come with necessary increases in cost to retain more QC engineers and technicians with higher salaries and less hours. Probably harder will be establishing a consistent culture, like I'm sure SpaceX has Quality Management Systems and Document Control, but how much are they reliant on unwritten institutional knowledge? Can they effectively train new employees and transfer enough knowledge to keep the boring parts of the company going?
And yes politics matters. SpaceX's recruiting efforts might not get the best and the brightest now that Musk's latent fascism has come to the forefront. Whatever engineering culture that worked before when they could reliably get their pick of top engineering graduates will not work when they're mostly attracting DOGE wannabe baby edgelords, or engineers that are just going to punch a clock for a few years until they get a job at a company that actually want to work for.