Starship: the iterative design methodology

Starship blew up after four minutes of flight, but SpaceX employees still cheered. This is due to Elon Musk's 'iterative design methodology,' which pushes a system under development until something breaks, figures out what went wrong, and does it again.

Even in this era, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is the only person with the drive, the imagination, and the resources to build something like Starship, writes Gwynne Dyer.Flickr photograph courtesy of Daniel Oberhaus (2018)

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

April 26, 2023

“Obviously, this is not a nominal situation,” said John Insprucker, a senior engineer at SpaceX, who was doing a webcast on the April 20 launch attempt of Elon Musk’s gigantic Starship rocket. So why did Musk’s employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer wh...

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