Elon Musk has decried a wave of “insane” strikes focused on Tesla workshops in Sweden, as workers target the US electric car manufacturer in a strike calling for collective bargaining rights.
In what has been portrayed as the largest fight in decades to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices, the powerful trade union IF Metall has been leading a strike across eight Tesla workplaces in Sweden for five weeks.
It is the first time workers for the US carmaker have gone on strike and on Thursday, Musk, the tech billionaire and chief executive of Tesla, made his feelings clear, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “This is insane.”
I’ve worked at both and cannot confirm. Startups are good at shipping new features, but that’s usually because we don’t spend as long planning, have less legacy code to work around, and most importantly, we cut a lot of corners. These behaviors are not good for space travel
I think SpaceX is demonstrating that a lot of IT startup methodology actually works for the space industry too. Most famously, accepting that making errors makes you learn faster, with their many rocket explosions, this is like short iterations in IT. This is opposed to the years long planning and studying to make sure everything is 100% perfect before launch of traditional space industry. They are out-competing every public and private space industries (such as ArianeGroup) with their methods, it seems to work pretty good.
Exploding rockets over populated areas and putting debris in the sky is bad. Wasting money in explosions is also bad. I don’t think startup mentality belongs anywhere outside of SaaS. If you disagree on this then we’re likely not going to reach common ground when talking about spaceX.
I also don’t agree that they’re out competing NASA, nor do I agree that that’s even a worthwhile measure here because something so dangerous shouldn’t be subject to the market. Getting exclusive contracts from the government is too political to truly say they’re better. The F-23 was better than the F-22 but the 22 won the contract anyway.
Yes, the ecological impact is bad. I was focused on organizational efficiency as it was the subject of the comment I replied to. Also here’s a study from Oxford University about it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4119492
We find that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy
If ecology is to be the top priority then NASA budget could probably go into ecological transition research too instead of the new moon project.
