Elon explains how to build anything with first principles pic.twitter.com/DTBuEfazi7
— TaraBull (@TaraBull) May 9, 2026
I’m working on a lunar skycrane project, and doing a trade on how/when to unreel/reel the tether, but I’m thinking about simplifying by simply making it fixed length.
Make your tether long enough so that your canted thrusters aren’t blowing dust around so much to obstruct your ground view or the workers below while the object being hoisted is on the surface and no longer. Use the thrusters for all else. Variable canter?
The best part is no part.
Lunar version of the Sikorsky S64 Sky-crane? Using standardized containers?
Never optimize a process for the edge case, optimize it for the base rate.
“Simplificate and build in lightness.”
– Geoffrey de Havilland.
When Bill Lear was working on the first Lear Jet (the Model 23), he told his engineers to work hard to eliminate parts and systems. His reasoning was that no only would you eliminate that part or system, but also the backup redundant part or system. His discussed this in his autobiography, “They Said It Couldn’t be Done”.
This is far from a new idea.
Not new, just not accepted widely
Or, like many concepts, forgotten/ignored and has to be relearned.
I’m not anything close to an engineer but think about all this design advice, especially this specific bit, when designing things to print.
Designing things to print?
Sorry to deliver the terrible news. You’re an engineer.
Oh come on Doc, don’t you know you can’t do engineering without a degree? /s
Tell it to Roebling
Oh, that’s what I’m doing wrong.
40+ years later, that elusive BS that I never quite completed would have evaporated anyway.
Tell that to Jack Northrop and Bill Lear. Hell, tell that to the Wright Brothers. There were many others from that era who accomplished great things without a degree in engineering.
We should regard government regulation as an engineering problem.
I regard it as an existential threat to the species.
Indeed it is. “The best regulation is no regulation” sounds good to me.
I think Elon Musk’s supreme skill is the ability to put together a winning team.
Yes he has concepts like “no part is the best part” and has probably come up with some engineering ideas for SpaceX. But he cannot have done all the design and all the planning. He did not design Raptor 3 engines in detail, I don’t think. He has built a team and created a system that can produce hundreds of successful launches, and recoveries, a year, design ever more powerful yet simpler engines, innovate, learn from experience and update rapidly.
He doesn’t do that…the teams he built does that.
You’re right, he didn’t come up with every single idea and fix for the systems.
But then neither did any other member of that team. Tony Stark and Tom Swift and Doc Savage and Reed Richards are fictional.
This is why you build teams.
On the other hand, there’s twelve dozen or so rocket companies and only one has so far built a recoverable one that is shipping payload daily.
The single biggest difference is that that company is headed up by Musk.
Yes the company is headed by Musk……..
…who knows how to build successful teams that operate the way he wants them to operate..
The heads of the other companies do not.
“You’re right, he didn’t come up with every single idea and fix for the systems.”
I maintain he didn’t come up with most of them. Physically impossible, given the rate that SpaceX moves.
Actually, Musk does do a lot of the critical engineering for his companies. Marc Andreesen, who has known Musk for decades, explained Musk’s approach on a Joe Rogan episode awhile back. On a “SpaceX day,” Musk directly attacks whatever the current top of the toughest problems list happens to be at SpaceX with the team that is having the problem and continues until a definite or probable solution is developed, then sends the team back out to implement it. He does the same on each “Tesla day,” “Neuralink day,” “The Boring Company day,” etc. Musk is several kinds of master engineer and his “curriculum” has been auto-didacticism and direct confrontation of real engineering problems. Many of the features of the Raptor 3 are directly attributable to Musk as are many other aspects of SpaceX and Tesla engineering including, for example, the design of a solution to an interconnect problem in AI compute clusters that was limiting scale-up. Musk is the greatest engineer of the 21st century.
But you are correct that Musk also excels in building learning organizations that can tackle huge challenges successfully. So he’s also an ace social engineer. In that space, his only historical competition is Edison who, along with many physical inventions, also invented organized research and development in the modern sense.
One of the keys to Musk’s success in building such organizations is his ability to attract top talent. He does that by offering them the ability to take on as much responsibility as they can handle, direct involvement in real engineering projects, latitude to pursue “crazy ideas” of their own and the stimulation of working with others as bright and able as themselves.
And then, of course, there are the stock options.
Sure…Musk attacks a problem in each of his companies on “their day”. Only sensible to keep his hand in plus keep informed about what’s going on, and how the organization is working.
But there are dozens if not hundreds of design ideas and changes and upgrades and issues, and the teams he has built are shaped to attack the problems aggressively and solve them. He can not and does not do it alone.
Musk is a great engineer but he cannot have done all the thinking, design work, brainstorming etc which has made SpaceX a fabulously successful organization. Not even a large fraction.
Musk does build great teams, but there is much more to him than that…..
Larry Page: “Elon is one of the people who genuinely understands physics and applies it.”
Sergey Brin: “Elon is someone who thinks extremely deeply about hard technical problems.”
Eric Schmidt: “Elon is extremely smart. He thinks about problems at a fundamental physics level.”
Satya Nadella: “Elon has a deep understanding of engineering trade-offs.”
Yann LeCun: “He’s a very smart guy and I’m in awe of some of his projects.”
Jeff Dean: “Elon Musk is extremely capable technically.”
Andrew Ng: “Elon is clearly very smart and technically capable, even when I disagree with him.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Elon Musk understands engineering at a level that most CEOs do not.”
Chris Hadfield: “Elon Musk is clearly very intelligent and serious about engineering.”
Andrej Karpathy: “Elon has an incredible ability to reason from first principles. It’s very rare.”
Tom Mueller: “He’s a super smart guy and he learns from talking to people. He’s so sharp, he just picks it up.”
Jim Cantrell: “Elon taught himself rocket science faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been doing this my whole career.”
Robert Zubrin: “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer with an extraordinary ability to cut through nonsense.”
George Church: “Elon Musk is extraordinarily intelligent and unusually well-read across sciences.”
Vaclav Smil: “Elon Musk is a very intelligent engineer, though overly optimistic.”
Miguel Nicolelis: “Elon Musk is a brilliant mind, even when he overreaches.”
George Hotz: “Elon is actually very smart. People underestimate how technical he really is.”
Sal Khan: “Elon Musk is a deeply intelligent person who genuinely understands the science behind what he’s building.”
Mark Cuban: “Elon is very smart and ahead of the curve.”
Naval Ravikant: “Elon Musk is operating at a different intellectual level.”
Rodney Brooks: “Elon Musk is smart and technically literate, even if provocative.”
Cory Doctorow: “Elon Musk is obviously very smart. That’s not in dispute.”
Tim Urban: “Elon Musk is one of the deepest first-principles thinkers I’ve ever encountered.”
Uday Kotak: “Elon Musk is a genius in the way he combines engineering with execution.”
Doug Jones: “Elon Musk is a pain in the neck as a customer, but smart, fair, and sharp.”
Opinion formed after working with Elon, Tom, and Tim in 2002 to test fire the Merlin Gas Generator on the XCOR 5K test stand.
Mr. Musk gets a lot of shade thrown because ‘he didn’t invent’ X, Y, or Z.
No, he didn’t.
He just made them successful. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Success is a hard target. Bet on success, not on ideas
“Design is easy. Manufacturing is hard.”
– Elon Musk
A brief look at his manufacturing investments shows his commitment. Tesla’s factories are very successful. He’s building Gigafactories in Texas and Florida to mass produce Starships in a manner never seen before. His latest investments in IC production might end up costing over $100 billion. Who knows what the rumored projects will be in Louisiana might be, but if they happen, they won’t be small.
Every middle-school boy draws pictures of aircraft, or vehicles, or buildings.
Essentially none of them make it to the point of cutting tin.
Yep, that was me. Good thing about no tin cutting too. All of my designs had terrible aerodynamics from sporting way too many turreted machine guns. Flying porcupines.
Ah, youth. Ah, ignorance.
Yet from that we learn – to dream, if not to build
Musk is relentless in pursuing ever-greater production efficiency. He has twice completely re-done the way Teslas are built. The comparable number for how Starships are built is at least three and may well hit four or five before all is said and done. I expect Terafab to be at least an order of magnitude more efficient than any prior chip fab. Mining, smelting and metal-forming on the Moon can also be expected to outpace terrestrial practice by large margins.
Most of the comments here reflect Obama-ism at its wort: “If you have a company, you didn’t build that.” Without Elon, SpaceX would not exist. So yes, he built that.
That video explains how NASA came up with Artemis.
Problem: Return to the moon
Requirement: Get there with minimal risk, using proven designs to cut costs.
Start with the hardware that works: VAB, Pad 39, SRB’s, SSMEs, External Tanks.
Optimize them to come up with a design to get us to the moon. Refurbish the VAB, redo Pad 39, extend the SRBs, put the SSMEs under the ET, and refurbish the SSMEs.
Does it work? Not sure, so let’s study the design on paper until we are sure it may work then go fly it.
Well, it sort of works, but it won’t get us to the moon’s surface as it currently is designed.
Let’s optimize it until it can… Wait… How about we delete Artemis and start over… Nah, that would cost too much and take too much time.
Funny thing is, SLS is the second worst possible version of an SDV. Worst was the version with RS-68 engines. The Jupiter SDV (on whose design I had some small influence) could have been cheaper and better, especially the Ajax and Neptune versions. The main way the team listened to me was an upper stage with 6x RL-10 engines, conveniently forgotten when I was kicked off NSF…
My understanding is that Ares 5’s Achilles Heel was the intended clustering of RS-68B engines. The RS-68 series had ablatively-cooled nozzles that also relied on radiation for part of their cooling. Mount too many of them in too-close proximity and they would melt one another. This is much less a problem with regeneratively-cooled engine nozzles. Do I have that right?
That’s the essence of it, though the bigger problem was heat from the solids. They talked about RS-68SA but that would have been costly. The other issue was the 5 seg boosters. and the restarting RS-25 production. SLS is essentially Ares IV. My much cheaper version was a side mount SDV require launching the CSM and LM separately to the Moon. Pretty much what everybody is doing anyway. I published this idea in Spaceflight in 2004. CSM was an Apollo-class vehicle with a mission module carrying 5 crew. I suggested developing an LM from New Shepard. Add in a pressurized rover left on the surface and I named my plan Lunar Surface Rendezvous.
I never cease to be amazed at the difficulty multi-billion dollar programs have with designing reliable regenerative cooling and stable injectors- and NASA published how-to manuals half a freaking century ago! All I ever did was read the damn books and apply the methods, and whaddaya know, it worked! I’m smart but I ain’t THAT smart.
By the way, NASA SP-194 section 7.2.5 is easy to follow. Just apply type V and Bob’s your uncle. Plus a bit of NASA TND-126, which is older than I am.
Rand, I’m going to do some in-situ observations of long-line tether rotational dynamics next month in Costa Rica. I’ll get back to you with my report:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFD1BRA_m2w&t=175s
One thing I thought of is to have a payload canister that’s prepped in a clean facility, then sealed and jacked into a ship on the pad. It would add weight and reduce volume but enhance interoperability and launch recycling. Lots of ideas.