“FOUR EARLIER STARSHIP LAUNCHES Highlighted SpaceX’s ‘Fail Fast, Learn Faster’ Approach” reads the headline of Deccan Herald, citing the International New York Times, October 13, 2024. The article’s subhead expands, “For SpaceX, it is OK to blow up a rocket, as long as the failure provides the data to fix the problems on the next try. That approach can often be faster and save the time and effort of coming up with unnecessary solutions to nonexistent problems.”
SpaceX’s Starship lifts off during its fifth flight test, in Boca Chica, Texas, October 13, 2024. Image from Reuters via Deccan Herald.
There’s proof of the efficacy of this approach in SpaceX’s reusable launch platform culminating in its first-ever “Chopsticks” capture-upon-returning at the launch pad.
Image by Eric Gay/Associated Press. Video access at nytimes.com/live.
Musk’s Software Heritage. The Deccan Herald recounts, “Elon Musk made his early fortune with software companies, and he has adopted that industry’s philosophy of not trying to make everything perfect on the first try.”
Thus, “Fail fast, learn faster” may seem a legitimate business model in software development: Program 1.0 locks up, its bugs are identified, 1.1 is assayed, its bugs fixed… Maybe eventually 1.6 or 2.5 is a successful product.
It’s even arguably acceptable with destructible hardware—provided corporate (or taxpayer) pockets are deep enough for this aspect of “Rocket Science.”
But what about with human beings? For example, ask employees who were caught up in Musk’s halving the Twitter workforce in its transition into X.
Chainsaw Management. And what of the current chaos generated by Trump’s selective slash-and-burn promoted by Musk’s band of ill-informed chainsaw wielders?
There have been clear indications of retribution-related firings (over matters of DEI, for example), careers curtailed, racism revisited, and, in the long term of canceled health and aids programs, lives lost.
Asinine Statements. This is made worse by asinine statements by Trump (see BBC’s Fact-checking “Trump Claims about War in Ukraine”): Zelenskyy’s being “a dictator,” “starting the war,” and other batshit crazy stuff. There’s also an emphatically toady crop of Congressional Republicans (Are they intimidated? Do they actually believe these “alternative facts”?) And, yet to be determined, will the Supreme Court fulfill its Constitutional role of providing interpretive balance of the federal government’s three branches.
Though I claim no particular expertise in the matter, I sense this is utterly the wrong time for our federal government to play “fail fast” even with the dubious assumption of “learning faster.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025.