Author Topic: Would it be beneficial for SpaceX to take suggestions from members of the public  (Read 16322 times)

Offline Slarty1080

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Given the interest in SpaceX there must be tens of thousands of people many with technical experience who might have good ideas for improvements or money saving. If such ideas were vetted by someone with appropriate experience some of the better ideas could be passed on to be reviewed by SpaceX staff. Would this sort of arrangement work? Seems like a massive resource is going to waste here.
My optimistic hope is that it will become cool to really think about things... rather than just doing reactive bullsh*t based on no knowledge (Brian Cox)

Offline Lars-J

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Given the interest in SpaceX there must be tens of thousands of people many with technical experience who might have good ideas for improvements or money saving. If such ideas were vetted by someone with appropriate experience some of the better ideas could be passed on to be reviewed by SpaceX staff. Would this sort of arrangement work? Seems like a massive resource is going to waste here.

No. They know what they are doing. Far more than us armchair engineers.

Offline speedevil

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No. They know what they are doing. Far more than us armchair engineers.
I'd somewhat disagree, but 99.99% of the ideas 'we' have are not particularly novel.

The ideas are the easy part.
The hard part is the execution.

It is really easy to propose (for example) a rocket that lands vertically on a barge, this is not novel, and there is even remarkably prescient footage from a 60s soviet movie.

The hard part is looking at an actual rocket you're trying to implement this on, and working out exactly where you can put the leg attachments without impinging on critical structural elements or making things too heavy, not having too much drag at a specific worst case angle of attack and ... to rip the leg off during launch, ...

Sometimes what seems plausible may be difficult to analyse and prove it is or is not possible without lots of expensive testing.
In some cases, the risks are low.
Proving they're low in the case of the random good idea you had can be quite expensive.

In addition, I feel pretty certain that there are members of SpaceX reading this right now. (hi).
If a spectacularly awesome idea comes up, they may well pass it on.
« Last Edit: 05/08/2018 11:12 pm by speedevil »

Offline vaporcobra

No. No, no, no, no, and no. Also no. If you or anyone else wants to advise SpaceX, do so as an employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Offline Lars-J

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No. No, no, no, no, and no. Also no. If you or anyone else wants to advise SpaceX, do so as an employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Yes, this (and other forums) illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect perfectly.

Offline envy887

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No. No, no, no, no, and no. Also no. If you or anyone else wants to advise SpaceX, do so as an employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Or just tweet your brilliant ideas at Elon.

Offline ClayJar

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In addition to Dunning-Kruger, if someone did send them a novel and original idea to improve things, taking it and running with it might be considered an opening for "intellectual property" lawsuits.

It's one thing to take a published public tweet suggestion for an improvement to your Tesla and implement that.  It could potentially be considered something something completely different to take a potentially patentable idea submitted without any authentication and implement it, and I don't think anyone wants to involve the legal department unnecessarily.

Offline Lar

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Unsolicited suggestions are likely to be returned unopened, in the general case
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk
"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Offline envy887

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Given the interest in SpaceX there must be tens of thousands of people many with technical experience who might have good ideas for improvements or money saving. If such ideas were vetted by someone with appropriate experience some of the better ideas could be passed on to be reviewed by SpaceX staff. Would this sort of arrangement work? Seems like a massive resource is going to waste here.

No. They know what they are doing. Far more than us armchair engineers.

Except when it comes to naming schemes, apparently.

Offline Spudley

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I would put bets on there being individuals at SpaceX monitoring sites like this, which would give them the ability to cherry pick the occasional novel idea that does appear.

I'd also put bets on there being very *very* few good ideas coming up that hadn't been raised and discussed within the company already.

Online Robotbeat

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It’s not anyone’s job to do that.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline Ludus

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The biggest contribution public suggestions make is for consumer facing companies. Jeff Bezos especially wants Amazon to be customer driven and to pay attention to complaints and suggestions because customers are never satisfied and set a higher standard than the market. It’s possible to be better than your competitors at everything. It’s never possible to satisfy your customers even if you’re the best at everything.

With Starlink, SpaceX may become more consumer facing and have more need of suggestions and complaints from the public.

Offline meekGee

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In addition to Dunning-Kruger, if someone did send them a novel and original idea to improve things, taking it and running with it might be considered an opening for "intellectual property" lawsuits.

It's one thing to take a published public tweet suggestion for an improvement to your Tesla and implement that.  It could potentially be considered something something completely different to take a potentially patentable idea submitted without any authentication and implement it, and I don't think anyone wants to involve the legal department unnecessarily.
That's not how patents work.

If you disclosed it to them, then they can't PATENT it, but they can sure use it (unless it is already patented or filed for).

If you disclosed it in a public forum, then probably nobody else can patent it either.



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Offline DigitalMan

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In addition to Dunning-Kruger, if someone did send them a novel and original idea to improve things, taking it and running with it might be considered an opening for "intellectual property" lawsuits.

It's one thing to take a published public tweet suggestion for an improvement to your Tesla and implement that.  It could potentially be considered something something completely different to take a potentially patentable idea submitted without any authentication and implement it, and I don't think anyone wants to involve the legal department unnecessarily.
That's not how patents work.

If you disclosed it to them, then they can't PATENT it, but they can sure use it (unless it is already patented or filed for).

If you disclosed it in a public forum, then probably nobody else can patent it either.



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My recollection is that after the changes to the US patent system some years ago the 1 year grace period between public disclosure and filing was still in existence.  It was modified so that if ClayJar disclosed his invention here he would have 1 year to file on it but nobody else would be able to file on it because his post would be prior art for them.

Offline meekGee

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In addition to Dunning-Kruger, if someone did send them a novel and original idea to improve things, taking it and running with it might be considered an opening for "intellectual property" lawsuits.

It's one thing to take a published public tweet suggestion for an improvement to your Tesla and implement that.  It could potentially be considered something something completely different to take a potentially patentable idea submitted without any authentication and implement it, and I don't think anyone wants to involve the legal department unnecessarily.
That's not how patents work.

If you disclosed it to them, then they can't PATENT it, but they can sure use it (unless it is already patented or filed for).

If you disclosed it in a public forum, then probably nobody else can patent it either.



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My recollection is that after the changes to the US patent system some years ago the 1 year grace period between public disclosure and filing was still in existence.  It was modified so that if ClayJar disclosed his invention here he would have 1 year to file on it but nobody else would be able to file on it because his post would be prior art for them.
Not sure about the rule here, but that's equivalent to disclosing to the USPTO ("provosional") patent.

So yes, 1-yr window notwithstanding.

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Online launchwatcher

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That's not how patents work.

If you disclosed it to them, then they can't PATENT it, but they can sure use it (unless it is already patented or filed for).

If you disclosed it in a public forum, then probably nobody else can patent it either.
That's how it's supposed to work but searches for prior art are not always reliable.   And it takes lots of lawyers, courts, and money to figure out for sure if patent A is really valid and product B actually infringes patent A.

Treble damages for knowing infringement makes the game theory around the patent system somewhat perverse.   

For people actually building things, the optimal legal strategy is to treat the patent office like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark - stuff checks in, never to be looked at again.   Never ever look at patents, never ever look at stuff other people are doing that might be patented, just file as many invention disclosures as you can on the stuff you're doing (and let the legal department do the prior art searches and figure out if it's worth turning into a patent). 

Once you've done this for a while, if, by chance, a competitor has a patent that might describe you're doing, you probably have a patent that might describe something they're doing.   And rather than seek an insanely expensive court battle to figure out who's right (see also "pyhrric victory"), you can generally negotiate a nice out-of-court agreement or just have a tacet understanding that it's better to keep your lawyers locked up working on patent applications.

In this environment the safest thing to do with random unsolicited suggestions from John Q. Public is ignore them completely and attempt to ensure that your engineers never ever see them.


Offline Jimmy Murdok

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No. No, no, no, no, and no. Also no. If you or anyone else wants to advise SpaceX, do so as an employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Easy man, at L2 there has been good developments. SpaceX workers have directly hinted which ideas made sense or not for initial BFR designs, while lots of approaches were well evaluated. Lamontagne work was very extensive and the discussions endless, I myself collaborated with some conceptual designs because of discussion in the architecture. We were at similar scope as Zubrin criticism on the BFR architecture. I would not be surprised that some of those have been used to feed or somehow influence initial high level architecture meetings. As you get deep into the development of course the value goes down as there is no insight.

The size reduction of the BFR from year 1 to year 2 could partially have been influenced by 3rd party evaluations in forums like this one. Maybe no influence at all, but I would not deny this so categorically.

This forum did amazing work on the recovery of the video footage sea landing and Elon himself acknowledged that (indirectly form a SpaceX person in the forum), there are few forum-users who are SpaceX employees. SpaceX provided the material for the video to the community.

Old long discussions on barge landings, second stage recovery, LAS for BFS, biconic VS conic ships, crane use, nuclear reactor, solar needs and deployment... obviously, nothing deep into the development, but strategically some discussions have good value. SpaceX strategy is open to change often, why not have a look at outside perspective without internal bias? There is some good capacity in this forum, no need to get too underestimated  ;)

In any case, most probably we will never know

Offline meekGee

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I think it's safe to say that in 99% if not 100%, by the time we're talking about it, it's already in an advanced state at SpaceX.

E.g. F9.1, reusability, barges, Raptor, BFx, fairing/US recovery...



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« Last Edit: 05/12/2018 07:32 pm by meekGee »
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Offline Hauerg

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Offline spacenut

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A metholox 2nd stage was talked about for Falcon Heavy and for Falcon 9 which would greatly improve capability.  However BFR/BFS is taking all their efforts right now, which is supposed to make F9 and FH obsolete sooner than expected. 

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