SpaceX likes to hire ex-BMW employees?

[Zannanza]

Source:
http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Spacex/reviews

Comment posted on December 25, 2013

"Most of the management has no experience in aviation. For some reason they love to hire foreign car people from BMW and Mini to build rocket ships. Hey how about going down the road to Aviation Blvd and snagging some Lockheed, Boeing or raytheon guys?"

Anyone knows whether his comment is a fair statement? Why does SpaceX favor ex-BMW employee?

[Wigles]

Its probably an over generalisation.

But, if I were looking to start a commercial rocket company that plans on being profitable and competitive regardles of government subsidies and contracts I would be wanting people who understand efficiency and lean manufacturing, people who can sell and market a product, people who have an understanding of how to put profitability at the front of every trade off.

I wouldnt be going to lockheed or boeing for these people. They have lots of technically very competent people, but the most techically sophisticated design is typically not profitable.

[Lars_J]

Sounds like sour grapes - in particular the "how about going down the road to Aviation Blvd and snagging some Lockheed, Boeing or raytheon guys" part.

Otherwise experience in setting up a proper and efficient manufacturing assembly line is nothing to sneeze at.

[cambrianera]

For sure manufacturing engineering is a completely different thing from product engineering.
And in industries accustomed to lot of subcontractors the former is quite non existent (everything left to the subcontractor).
But I don‘t know SpaceX situation other than the well known part related to vertical integration.

[Akhenaten]

"It does not matter if a cat is black or white so long as its catches mice!"- Deng Xiaoping, one time Maximum Leader of China

[FutureSpaceTourist]

IIRC the SpaceX production VP came from BMW (and probably others too). SpaceX do talk about the similarities in what they do with the automotive industry but it's also clear that they employ a lot of aerospace engineers from other companies too. Typical journalistic exaggeration?

[john smith 19]

Its probably an over generalisation.
I wouldnt be going to lockheed or boeing for these people. They have lots of technically very competent people, but the most techically sophisticated design is typically not profitable.

There's another issue as well.

Aerospace + space == cost plus FAR25 contracts most of the time.

Effort is more important than outcome, after all, whatever it costs the USG will cover it. 

If you don't want to become dependent on govt contracts you cannot afford to think that way. 

The easiest way to avoid that is to hire non aerospace staff EG BMW, or new graduate aeronautical engineers for whom this is their first aerospace company.

BTW I did read that quite a lot of structural engineers for launch vehicles actually got hired from "Civil Engineering" courses, because they do so much structural analysis and make a lot of concrete columns 

As for some of the worker complaints I'll note Spacex's launch record on F9 has been solid so far. So whatever they claim is happening (and those claims cannot be verified) the rockets are taking the payloads where they should go.

Jeff Greason of XCOR discussed this a few years ago. He was asked if they would hire people from Boeing and LM and he said that people who'd had more than 10 years in the cost plus environment had trouble adjusting to the way they do things.

[Jim]

Aerospace + space == cost plus FAR25 contracts most of the time.

Unsubstantiated.  No basis to support that claim

[pippin]

Well, I do have some first hand experience with manufacturing and manufacturing costs in both automotive and aerospace although most of it is in electronics manufacturing (for automotive and aerospace).

And even though the "aerospace" part of included commercial avionics alongside military I can say that the focus on cost optimization in automotive was orders of magnitude (yes, I mean it) higher.

That said, it's primarily two aspects that drove the different methodologies both of which SpaceX will only be able to escape to a certain degree:

1. Documentation requirements. Even automotive looks ridiculous in this respect by "common sense" standards but aerospace - in this case primarily adopting mil standards - is ridiculously more ridiculous than just ridiculous. Cost to meet documentation requirements alone far, far exceeds the actual conversion cost. In avionics manufacturing the manufacturing itself is more or less free, the costs are all in development, capital costs and documentation. Don't know to what degree the same is true for mechanical components.
But I doubt that SpaceX will be able to fully escape this. If you want your several hundred megabuck payload with a provider you want that supplier to have fully transparent processes to understand what happens because, in the end, costs are not the primary issue.

2. Volume. Automotive has several orders of magnitudes higher volumes. Even if a certain car model is only being sold a few 10.000 times most of it's value-carrying components will be shared among different models so that most of them are manufactured at least in the 100.000s, at least in the 10.000s per year. If there's stuff with even lower volumes it often shares production lines with similar components, often even for other manufacturers. Also, companies like BMW control just a very small part of their value chain themselves which is in stark contrast to what SpaceX does.
Compare that to dozens or hundreds for anything SpaceX manufactures. Themselves. And you inevitably end up with very different processes.

Sure, a good understanding of manufacturing processes and cost structures will certainly help build up an efficient manufacturing at SpaceX, too, but the solutions they will need will certainly be very different from what the automotive industry doesn

[AS-503]

Elon did an interview several months back that expanded on this topic.
I am sure quantumg has the transcript on the shitelonsays website.

In the interview he said that Tesla and SpaceX benefit from one another.
He mentioned the use of high performance aluminum construction commonly employed in the aviation business as a way that SpaceX influences Tesla.
He then mentioned how mass-production techniques (fabrication and integration) of a complicated system (and many sub-systems) employed in the automotive business as a way that Tesla influences SpaceX.
It was in this interview that Elon also mentioned that the head of the Falcon 9 production line had come from BMW.

Link: http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/opening-keynote-with-michael-dell-and-elon-musk-austin-tx-2013-12-12

[Lar]

Aerospace + space == cost plus FAR25 contracts most of the time.

Unsubstantiated.  No basis to support that claim

Do you have citable stats on what the mix of contracts actually are? Either by contract number or by dollar value? Because this certainly is a common perception, it would be interesting to know what the real numbers are.

[Jim]

NASA NLS launches are fixed price
USAF launches are fixed price
Spacehab module missions were fixed price
TDRS  (Boeing) spacecraft were fixed price
Juno (LM) was fixed price.
GOES (Boeing) fixed price

[Prober]

http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Spacex/reviews?id=3630215f0a103a74&from=jobs&irclick=reviewc

"I have been in aerospace for 10 years now and I am at a complete loss for words with how this company is run. There is no tool control which anyone who has been in aviation has had pounded into their head. There is no formal training and worst of all there are no specifications! i.e. there is both a MIL-SPEC and FAA AC 43.13-1B that cover the acceptable criteria of a button head AD rivet (most common fastener in aviation) but not at SpaceX! To back that up most of the tech they hire have little to no experience, best case scenario they spent a few years in the military but thats a select few. The lack of quality is another mind blower. There are very few inspection steps when building some flight critical components which most technicians just skip and hope the inspectors will just shrug it off (most of them do). I have also watched techs forge a signature for an engineer to inspect the turbine wheel after a test run, no big deal.

When I first hired on I was unsure if I had what it took to be an inspector at SpaceX but after a few weeks I quickly realized I was the most qualified. The less experience you have the better so you wont realize how out of control this place is. If the FAA or DCMA ever do an audit this place is going to be shutdown until they get their head out of their behind."

How very, very, 

[Lars_J]

Have you bothered to read these kinds of reviews for other corporations, Prober? I'm sure one can find these kinds of nuggets for the other usual suspects.

[Prober]

Have you bothered to read these kinds of reviews for other corporations, Prober? I'm sure one can find these kinds of nuggets for the other usual suspects.

Not that it matters much, but I have. 

[Lars_J]

Have you bothered to read these kinds of reviews for other corporations, Prober? I'm sure one can find these kinds of nuggets for the other usual suspects.

Not that it matters much, but I have. 

Excellent! Then I trust you can make an informed judgement about these comments.

[meekGee]

Heh, one thing this discussion makes clear though is WHY SpaceX is not hiring from the aerospace industry...   You can't go on about how SpaceX "is doing it wrong and is clueless", and then complain "and why don't you hire me".

(Irrespective of who's right about the rivet standards)

If SpaceX is that bad, then start your own rocket company, or stick with your old one.

[CuddlyRocket]

One can see where some of SpaceX's cost advantage comes from!

It may be that SpaceX is cutting cost too much - unlikely, I suspect, given Elon's well-known emphasis on quality - but the results will determine that. They speak far more loudly than an anonymous post on a site almost tailor made to allow the disgruntled to vent.

[Mader Levap]

"I have been in aerospace for 10 years now and I am at a complete loss for words with how this company is run. (...)"

Nine for nine in extremely hard field (proverbial rocket science) says otherwise. I will take aside things that should have been reported in proper places, not just mentioned off-hand in review, especially considering his purported job.

Other comments are sometimes hilarious...

I don't now how they get that rocket in the air, I guess enough failed attempts everything will fly

[Chris Bergin]

Strange thread. Let's lock it.