Comment by xiphias2
5 years ago
What’s your opinion of what SpaceX is doing with the SN rockets? It’s clearly not waterfall, as SN11 was finished already when the SN10 exploded. SpaceX needs to do modifications to it though. At the same time Elon is working on the assemly line while innovating by running lots of experiments. What SpaceX is doing is clearly state of the art.
To tell you the truth I think waterfall model was not about getting the best manufacturing, but about the leaders not taking any risks and saving their own jobs.
You can certainly keep innovation on an assembly line, hence why I was very specific with my words about optimising the speed of an assembly line. Lean manufacturing for example prioritises innovating on the manufacturing process instead of using an assembly line and gets comparable speeds.
SpaceX is clearly an innovative company and I'm sure they're not using a Ford-style assembly line because that would make no sense for a quality-over-quantity product like a rocket.
By assembly line I specifically mean a Fordian assembly line where units move between stations manned by specialists in a single step of the process.
> By assembly line I specifically mean a Fordian assembly line where units move between stations manned by specialists in a single step of the process.
That was the result of lots of innovation that Ford did. And then all the car companies stopped innovating on it.
For example Ford started to use electric motors for each machine separately instead of having 1 big motor that tried to power all machines. He sped up the assembly line by 10x at least and measured all operarions carefully.
The assembly line you are talking about is the last process set in stone for 100 years instead of innovating further.