00:48:32 · Ty Morse
[00:48:32] S0: You can have the desire to ship fast and, like, iterate quickly, but how do you actually design the organization so that the iteration speed and everything is just a cut above anyone else?
00:48:43 · Ethan Thornton
[00:48:43] S1: So one, the most powerful thing is always, like, team size and the types of people you have doing it. There's not that much work to do in aerospace. Like, shipping an iPhone is, like, many orders of magnitude more work than shipping a Glide. The difference is aerospace is so so so coupled. Like, you can't make a decision in a vacuum from any other thing. And so what this means is that most of your engineering time is actually decisions and communication. The best thing you can do to minimize that is to decrease team size. The amount of people that have to communicate with each other grows as the factorial of team size. Exponential. And so the the the best thing you can do, especially in aerospace to make a program move fast, is keep a very small team. Now... And that... You see that throughout history. Like, this is why the SR 71 was something like 15 designed engineers. And I I truly believe that on these programs, like, 10 or 15 of the best people on earth will outship 300 of the top 1% people on earth. But you have to have really, really good people to pull that off, but that's the first thing you have to do. Now that that just means it is always kind of a painful process. Like, teams, they have a lot of work to get done. That's why it's a very intense place to work. That's the first thing. Second thing is deep analysis. Right? Like, you want really, really good hittle. You want excellent aerodynamic... Actually, it applies across literally every domain. Like, analysis is the way you move quickly. Third thing is the ability to cut prototypes incredibly quickly. Like, we're we're joking today watching the pike test. This is like a $2,000,000 test today. Now at rate, Pike will cost significantly less than that. And if I wanted to, today, Pike could cost a lot less than that. The reason that's so expensive is because we we had, like, really four weeks from design release to first flight on the Thay. And that means you're just surging to get the prototype built as quickly as you can. And so this is partially vertically integrating prototyping capabilities and partially, like, excellent vendor relationships, and you're willing to pay these people a lot. Because the cost is not really the pike you're flying.
00:50:42 · Ethan Thornton
The cost is how many weeks did you have a bunch of engineers sitting around working, or more often, like, the overhead of the business, the opportunity cost of not winning the contract. And then the final thing is excellent test. You need to know what you're testing, and you need your, like, test ops to be run clean. We have a very large test organization. And I... It pains me how many aircraft we crashed early in the process, not because of technical reasons. These tests are complex, and you're running, like, 10, 15, 20 tests a week of aircraft. And so you you have to be no fail. Test is also where safety sits. So you wanna just invest so deeply in test. And then everyone jumps to product testing. By the time you're in product testing, it is usually too late. And this is where we still struggle is excellent, excellent, excellent component in subsystem testing. Like, how do I characterize every single portion of the aircraft before it goes in the aircraft and flies? If you're learning something in the air that you could have learned on the ground, you have failed. Test today, right, good release, got into flight, vehicle departed, not a surprise, successful test. But what we learned, you can't go and test that on the ground. You can with a wind tunnel, but it would take us eighteen months to get in, and I don't have $300,000,000 to build a transonic wind tunnel of that size. So you test it in the air. Like, that's a successful test because that's something I had to learn by flying. But if the issue had been, like, a software hang up, that's bad. Like, that is something you can absolutely test on the ground. The other nice thing about test is it immediately allows you to win on manufacturing. Testing on the manufacturing line is one of the... If not the most painful things in the manufacturing process. And so all of the excellence you're generating on component testing along the way, that all goes directly on your manufacturing line to be able to debug problems immediately. Because the thing I said about engineering and the power law of engineering, it applies in the design phase. Unfortunately, it does not apply in the manufacturing phase. And this is not to say manufacturing engineers are less talented. Like, our manufacturing engineering is one of the most talented functions of the company, and they do some of the hardest work.
00:52:49 · Ethan Thornton, Ty Morse
But manufacturing engineering is I'm bringing up this line, and a thousand things just broke at the same time. And I need to run down all thousand of those things immediately. The better you can be testing products along the line and the better you can be collapsing all of that data, those army of manufacturing engineers, you truly need an army of them, have orders of magnitude of an easier time actually getting the thing into right. [00:53:13] S0: For, you know, this vehicle, you don't want just one. Like, when you start testing it, you wanna test 10 in two weeks. And so how do you decide at any given point to basically scale some amount of manufacturing so that you can test as rapidly as possible and get that feedback?
00:53:28 · Ethan Thornton
[00:53:28] S1: The cost is almost always cheaper on average to build more vehicles than you think you will need and test. Now you have to balance this with the fact that this... As soon as the engineers have a bunch of vehicles on hand, they wanna fly them. And so you have to, like, you have to make sure that you're going into tests with everything understood so that you don't start discovering ground test things and flight tests. But, dude, if I... Like, if we build two pikes more than we need in testing, that is not the cost. The cost is if I build too few, and suddenly it's four weeks to go and build the next batch of pikes. So we usually overbuild there. So that's that's the number you choose to build. And then in prototype, you want your prototypes to look distinctly different than scale. I think early in the process of company building, I used to try and brag about how similar my prototypes look to my mass manufactured units. I tried to force that. I think you wanna do basically the exact opposite of that. You need to make sure that you're not expecting to manufacture something that is not manufacturable. So you have your manufacturing engineers there the whole way, but if you have a part and it's like, is this part gonna be cast or is it gonna be machined from a billet? Choose the latter every single time and proto. That said, in scale, I think people... And who who knows? I haven't stood at... Like, we manufacture some things. We don't manufacture a ton yet, so I'm sure I'll eat my words and change this principle over time. What it what it seems to me though, based on conversations with good manufacturers, we made like a thousand aircraft probably in the last twelve months. What it seems is that the the stack ranking of importance on how to get excellent at manufacturing is first DFM. Like, DFM is the truly power law thing, like on glide. Glide block three versus block four. Same aircraft, same exact specs, but literally one process change, one redesign is taking us from, like, fifty operator hours to zero operator hours on that specific airframe and from probably several thousand dollars per airframe down to, like, $7 airframe. And so folks tend to obsess with the fourth step, which I'll get to, which is manufacturing operations, but you really, really wanna focus on DFN. The next is supply chain. I think... And I I I was guilty of this.
00:55:32 · Ethan Thornton, Ty Morse
I think I think supply chain is not as sexy of a thing as it needs to be in company building. Like, I think when most people hear supply chain, they assume, like, the function that, like, goes and buy stuff. I'm fortunate to work with my COO who led supply chain for Tesla, which I think is probably the most, like, exciting supply chain effort that's that's been built in the last [00:55:52] S0: At least in The United States.