Mike's Notes
I like solving impossible problems; everything else is boring.
I will apply this five-step method to Pipi and to Ajabbi's future internal culture. The method could be applied to discovering a cure for breast cancer, lowering housing costs, and building safer ships.
According to Google Search: AI Mode (Gemini).
The "Way": The Five-Step Algorithm
At SpaceX, engineers are trained in a specific "Algorithm" to tackle impossible technical hurdles. The process must be followed in this strict order to avoid the "expert's trap" of perfecting things that shouldn't exist:
- Question every requirement: Every requirement must have a specific person’s name attached—not just a department. Even those from "the smart guys" (including Musk himself) must be challenged to make them "less dumb".
- Delete any part or process you can: Engineers are encouraged to delete until they are forced to add 10% back; otherwise, they aren't deleting enough.
- Simplify and optimise: Only optimise after questioning and deleting. A common mistake is optimising a process that should have been eliminated entirely.
- Accelerate cycle time: Increase speed only after the first three steps are complete to ensure you aren't just "digging your own grave" faster.
- Automate: Automation is the final step, used only once the design is refined and proven.
The Culture: "Responsible Engineers" (REs)
SpaceX replaces traditional siloed management with a flat structure centred on Responsible Engineers.
- Total Ownership: An RE owns their component from requirements and design through to manufacturing and flight.
- Systems Thinking: Every engineer must understand the whole vehicle, not just their subsystem, to ensure local optimisations don't hurt the global mission.
- Information Velocity: Direct communication is required; anyone can talk to anyone to solve a problem, bypassing hierarchical "chain of command" protocols.
Resources
- https://aviationweek.com/space/commercial-space/algorithm-spacexs-five-step-process-better-engineering
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdf3luOCNks
References
- Reference
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
- Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
28/04/2026
The Algorithm: SpaceX’s Five-Step Process For Better Engineering
Based in the Seattle area, Garrett Reim covers the space sector and advanced technologies that are shaping the future of aerospace and defense, including space startups, advanced air mobility and artificial intelligence.
Guy Norris is a Senior Editor for Aviation Week, covering technology and propulsion. He is based in Colorado Springs.
Irene Klotz is Senior Space Editor for Aviation Week, based in Cape Canaveral. Before joining Aviation Week in 2017, Irene spent 25 years as a wire service reporter covering human and robotic spaceflight, commercial space, astronomy, science and technology for Reuters and United Press International.
What is behind SpaceX’s success? According to one former top employee, it is something called “The Algorithm.”
Tim Berry, head of manufacturing and quality at blended-wing-body startup JetZero, spent a decade at SpaceX leading the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy family of rockets upper-stage production team. Berry also led the Dragon Crew and Cargo integration team and was head of additive manufacturing.
How the Raptor 3 rocket engine was streamlined
“Your requirements are definitely dumb; You have to find a way to make them less dumb.”
The Algorithm was “drilled into our minds,” he said at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aviation Forum in Las Vegas in July. “It’s a five-step process for improving the design, making it ultimately easier to manufacture and finding ways to optimize along the way as well.”
Step 1 is: “Challenge the requirements,” Berry said. “Or as our benefactor used to say, ‘Your requirements are definitely dumb; you have to find a way to make them less dumb.’”
Step 2 involves deleting a part or a process step. “Really looking at the full value chain of what you’re working on and eliminating any unnecessary process steps while also finding opportunities to delete parts ultimately yields an overall optimization, whether it’s a reduction in labor or cycle time or anything like that,” he said.
Step 3: “Find additional opportunities to simplify the design or optimize it,” Berry said. “Make it easier to manufacture or eke a few more points of performance out of it.”
Step 4 is all about speed. “Find even more ways to go faster,” Berry explained. “You add more stations; you ramp up the manufacturing.”
And then, finally—Step 5—you automate. “Most people start with Step 5, and they automate a process that never should have existed in the first place,” said Berry. “It’s really important that you work the steps in order.”
After completing Step 5, rinse and repeat. “You’re never satisfied,” Berry said. “You’re constantly going back and finding opportunities to challenge your requirements, deleting more parts, simplifying, optimizing, going faster, and then finally, opportunities to automate, but only once you’ve really boiled down to the baseline process.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is keen on reducing engineering to its basics via first principles thinking. Aristotle invented the first principles method some 2,400 years ago in his Metaphysics, describing it as trying to understand “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
“The normal way that we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy,” Musk explained in a 2012 interview. “We’re doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it’s like what other people are doing. It’s mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths.”
Musk often talks about competing SpaceX’s hardware against the laws of nature rather than other products on the market. That philosophy has driven SpaceX employees to simplify the Raptor rocket engine from something that looked “like a Christmas tree with how much stuff is on it” to a more spartan look, Berry said.
In August, SpaceX revealed the drastically streamlined Raptor 3 engine (see photo) and test-fired it. The company ditched a heat shield on the latest iteration of the methane-fueled engine by taking plumbing and wiring that was previously hanging on the outside and fusing it into the motor’s metal structure. To do so, SpaceX heavily relied on 3D printing, Musk wrote on the social media site X.
The sea-level variant of the Raptor 3 weighs 3,362 lb., compared with the 3,594-lb. Raptor 2, while generating 280 tons of force, compared with the current rocket’s 230 tons of force. The total weight of the Raptor 3 plus vehicle commodities and hardware is 3,792 lb. compared with the Raptor 2’s 6,338 lb.
“The amount of work required to simplify the Raptor engine, internalize secondary flow paths and add regenerative cooling for exposed components was staggering,” Musk said. “Getting close to the limit of known physics,” he added in another post.
