The Algorithm: SpaceX’s Five-Step Process For Better Engineering

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.