SpaceX

In 2002, Elon Musk took one hundred million dollars of his own money and started a rocket company with no experience in aerospace. The industry laughed. The first three Falcon 1 launches failed. Each explosion burned through tens of millions of dollars. The fourth launch succeeded with weeks of funding left. SpaceX survived by the thinnest of margins. The manufacturing philosophy is what separates SpaceX from every aerospace company that came before it. Traditional contractors outsource components to hundreds of specialised suppliers. SpaceX builds roughly seventy percent of its components in house, including the engines, avionics, and flight computers. But the real weapon is the iteration speed. SpaceX treats rockets the way software companies treat code. Build it, test it to failure, find the weak point, redesign it overnight, and test again. They deliberately blow up prototypes because each explosion teaches more than a year of computer modelling. The Starship program has gone through dozens of test vehicles. Every explosion is a data set. A single Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX roughly fifteen million dollars to operate and they charge customers sixty seven million.