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Comment by gibolt | Hacker News Reader

The focus on making lots of prototypes reduces cost. They streamline the largest and most expensive manufacturing bottlenecks.

Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made

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Hmmm, from a manufacturing prespective this is probably the safest way too, because you have already scaled production, you arent suddenly trying out all these new manufacturing processes when starship enters production. All your processes have been continuously validated already.

Failing fast also reduces cost. It cuts down on the time wasted on things that aren't going to work. With traditional design it can take years to find out if something will work or not. And when they don't, it leads to lengthy and expensive redesigns. You avoid all of that by iterating rapidly and building on and perfecting what works and scrapping/replacing what doesn't work before you sink a lot of time and resources in these things

We could have had dozens of James Webb Space Telescopes for the cost of, like, five.

Even better, since larger payloads can fit, the design can be far less complex due to weight and folding limitations.

Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform

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