I would think the best way to keep SpaceX rockets from exploding is to get Musk as far away as possible from any engineering decisions. I firmly believe that SpaceX has only done as well as it has because the engineering is so far above Musk's knowledge that actual aeronautical engineers can do what they do and throw some technobabble at him to shut him up when he suggests dumb thing.

▲

simonh 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Multiple current, and more significantly former SpaceX engineers have confirmed Musk was the driving force behind the engineering decisions that lead to reusability for Falcon 9.

He’s also been very much in the driving seat on engineering for Starship, and we’ve yet to see how well that works out, but the success of F9 is there to see.

	▲	AngryData 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are also stories from engineers at both SpaceX and Tesla that they do everything possible to keep him away from any engineering decisions because he doesn't know what he was talking about. His brainchild of the cybertruck was suppose to be a monolithic bent stainless steel shell that he spent years trying to accomplish and fired many engineers over who said it wouldn't work, and we see how that turned out with strips of low quality stainless glued onto aluminum parts that are suppose to be load bearing with a regular steel undercarriage that will still rust away.

▲

ACCount37 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The whole notion that "Musk doesn't know anything about technology or engineering" is incorrect. Probably stems from all the people trying to reconcile their hatred for Elon Musk with SpaceX's outstanding successes.

Quite a few major engineering decisions at SpaceX go all the way to Elon Musk himself. One of the best known is probably the decision to make Starship land onto the "chopsticks" of the launch tower, removing the need for dedicated landing legs.

Elon Musk made this suggestion back in 2020. Most of the engineers tried to talk him out of this crazy idea. So he took the few engineers who thought it was plausible and assigned it to them.

We even know for certain that this wasn't a success that got attributed to Musk after the fact - because this story was first printed in a biography in year 2023, when it wasn't clear whether this ambitious landing method would work in practice. The first "return to launch tower" attempt was only made in year 2024, and succeeded on the first try.

	▲	AngryData 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Musk has no engineering degrees, has never worked in any engineering capacity, has no patents under his belt, and has constantly run into engineering blunders directly attributed to his lack of understanding in SpaceX and all his other businesses. I think you are delusional if you think Musk has any more engineering knowledge than a highschooler with a B in science, nothing he has ever said or done has shown otherwise. On top of that I have seen numerous stories out of SpaceX itself that Elon has to be distracted away from anything important because he thinks he knows better than people with decades in aeronautical engineering.