Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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You may wonder ‘How can launching a SpaceX’s rockets possibly be 3 times cheaper than its competitors?’. One of the amazing obsessions of Musk is cutting down the cost of manufacturing parts. He does this mainly through producing parts in-house. This method however, often has expensive initial investment for equipment and machinery. The labour cost and prototyping are also expensive. Musk is taking a risk with his strict budgeting and trusting his employees on using resources carefully. 32 But as mentioned earlier, Jobs and Musk’s key ability is to make their employee believe that something which seems impossible is possible. "In addition to building its own engines… and capsules, SpaceX designs its own motherboards … solar panels…," Vance wrote. "The cost savings for a homemade radio are dramatic, dropping from between $50,000 to $100,000 for the industrial-grade equipment used by aerospace companies to $5,000 for SpaceX's unit." – Ashlee Vance 33 As mentioned earlier, the culture of SpaceX reflects a playground for the most talented engineers to bond around. In fact, SpaceX is the definition of engineering at its finest, they are producing ‘space-grade’ parts using the budget of a start-up company.

32 Sam Ashe-Edmunds, "The Pros & Cons Of Manufacturing Products With In-House Manufacturing", Bizfluent, Last modified 2018, https://bizfluent.com/info-8120513-pros-manufacturing-products-inhouse-manufacturing.html. Web. 11 April. 2018. 33 Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk , 1st ed. repr., London: Ebury Publishing, 2016