Andy Walsh2x Exited Founder, Startup Strategist & Podcast Host

Why Elon Musk Throws Away Half the Parts

10 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:47

Elon Musk is cutting rocket costs by eliminating roughly half of engine components, which paradoxically made them work better. He's pursuing reusable rockets and heat shields to enable day-after-day Starship flights, targeting launch prices one-tenth to one-thousandth of current rates.

Chapters

When Elon Musk said, I want to make getting cargo to space 1/10th, 1/100th, 1/1000th the cost, how do I do it? He started to think of foghnamly. So reusable rockets are foghnamly. That was something that people thought couldn't be done. Reusable tiles were getting there. I don't know if you saw the last launch of Starship. It looked very good. I don't know how good, but the idea that you could have reusable tiles and go up day after day. Amazing. But look at the engine. He looked at the engine and said, we can simplify this. And if you look at the simplification, it looks like they threw away half the parts and they ended up with a better engine.