So make cost optimization cool. I always enjoyed getting rid of production hardware and running as lean as possible within operational constraints. Incentivize cost reduction with benefits proportional to the savings.

You know what’s cooler than an expensive thing? A high quality thing with higher margins. A very well known and highly profitable company has taken that model pretty far (like trillions in valuation far).

Higher margins are not really cool unless you share them, which the engineers probably did not.

Engineers arent really responsible for these types of attitudes though. Management are. By and large engineers will do as they are requested.

I find it far more plausible that costs ballooned due to an empire building dynamic by management than because engineers arm twisted them into building something "cool". Same reason Uber has, like, 150 people working on a mobile app.

"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

Engineering is all about fitting within your constraints. Make budget one of those limits and life will uh find a way.

Much of engineering is "bean counting" but not beans. I think that engineers will do some CYA around safety, but they also appreciate the money arguments because they are inherently numeric in their evaluations.

> If there's [...] no market cnstraints its obvious that the product is going to be really good and really expensive.

Well sure, you literally just removed the cost optimization variable. SpaceX vs. NASA is a clear example demonstrating that engineers can do this sort of optimization when it's given to them as a constraint. NASA's rocket designs were all custom, single-use, often down to the bolts because the budget was per-project/launch, where SpaceX rockets were designed for reuse and cost minimization across multiple launches.

Spacex also had the very small advantage of all the basic science being done for them for free. The constraint in the NASA golden years wasn't getting it done cheaply, it was getting it done at all.

Rockets haven't changed much since the 60s. This doesn't explain all of the launches since the Space Shuttle, for example. Furthermore, SpaceX clearly innovated with their reusable rockets, but this is exactly the kind of cost constraint that commercial ventures prioritize which government ventures often don't.

Minimum Flyable Plane