There is always a discussion that breaks on in the agile community about how Burt Ruthan got to win the X-Prize with a minimal set of processes and how this is an illustration of how agile processes can be applied to heavy weight domains to reduce cost and improvement performance.
Well, there's a bit more as always to any analogy. I found thorough a posting on the Agile Project Management forum a nice set of numbers comparing Burt's wonderful achievement to the lifting of other payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LOE).
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/08/wwbrd_one_readers_an.html
Add to this the payload increases and you need a machine that looks like this.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/delta/d310/041221launch/03.html
None of this must take away from the stupendous achievement of Ruthan. I was in the hallway watching TV when SC1 successfully completed its second flight to win the prize. The propulsion and structures engineers in the group were "wowed" like us in finance and business operation (that's where program planning lives).
But to take that achievement and extend it to other domains - say agile project management - misses many important details. Not the least of which is SC1 did not orbit, it went up and down inside a small (30 mile) radius from the launch location. All good stuff, but we're far far away from replacing commerical launch vehicles.
The rub here is that agile project management or agile software development has a specific "sweet spot." When the enthusiasm of the purveyors of agile methods move off the business domain coordinates of that sweet spot, they also move off the applicability of those methods to the new problem.
Agile does not solve every problem it encounters.
Besides many of the agile practices are incorporated in modern program and project management methods anyway. The target of most agile project management methods is PMBOK, which is no where to be found in aerospace development programs.
