As I go along this tutorial (which is awesome!), I copy-paste most of the commands that I encounter to work along inside my own spack installation. When I copy-paste this line "spack install netlib-scalapack ^openmpi ^netlib-lapack" from here it fails with an error. After some digging I found out that this is the expected behavior and should only be encountered later in the tutorial.
I guess a note saying "don't copy-paste these commands here" right in front of this would help:
$ spack install netlib-scalapack ^openmpi ^openblas
$ spack install netlib-scalapack ^mpich ^openblas
$ spack install netlib-scalapack ^openmpi ^netlib-lapack
$ spack install netlib-scalapack ^mpich ^netlib-lapack
$ spack install py-scipy ^openblas