Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design
I don’t feel like a field that has in its entire history only produced a handful of actual successful designs at all can possibly rate this kind of ‘world weary cynicism’ style of writing.<p>Nobody has the experience or ability to be able to say ‘trust me I’ve built a few spaceships, this is the hard won truth of how it is’. There are exactly <i>nine</i> spacecraft that humans have ever flown in. Only the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs really accumulated any kind of experience and that experience was extremely specific to a particular place and time and organization.<p>So sure, some general engineering truisms in here have the ring of wisdom to them and us non-spacecraft engineers can nod at them and quote them with the cachet they get from being associated with NASA.<p>But ‘trust me I have been teaching people to design spacecraft for decades’ doesn’t really count for much when during those decades no new spacecraft designs were actually getting made and launched.