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.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 nine 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.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.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.