I agree 100%. After reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" I was really blown away by what kinds of problems the engineers at

I agree 100%. After reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" I was really blown away by what kinds of problems the engineers at spaceX deal with. It makes my job as software engineer seem like a monkey with a typewriter could do it. It's many levels of magnitude more complex and there are no frameworks to just download and leverage. you're pretty much constantly inventing new stuff. edit, one example of the kind of problems they deal with: initial rocket testing was done on an island near Hawaii, so the engineers had to build their own living space and stay there full time rolling out this big heavy rocket onto an open field for testing and then rolling it back into it's hangar every day in grueling heat. they'd work 15 hr days which was pretty much expected and thankless. when there was component failure Elon would use his Jet to get parts at radio shack in a different state and fly it over to CA for testing, and then straight to the island speed up the work. Something that would take NASA months would take SpaceX days or weeks since they didn't need "space grade" components but instead used common parts. They'd just ensure that those parts passed enough tests that they could be confident of the quality.