4 ms·
15 years ahead is a good rule of thumb for DoD / Aerospace. 3D printing and additive manufacturing used to carry monikers like Rapid Prototyping and Stereolitho
by ArtWomb 7y ago
15 years ahead is a good rule of thumb for DoD / Aerospace. 3D printing and additive manufacturing used to carry monikers like Rapid Prototyping and Stereolithography but has been in use for decades. Another metric is cost, which is typically many orders of magnitude ahead of the inevitible consumer tech version.
I love reading about space history. And the part of the article that hit home was the floor with 200+ engineers working as a team. That engineering led culture is giving way to financial dominance.
The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course:
A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing-lost-its-bearings/602188/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
- jkaptur 7y agoI was struck, though, by this quote: "my Electrical System Engineer Al Gross threw me a curve. He said, 'Bob, we need to connect two new circuits with a couple of diodes. I don't know where you are going to put them, but I don’t want to add them to the Recovery Programmer as this will trigger a requal program,' That would require a lot of work and paperwork to requalify the programmer." I don't know enough about aerospace to really follow this (or even to know what a "programmer" is in this context), but it certainly sounds strikingly similar to Boeing's use of ad-hoc engineering solutions to avoid expensive retraining of pilots. Perhaps technical corporate culture has always been a complicated relationship between finance and engineering. Triumphantly successful projects tend to make everyone forget about the tension, while miserable failures lead to more introspection.