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If they don't investigate the science behind "why" how do you think they come up with new ideas and improvements? I'm sure they don't discard their learnings!

• bumby 7y ago
  I probably didn’t explain well. Say they have a check valve in their titanium system that fails. They could spend a lot of research dollars on the fundamental science of why that valve failed or just replace it with a burst disk. From an operational engineering point, they may feel like they solved the problem. But from a scientific standpoint we haven’t learned much other than “check valves are bad”. It’s akin to the old joke about a mathematician, physicist, and engineer trying to find the volume of a cow. The mathematician tries to formulate a triple integral for the cow’s shape. The physicist drops the cow in water and measures the displacement. The engineer says, “let’s suppose the cow is a sphere...” Point being, often in engineering they’re shooting for “good enough to get the job done” not to increase fundamental understanding
  • chha 7y ago
    You can do both though. Replace the valve with a burst disc now, just so testing can continue. Investigate the valve in parallel with testing, and place it back in whenever you think you've solved it, if you still need it.
    • bumby 7y ago
      What I’m saying is that I don’t get the impression they do the latter for a variety of reasons. I.e., they solve the engineering problem and move forward. However, I think NASA may move forward with the research part
    • gpm 7y ago
      You can, but it is expensive. SpaceX definitely does some research, but they are also definitely not in it for researches sake. If it isn't necessary to get to mars, and it isn't going to make them money to figure out why, they're probably just going to drop it.
  • sciurus 7y ago
    As I've heard that joke, it's the engineer who suggests measuring displacement and the physicist who wants to assume the cow is a sphere. The joke is that physicist's models oversimplify reality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
    • bumby 7y ago
      Maybe I got I wrong, but then again I originally heard it from a physicist so they may have deliberately changed it :)
    • Ericson2314 7y ago
      (Theoretical) physicists would throw out data to simplify, engineers would throw out theory.