I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "manufacturing" and other development activities in this case. This sort of thing, an effort to build a s

I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "manufacturing" and other development activities in this case. This sort of thing, an effort to build a single example of a device using a mountain of new technology, just can't follow the process of design the whole thing, then manufacture it, then we're done. Kind of like waterfall vs agile software development. They're probably constantly fabricating and testing subsystems in various ways, iterating on manufacturing technique to get quality good enough, making changes in other related subsystems as a result of things they found to be impractical with the first, making sure subsystems actually integrate with each other as expected, etc.