When I was in basic research I thought that concept development and prototyping represented the hard part of the work, requiring actual brain power. Show it wo

When I was in basic research I thought that concept development and prototyping represented the hard part of the work, requiring actual brain power. Show it works and the rest is "engineering." Then, I moved to industry where products have to meet size, weight, and power restrictions, be manufacturable, testable, deployable, and usable by people who have other things to do. Aircraft usually come down so add serviceability. For most space applications, it's even more stressing. Even within engineering disciplines there's a tendency to "throw the design over the wall to manufacturing." It usually leads to bad news. The transition from TRL(Technology Readiness Level) 4 to TRL 7 in NASA's parlance is called the "Valley of Death" for good reason. https://mkainsights.com/insights/fundamentals-operations/trl/ https://mkainsights.com/insights/fundamentals-operations/trl...