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Voyager is something that I keep thinking every time I see people talking about what great things musk/spacex are doing with their fail often/fail fast approach
by blensor 2y ago
Voyager is something that I keep thinking every time I see people talking about what great things musk/spacex are doing with their fail often/fail fast approach.
I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
- jballer 2y agoThey’re optimizing for different priorities. Obviously you need to be conservative when launches cost so much you can only afford ~one shot.
- glzone1 2y agoVoyagers were built by JPL and not contracted out so align to a degree with the spacex model. In part this was because budget got cut badly. “In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica I think they also did build a test spacecraft ? Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.