4 ms·

So tech is unreliable because so many people work on different parts, that everything is a fragmented mess? How can one fix this problem?

astrodust 14y ago
Having a large number of people in the chain isn't the problem, it's that no manufacturing process is perfect and defects in design or production are often not obvious until you've tested the item in the field. Further, since it's not practical to test things on Mars, so you can imagine how difficult this can be for the engineers here on Earth. The process described here is typical of many companies because it's not possible for one person to do all of these steps. The level of expertise required is too high. You may be a great mechanical engineer, but do you know about the performance characteristics of the hundreds of different kinds of grease? About the way the sleeve should be machined? There's a list of specializations thousands of items long, and at best you'll be able to truly master only a small percentage of these even through a whole career. The ultimate reason technology is unreliable is because the world is a complicated, crazy place that often exposes you to situations you're not prepared for.
HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
Let's not say it's unreliable. That doesn't really have much meaning without context: the reliability I expect from my car is much lower than the reliability I expect from a space probe. Instead, let's consider that everything ever built will fail under a certain set of conditions. Understanding a particular component's reliability means understanding all the things that are likely to go wrong over its lifetime and fixing some, and characterizing others. The many people working on different parts is an outcome of different concerns seeing different problems and applying solutions. These solutions are sometimes contradictory: a weak potentiometer shaft may be improved by using a particular alloy of steel instead of, say, aluminum. But now that alloy may make the part too heavy, or too expensive, or it may create problems for the bearing it has to sit in, etc. What you see in the long development time isn't that something is necessarily "unreliable" it's that it takes that long to understand how it can fail and make it reliable enough to sustain the mission. This is already why engineers will tend to use tried and true parts: they already understand them completely.

astrodust 14y ago

Having a large number of people in the chain isn't the problem, it's that no manufacturing process is perfect and defects in design or production are often not obvious until you've tested the item in the field. Further, since it's not practical to test things on Mars, so you can imagine how difficult this can be for the engineers here on Earth. The process described here is typical of many companies because it's not possible for one person to do all of these steps. The level of expertise required is too high. You may be a great mechanical engineer, but do you know about the performance characteristics of the hundreds of different kinds of grease? About the way the sleeve should be machined? There's a list of specializations thousands of items long, and at best you'll be able to truly master only a small percentage of these even through a whole career. The ultimate reason technology is unreliable is because the world is a complicated, crazy place that often exposes you to situations you're not prepared for.

HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago

Let's not say it's unreliable. That doesn't really have much meaning without context: the reliability I expect from my car is much lower than the reliability I expect from a space probe. Instead, let's consider that everything ever built will fail under a certain set of conditions. Understanding a particular component's reliability means understanding all the things that are likely to go wrong over its lifetime and fixing some, and characterizing others. The many people working on different parts is an outcome of different concerns seeing different problems and applying solutions. These solutions are sometimes contradictory: a weak potentiometer shaft may be improved by using a particular alloy of steel instead of, say, aluminum. But now that alloy may make the part too heavy, or too expensive, or it may create problems for the bearing it has to sit in, etc. What you see in the long development time isn't that something is necessarily "unreliable" it's that it takes that long to understand how it can fail and make it reliable enough to sustain the mission. This is already why engineers will tend to use tried and true parts: they already understand them completely.