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This is very interesting! I wonder if it'll ever come to the point where it'll be cheaper to just do trial and error more often and keep fixing issues than to t
by makmanalp 13y ago
This is very interesting! I wonder if it'll ever come to the point where it'll be cheaper to just do trial and error more often and keep fixing issues than to take the big-design-up-front approach.
- DougWebb 13y agoI doubt it. Unlike software, the material costs for a spaceflight are substantial and they're mostly/completely unrecoverable. Especially if your trial becomes an error. [edit] Also, building, launching, and operating spacecraft are a lot more like bridge building and other non-software engineering projects. Each spacecraft may be unique, but they're made up of well-understood parts that go together in well-understood ways using time-testing engineering practices that make simulations and modeling truly useful and big-design-up-front feasible. We don't have much of that in software engineering yet, so trial-and-error is still a necessary tactic.