SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says

Re:SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says by panick21_ on Monday November 07, 2022 @05:05AM (#33503807)

I certainty don't don't have your expertise here. It sound like a case of doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. If you don't keep updating incrementally you have difficult single updates and issues stick around for longer. If you update incrementally you have a lot of issues with tracking all the different versions and potential inconsistency. Its really quite a bit like software in terms of rolling release vs stable upgrades.

What I mean by 'manage with software' is that each car has an exact description of what hardware is in it. Meaning what revision of every part. Tesla has some advantage because they manage the process end to end, knowing exactly what vehicle was sold to what costumer and the control the service center and write the diagnostic software so the service center should know exactly what car they are working on and what potential problems each revision of the software has.

In the 70s when Deming advocated for this such extensive version tracking would likely be much harder.

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Re:SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says by bumby on Monday November 07, 2022 @03:46PM (#33512175)

Ah, ok. Your clarification on software for version tracking makes a lot of sense and I completely agree.

The software management issue I was talking about was a different animal. Take the Ariane V; the idea was the could iterate faster if they leveraged software reuse. Since it was previously verified software, they didn't think it needed much testing. But the new rocket design exceeded the assumptions in the previous iteration and the vehicle was lost. There's a lot of instances where software allows you to iterate faster, but you have to very careful about the baked in assumptions.

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