Another “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, but this is spacecraft edition.
A few highlights:
- 2 — To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
- 4 — Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.
- 7 — At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
- 11 — Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
- 19 — The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.
- 23 — The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
- 36 — Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.