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I don't think it is that impressive anymore. We've been building rockets for decades. Making them return to Earth is peanuts compared to building a self driving car. You can even make a simulation that is 99% accurate without much effort. Also, rocket science is just Newtonian physics.

Of course, building a rocket requires a shit-ton of resources, so if anything is impressive then it's the management of those resources.



> Also, rocket science is just Newtonian physics.

Disagree.

The newtonian physics part of flying a rocket is indeed the boring part of rocket science in these days of Ghz computing.

But all the engineering (an altogether different - if related - discipline) required is anything but simple.

And engineering and all of its sub-disciplines (materials science, propellant research, iterative refinement, operational research, logistics, 3d printing, computing, simulation, structural engineering, etc...) is both where the complexity lives and where the greatest progress in rocket science has been made.

The devil is in details, as usual.


Yup, as an engineer the "nuts and bolts" of all this stuff is the really hard part.

The stresses, forces, environment etc that these machines face mean that it is always impressive the don't blow up.

And its silly talk to say that the ESA shouldn't have its own rocket programmes.


I view the things you mention as incremental improvements on stuff that basically worked since the 60s.


If we want to get real pedantic, the Chinese invented rocket powered flight around 1000AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huo_Che


They're only incremental improvements in the sense that developing LLMs is an incremental improvement on stuff that basically worked in the 60s.


There was no way to solve hypersonic retropropulsion without doing it.


> Also, rocket science is just Newtonian physics.

Spoken like a true software engineer ;)


Software engineers have a lack of self-esteem when comparing to other STEM disciplines. The reason we see more fuck-ups in software than in other fields is not because software engineers are stupid, but because software is inherently difficult.


Rockets and drugs discovery seems harder but failure is part of those discipline and they are managed accordingly. It's rarely the case in software.


Software engineers are not stupid, but in other STEM disciplines they have a reputation of making themselves look stupid because of beliefs like "it's just newtonian physics".




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