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Comment by frickinLasers | Hacker News Reader

I shortened the title a bit from "LEAP 71 hot-fires 3D-printed liquid-fuel rocket engine designed through Noyron Computational Model."

From the article:

- First rocket engine built entirely through a computational model without human intervention

- Likely the shortest time from spec to manufacturing for a new rocket engine (2 weeks, usually this process takes many months in manual engineering using CAD)

- First liquid fueled rocket engine developed in the United Arab Emirates

- Engine worked on the first attempt

- No CAD was used in the design

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> Likely the shortest time from spec to manufacturing for a new rocket engine (2 weeks, usually this process takes many months in manual engineering using CAD)

Does anyone in the field of rocketry specifically know if this alleviates some previously annoying constraint?

My uninformed gut suspects that these rocket spend an overwhelming amount of time in the post-design stage (I mean rocket engines seem to stick around for a long, long time, right?). But I’m a programmer I don’t know anything about this stuff.

A software build used to last the whole night.

obligatory https://xkcd.com/303/

Exactly, right, I don’t trust my intuition here because that’s seen as an absurdly long time in software, whereas in rockets it seems like months and weeks just kinda zoom by.

That's the wrong way to think about it.

"We've built a great new way to design physical structures."

"So what? The existing ways work just fine."

"We designed and built a rocket engine in two days."

However, even in the rocket field, there's a "design, simulate, build, test" cycle. They can do two of those steps in effectively 0 time and with significantly lower cost.

Moreover, it looks like the design has incremental feedback from something akin to simulate.

Who are you quoting? The second speaker in your conversation seems to have a pretty negative, incurious, and arrogant tone.

I'm quoting voices in my head having a discussion about this.

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