rexskimmer

CAD generally has a steep learning curve, but once you're adept at it it can be easy to create surprisingly complex parts in very little time. Professional CAD packages can make this even faster with more complicated built-in tools. But time spent designing in CAD is usually focusing on figuring out some particular dimension...or dealing with the thousand obscure bugs, crashes, and constraint failures that seem to plague all CAD software.

Step files are just "dumb" solids and are not useful if you actually want to edit a model's features or relationships. Almost all CAD software keeps the actual editable model info in proprietary file types. Some CAD programs can generate a part file from a step file with varying degrees of success, the professional CAD packages (CREO, CATIA) being the best at it, but even then they often fail to produce a complete part for anything that is remotely complex. Step files are mostly used to export a final product to production (CNC, 3D printing, etc), or sometimes used incorporate common hardware into a larger assembly, like a simple bracket or something.

> And bearings/motors are such mature tech that they can last decades, even a century without replacement.

This is not true at all for bearings in large industrial systems under constant load. As the mass scales up, the systems become exponentially more sensitive to vibrations from wear of the mechanical parts. Even magnetic bearings max out at about 20 years.

Flywheel systems are more complicated and expensive than simple chemical batteries. Cost also scales much more than batteries as you increase the energy storage. They are also less efficient over time due to friction even with magnetic bearings.

There is also NASA's upcoming mission to Titan, where they plan to fly an octocopter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)

It's mostly an socioeconomic problem, at least for US public education. People don't want to pay for other people's kids.

And the rest are in DC.

We are decades away from asteroid mining at best, even assuming we go all in starting today. The difficulties and numerous engineering challenges of mining at zero g cannot be understated.

All of the above for me.

No. A gear train is just a transfer of force/torque. It's analogous to a simple lever for rotational motion. Mechanical impedance is almost always referring to harmonic forces (think of spring systems and structural dynamics). Impedance in fluids also fall under mechanical impedance but it's usually classified separately as acoustic impedance.

The whole article appears use a very loose philosophical definition of "impedance". As a mechanical engineer, none of the mechanical examples are correct either when there are real-world examples that actually meet the more strict technical definition of impedance matching, mass-damper systems in skyscrapers is immediate example that comes to mind.

They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.