by John Macdonald | May 11, 2024 | The250
You can plan. You can measure twice and cut once. You can think ahead. But at the end of the day, sometimes the universe pulls its goalie in the middle of the period. Now what? Now, you dig in and find solutions. You improvise. You could never have...
by John Macdonald | May 10, 2024 | The250
Engineers are like all non-engineers — nobody wants to fail. Nobody wants their design to fail. Nobody wants their decision to be the cause. Nobody wants to be seen as bad at their job. But really, nobody wants to be blamed. Measure twice. Cut...
by John Macdonald | May 9, 2024 | The250
Engineers are famous for proclamations such as “You can’t make a baby in one month with nine women.” Reality, and such. There are laws of physics and biology, after all. But also, physics doesn’t control how much effort you put in or the...
by John Macdonald | May 8, 2024 | The250
As engineers, we have a love-hate relationship with cost. On the one hand, we like to start with a clean sheet of paper and dream. What if cost didn’t matter at all? What could we build? But also, cost is one of those existential variables that...
by John Macdonald | May 7, 2024 | The250
When Elon started SpaceX, he looked around at the history, players, and current state of rocket-making and believed it could be done better, faster, cheaper. He came up with a set of rules that engineers would live by in SpaceX: Question every cost. Have a...
