What are the main technical hurdles in launching the Falcon Heavy, given that Spacex is really good at launching single F9s?

They're silly questions, from an engineering standpoint. It's not really a "strong position," either; If you really want to know the answer to these questions in their gory detail, you need to become an engineer. And, it's not bitter. Not especially. Most of r/spacex is a complete waste of time. And I don't mean because space is a waste of time (It kinda is.), but because the discussions are mostly incompetent. It's the equivalent of 8th-graders talking about sex; The discussion is just a way to feel smart, but is completely out of touch with even the first reality of the thing under discussion.

There may or may not be "main technical hurdles" to the Falcon Heavy. Who knows. But, even the shape of these questions is wrong. You don't feel your way through engineering with hunches about what's most likely. You do analyses and trade studies and finite element models and modal decomposition and failure mode effects analyses and you choose suppliers and design fabrication processes and run component and integration tests....it's just not summarizable. What is true about that system comes out of that process. To know the answer in any way is to have a result of that process. It's the most contingent thing you can imagine, and to even think that there's a wet-finger-in-the-breeze answer is to admit to complete engineering virginity.

I'll tell you what, the answers aren't even worth knowing for you, or for me. Because neither of us are on the design team, because neither of us have any input into that launch system, and because those answers are so contingent on everything about those actual systems (and not our idealizations of those systems), and because that work is sooo tedious, we don't actually want to know. It's useless information for anyone not building that system.

If you want to work on systems like the F9 and the Heavy, you really need to do your calculus homework and get into a good state school. And you need to be prepared to stare at a lot of code, fiddle with a lot of spreadsheets, attend a ton of deeply technical and mentally taxing meetings, and to be responsible for a very small part of a much larger system.

But you won't believe me, because you don't have an engineering degree.

/r/spacex Thread Parent