What is something about engineering that everyone should know but no one does?

Engineering is about bringing something to reality for use by real people. Fighting through the design, material science, logic, chemistry, cost, and company level politics to make something real people can use to move one step forward. Engineering may involve science internally within a company, but not necessarily.

Science is not engineering. Science is about finding and proving something new that was never known in the past, allowing us to move forward as a society using that new concept in our designs and lives. Science is important to figure out new totally new concepts we can do, but isn't necessarily tasked with bringing it to market.

e.g. Rocket science involves figuring out new fuels for specific use cases, new flight and orbital profiles, new possibilities of in space propulsion and other technologies.

Rocket engineering today involves applying the decades of rocket science developed by researchers and often looking at the engineering methods done by firms over the past 100 years. For example, the science that SpaceX is applying isn't new in any way, but their engineering team is able to use it to bring to market a vehicle platform built on modern manufacturing methods and meeting a price point that is highly competitive.

/r/engineering Thread