> But at the same time it shows that rocket tech is not as difficult as people make it out to be.

It really doesn't. The scale model probably weighs a few pounds where as the real Falcon Heavy weighs 3 million pounds [1]. Think about what a different scale that is!

Also note that the scale model's (really cool) test flight failed -- with the real Falcon Heavy that lesson would cost something like $150M.

I think this is kind of similar to: it's really easy to query/serve a SQL database even if it's a few tens of terabytes in size. But make it a few tens of exabytes, and things are dramatically more difficult due to the scale. The architecture that works at the terabyte size (single machine) falls over completely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

This thing doesn’t fly as high as a bottle rocket. What makes building rockets hard not the avionics but economics and the good old rocket equation. A cool model is really solving a very different but still fun problem.

Those open source tools are sometimes how I stay employed. Wouldn't want to be without HN.