Hacker News Reader

So your advice is to just suck it up and accept that interested people need to spend billions and study for decades on the issue, because learning from previously successful endeavors is a worse teacher. Right.

It's fine to just half-ass it if the interest is only superficial or for a hobby. Otherwise it might create a very unrealistic expectation in the student, because the gained knowledge by doing it like that is pretty worthless in a professional setting

View on HN

No, I was not suggesting education is not useful.

But if one is to study rocketry without an aeronautics degree I'm guessing it's better to start from hobby level engines and vehicles and then scale up.

There is lot of added complexity due to size and mission constraints that is vehicle specific in Falcon Heavy, and I'm not sure how one would even use it as a learning platform - unless there is a university curriculum built around the vehicle.

There are lot of basics that model rocketry probably gives a good intuition for but then to my limited understanding it becomes (drumroll) rocket science.

Learn from the past but don't take it as gospel because people probably worked with different constraints and assumptions that might be completely different today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com