Comment by plugger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plugger | Hacker News Reader

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> I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.”

The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.

USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.

I used to be part of a very successful competitive robotics team. You'll be surprised at how many student teams have this one guy who has been doing his PhD forever/startup founder who spun off from your team and mentors it that exist in the more successful teams.

I've seen PhDs whove mastered the art of being in the same uni team. One of them I knew has followed the path from undergrad (4 years), masters (2 years), RA (2 years), Phd (7 years), Post-doc (2 years).

Another is a startup founder who started the team in undergrad, worked as an RA for 4 years, then spun-off his own company over the next 6 years.

For the most part its beneficial for the uni to retain such talent. Especially, cause they are better grounded than some of the professors who claim to be "experts".

Unless they turn faculty I kinda doubt it. Not to sully your robot team, but I expect many of these students to want to progress to bigger and better things in the commercial space launch sector which they can't do at USC. Also, money.

But I'll ask them now, and get a real answer.

Actually, they have a team bio on their site. They look quite young to me.

https://www.uscrpl.com/the-team

Founded in 2005. They probably have a very strong Knowledge transfer system and alumni network in place (useful for funding). This is something I can attest to when I go back to my college days.

> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience

For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.

>Their main competitive advantage

Their advantage is institutional buy in and resource allocation.

A collegiate team that has to piss a huge fraction of their man hours on overhead tasks and fundraising has no chance of success.

Isn't their main advantage that every student at USC is rich AF? It's one of the wealthiest student bodies in the land.

At schools like that a pretty decent amount of students are on partial or full rides from scholarship or financial aid fwiw.

Somewhat but it's still such a wealthy student body that if everyone in the photo was from a family worth millions that would not even be a very unlikely statistical anomaly.

Apparently at USC the proportion of people on some form of aid is over 2/3.

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