That's honestly one of the reasons I moved out of "old aerospace" - it's so easy to get pigeonholed and it becomes easier for people to stop learning.
14 karma · joined May 22, 2019
[edit]: Both options of thruster choice make sense for different missions so it starts with customer conversations usually. We'll work with a customer to understand their mission requirements and then design a system to match. Some of the things feeding into the trade would be the mass of the spacecraft, how fast the customer needs to get to orbit, the footprint we can take up externally, and any preferences for redundancy. I'll also look to see if I can build a system with existing thrusters vs. designing a new one. (For example, if the customer wants 48N of thrust, I would suggest using 2 x 22N thrusters and getting close to the goal instead of designing a custom engine)