I worked for five years at Draper, an R&D lab mostly in the USA military-industrial complex. I did a lot of calculations of the form “if we build this kind of gadget (usually a sensor), will it to actually meet the performance requirement?”. I was usually involved at a very early stage, when there was a wide space of possible design decisions and we hadn’t committed to anything yet, let alone started prototyping etc. As the project proceeds, you ramp up to more and more detailed models that make fewer and fewer assumptions, and you start supplementing that with prototype data and so on… but meanwhile the project costs are growing exponentially and it becomes almost impossible to make any more big design changes. So the calculations needed to be as faithful as possible, right from the earliest BOTEC / spreadsheet stage. No factor-of-2π errors allowed!! I think I was good at it … or at least, if I screwed anything up, nobody ever told me. :)
The firm also had projects that for things like designing & building actual gadgets that would then actually get launched to the moon, and other stuff like that. I wasn’t as directly involved in those—again, I was more of a low-TRL specialist—but some of my friends there were, so I became at least vaguely aware of the procedures and checks and balances that they were using.
I worked for five years at Draper, an R&D lab mostly in the USA military-industrial complex. I did a lot of calculations of the form “if we build this kind of gadget (usually a sensor), will it to actually meet the performance requirement?”. I was usually involved at a very early stage, when there was a wide space of possible design decisions and we hadn’t committed to anything yet, let alone started prototyping etc. As the project proceeds, you ramp up to more and more detailed models that make fewer and fewer assumptions, and you start supplementing that with prototype data and so on… but meanwhile the project costs are growing exponentially and it becomes almost impossible to make any more big design changes. So the calculations needed to be as faithful as possible, right from the earliest BOTEC / spreadsheet stage. No factor-of-2π errors allowed!! I think I was good at it … or at least, if I screwed anything up, nobody ever told me. :)
The firm also had projects that for things like designing & building actual gadgets that would then actually get launched to the moon, and other stuff like that. I wasn’t as directly involved in those—again, I was more of a low-TRL specialist—but some of my friends there were, so I became at least vaguely aware of the procedures and checks and balances that they were using.