Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]

https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/201409/Akin%27s%20Laws%20of%20Spacecraft%20Design.pdf

by tosh • 7 months ago

345 109 7 months ago

ece.uvic.ca

joha4270• 7 months ago

While this PDF might be new, Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design dates back to 2003.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031101212246/https://spacecraf...

Sharlin• 7 months ago

The first law already gives a good reason why software "engineering" is rarely actually engineering.

PxldLtd• 7 months ago

Almost all the laws are great guidance for Software dev to be honest and idiomatic to a lot of what's banded around today as good practice.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 7 months ago

Oh god it can be worse when the suits try to measure everything. Some things are measurable and others are taste / gut and that is OK.

StatsAreFun• 7 months ago

Agreed (unfortunately). It's also a good reminder IMHO to think and do engineering so we can one day be worthy of the title. Be the change you wish to see in the world. :)

z3t4• 7 months ago

I like systems that are maintence free and easily replaceable. My experience so far in software engineering is that technologies die, so it should also be easy to replace the tecnology, like the hardware it runs on, the platform/os, the programming language and the framework.

rawgabbit• 7 months ago

In the big companies I worked, it was easier to replace a system with all its dependencies than to remove a part of it. This had nothing to with tech. It was about getting buy in from the business stakeholders and the internal risk compliance department.

num42• 7 months ago

TL;DR:

Minimize negative(painful) notions as much as possible, ideally approaching zero, while maximizing positive (pleasurable) notions.

Minimize negative(painful) notions: Uncertainty, Risk, Chaotic behavior, Randomness, Non-deterministic, Instability, Cost, Energy losses, Time consumption, Resource usage, Excessive complexity, Failure modes, Noise

Maximize positive(Pleasure) notions: Reliability, Efficiency, Deterministic, Predictability, Precision, Accuracy, Verification, Validation, Safety, Stability, Simplicity (lower complexity), Robustness, Redundancy

xtiansimon• 7 months ago

I can think of a few SaaS products in the document scanning and OCR space whose UIs are not efficient or simple, while being time consuming and, to my mind, chaotic.

There should be an Akin Exit Clause from said 3-year contracts. They have zero incentives to fix or improve _anything_ during those years of servitude.

wcrossbow• 7 months ago

The last and most important slide is missing.

"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"

This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.

firesteelrain2• 7 months ago

I believe that might be Law 16:

“The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.”

jobjobjobjob• 7 months ago

Bhargava’s Law: Only 1 out of 10 research ideas make it into industrial practice

It's a nice reflection, but what is the origin of this? Can't find another reference to this "law" online.

beklein• 7 months ago

Not all laws are hard science laws in the sense of the second law of thermodynamics; they are, however, good approximations based on experience and, in the right context, make a bit more sense.

Notes from the original author:

I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than a decade. These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself. I originally wrote these up and handed them out to my senior design class, as a strong hint on how best to survive my design experience. Months later, I get a phone call from a friend in California complimenting me on the Laws, which he saw on a "joke-of-the-day" listserve. Since then, I'm aware of half a dozen sites around the world that present various editions of the Laws, and even one site which has converted them to the Laws of Certified Public Accounting. (Don't ask...) Anyone is welcome to link to these, use them, post them, send me suggestions of additional laws, but I do maintain that this is the canonical set of Akin's Laws...

barishnamazov• 7 months ago

Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:

"A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."

potato37328422• 7 months ago

That's what happens when the likely success scenario is selling out to an existing company rather than growing to be a genuinely large and long lived company.

nine_k3• 7 months ago

There are beef companies and milk companies, depending on the way they plan to use their cash cow.

(Most VC funding is used to quickly produce a beefy market share, and sell it to those who think they can milk it, or to profitably butcher it.)

noduerme• 7 months ago

Hiring salesmen to talk to other salesmen is always the sleaziest part of doing anything productive. You could say the same thing about opening a restaurant.

__patchbit__• 7 months ago

Petro Tyschtschenko is a good salesman.

   https://youtu.be/0-z1TaNx7TM

martin-t2• 7 months ago

I'd add to that: If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.

sho_hn• 7 months ago

This is key to fulfilling a senior tech leadership role and substantially what people expect to pay you for, if you ever wonder what the mysterious "impact" really means.

aleph_minus_one3• 7 months ago

If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.

I do, and I can tell you the result: you will be branded as a troublemaker.

nine_k3• 7 months ago

Imagine that you're a highly intellectual, highly technical, and highly responsible person in control of large sums of governmental or corporate money. You don't want to waste the money, you want stellar results (in spacecraft industry, maybe literally so).

Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?

"If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.

pklausler2• 7 months ago

I think that Feynman was talking about preparing a freshman-level lecture for Caltech-standard freshmen, but maybe you have somebody else in mind.

userulluipeste• 7 months ago

What often happens next is, another party comes up in the middle to manage the interaction between both of you (with the proper bump in the ask price), because there's not only so many decision makers looking for neat presentations and whatnot but also there's only so many teams willing to do the actual work.

aleph_minus_one3• 7 months ago

Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?

This mentality seems very US-Amercian to me.

"If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.

OK, challenge: explain A1 homotopy theory to a 5-year old child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C2%B9_homotopy_theory

Lesson learned: very commonly you need a deep knowledge of a topic to understand advanced scientific theories.

gcanyon2• 7 months ago

The biggest commercial success is not the best technical design: Nokia N95 versus the first generation iPhone

That’s not a good example. Neither is Beta vs VHS. The most they illustrate is a different law I am coining right here:

Canyon’s Law of Design Optimization: you will inevitably choose to optimize for different metrics than your customers would wish. Don’t try to convince them they are wrong.

JKCalhoun2• 7 months ago

I had to look up the N95. Yeah, Wikipedia goes to pains to rattle off things that made it better than the iPhone, but then I looked at a photo of the device and it was clear why the iPhone "won".

pfisherman• 7 months ago

I has a Nokia N95. The phone itself was great. The problem was the dearth of apps. Nobody developed anything for windows mobile OS. Maybe Ballmer was not so crazy when he was running around on stage screaming “Developers, developers, developers”.

canjobear• 7 months ago

This was the (juvenile) nerd take back then https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

(Nokia E70 not N95, but still)

jltsiren• 7 months ago

That's not a good example, but for a different reason: the N95 outsold the original iPhone.

The original iPhone was a promising proof of concept. It got the form factor and the interface right, but the actual device was underwhelming. It had no 3G, no GPS, no third-party apps, and a weak camera. iPhone 3G added all the features competitors already had (apart from a good camera) and became a much bigger commercial success.

elzbardico2• 7 months ago

The N95 outsold the IPhone because it had a good camera and was cheaper, and got even cheaper with the phone companies subsidy.

But I'd be surprised if Apple didn't have a beefier profit with the IPhone compared to Nokia with the N95.

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

That’s not a good example

It’s a great example. One can list a litany of technical specifications on which the N95 is superior. That, however, doesn’t make it a superior product.

gcanyon2• 7 months ago

"technical design" vs. "technical specs"

I think we're in violent agreement.

strawhatdev• 7 months ago

Quality thinking is more important in this profession than fast thinking.

Feels true, particularly in an era where LLMs make fast thinking cheap.

einrealist• 7 months ago

The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it. (Law 23)

So will Musk finally be fired in 2026?

Geonode• 7 months ago

He promises 10, gives the world 4, but everybody else has 1, and he's hated for it.

erikig• 7 months ago

It's been interesting to see how often Elon is chided (even by his supporters) because his reach always seems to somehow exceed his grasp knowing full well that this is by design and not by fault.

zoeysmithe2• 7 months ago

I'm not seeing that. The truck is a mess of a product. The self-driving is terrible compared to things like waymo, and the robot seems to be entirely fraud. Tesla cars was a good product but now lost the early lead and 2025 sales were unimpressive and certainly not remotely enough to justify the stock price.

So he gives 4, which but 1 are all terrible, and is rightly criticized. Then he inserts hateful regressive politics into our collective culture as the secondary price of using/buying/supporting his brand and products. If anything, he's under-criticized and keeps failing up.

nancyminusone• 7 months ago

I can't think of any breakthrough successes Musk has had within the last 5 years, unless you count helping the current president get elected. If the promising but still incomplete Starship was on the same pace as the exceptionally successful Falcon 9, it would have already delivered cargo to orbit by now. His rates appear to be slipping.

x13• 7 months ago

maaaaybe it was the Nazi salute

karaterobot• 7 months ago

I've been quoting von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design for over a decade, since it is a great summary of why I switched from engineering to product design mid-career. That law is the one that says engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept. I didn't engineer spacecraft, but on web projects I noticed that whoever made the documents furthest upstream had a ridiculous amount of influence over the outcome of the product. Even just being the one taking notes in the first meeting gives you leverage in a process which, despite claims of being agile, is definitively path-dependent most of the time.

GlenTheMachine2• 7 months ago

I’m Henshaw (#37). AMA.

getpost2• 7 months ago

Tell us. What inspired you to say this?

ycombiredd2• 7 months ago

I think he's saying that he (GlenTheMachine) is Glen Henshaw, "space roboticist", and (understandably) was a bit excited that a somewhat famous document contains a "law" bearing his name as attribution was posted by this water cooler. A way to get some minor attention for it in a comment thread full of like-minded users, and probably offer a genuine (and also maybe coy/tongue-in-cheek) offer to answer questions about that specific line item law.

I like that he waved from the crowd in this way, if only for the "huh. Small world" moment I had reading his comment.

GlenTheMachine2• 7 months ago

I was a grad student in Dave Akin's lab from 1994-2003. Like many labs, we had a journal club. Once a week (Wednesday, I think) somebody would give a presentation over lunch on a paper they'd read. We would get takeout Chinese and eat while discussing the paper.

On this particular Wednesday the presentation was on a failed spacecraft program. It's been a long time, but I think it was probably this paper:

https://llis.nasa.gov/llis_lib/pdf/1009464main1_0641-mr.pdf

which is the initial failure analysis of the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999), which famously crashed into Mars during its orbital insertion burn because JPL specifications were in metric, but Lockheed wrote code in imperial units, and as a result there was a failure to properly convert between newtons and pounds. One fact of note was that the the team responsible for spacecraft navigation had already observed anomalous trajectory data but their reports were ignored because they didn't follow program guidelines for filling out the paperwork to document the observations, so the insertion burn went ahead heedless of what the spacecraft's behavior was trying to tell them.

Ultimately, the loss of mission was a result of unclear responsibility for ownership of the orbital maneuvering software, including the mission requirements that traced to the software, the development of the software derived from those requirements, tests to validate the software, and reports from users of the software that it was behaving unexpectedly.

I was trying to be funny, and turned the statement around from "clear lines of responsibility" to "clear lines of blame".

aj7• 7 months ago

I have found that my best designs, few and far between, enter a period where they get simpler as they are completed. And my worst or failed designs keep getting more complex as I go on.

iancmceachern2• 7 months ago

This is the way.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/14789-any-intelligent-fool-...

AnimalMuppet• 7 months ago

My contributions/spins on this:

The most general problem cannot be solved. (If you don't limit scope, you will never finish. You won't even finish the design.)

If you want it bad, that's how you're going to get it. (That is, rushing a project means you get crummy results. This may be "Hanka's Law", because I first heard it from Steve Hanka, but it may not be original to him.)

sbondaryev2• 7 months ago

Law 20: A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately

I definitely struggle with this. I run a math education site and I usually focus heavily on technical accuracy but underestimate the presentation.

Hard lesson that being "right" isn't enough if the delivery is clunky.

elzbardico2• 7 months ago

Something I've learned, loosely related:

Adding "just a few fundamental equations" to a presentation won't make your case more compelling to business stakeholders. You lose roughly 10% of engagement for every greek letter in a slide.

pklausler2• 7 months ago

I have learned to think about this problem thus: there's reality, and then there's perceptions, and communication is a task of persuading somebody else's perception to somehow align with yours. When you both view reality clearly, it's best to present simple facts and their implications. The other three cases are education, bullshitting, and nonsense, and it's best to involve a professional.

i_am_a_peasant2• 7 months ago

care to share the site? :)

sbondaryev2• 7 months ago

yeah, i learned this the hard way. I tried producthunt, indie hackers, linkedIn, twitter even instagram thinking distribution was the issue.

Turns out it was mostly audience and presentation. Math/educational content just doesn't travel well on those channels unless it’s tailored very carefully. Being right wasnt enough if the delivery didn’t match how people consume it.

MinimalAction• 7 months ago

Bhargava’s Law: Only 1 out of 10 research ideas make it into industrial practice.

Not sure of the source for this. Nevertheless, this is ridiculously high percentage of projects that ever see an industrial angle, at least in basic sciences. Perhaps, this is restricted to engineering.

zoeysmithe2• 7 months ago

I'm not sure if the nokia example works. When the nokia launched the screen technology, SoC horsepower, battery tech, etc just wasn't there to make an iphone. Even when the 2007 iphone launched it was a bit of mess, with the first gen not being 3G when other phones were and no app store, but instead devs were told to write web apps.

If anything, some of these early smartphones were pushing a lot of limits considering the hardware restraints. Its just by the time the iphone came out, these restraints were lessened and Apple did a good job using these technologies.

beefman• 7 months ago

Last archived working original: https://web.archive.org/web/20250808213459/https://spacecraf...

pjdesno• 7 months ago

"Trellis coded modulation got this rate up to 50 kilobaud by the 1990s"

Not quite, and an interesting story that fits these engineering maxims better than you might think.

An analog channel with the bandwidth and SNR characteristics of a landline phone line has (IIRC) a Shannon capacity of 30-something kbit/s, which was closely approached with V.34, which used trellis coded modulation plus basically every other coding and equalization mechanism they knew of at the time to get to 33.6kb/s on a good day.

But... by the 80s or so the phone system was only analog for the "last mile" to the home - the rest of the system was digital, sending 8-bit samples (using logarithmic mu-law encoding) at a sampling rate of 8000 samples/s, and if you had a bunch of phone lines coming into a facility you could get those lines delivered over a digital T1 link.

Eventually someone realized that if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher - in theory the limit is probably 64000 bit/s, i.e. the bit rate of the digital link, although V.90 could only achieve about 56000 b/s in theory, and more like 53kb/s in practice. (in particular, the FCC limited the total signal power, which means not all 64000 combinations of bits in a second of audio would be allowable)

I worked with modem modulation folks when I was a co-op student in the mid-80s. They had spent their lives thinking about the world in terms of analog channels, and it took some serious out-of-the-box thinking on someone's part to realize that the channel was no longer analog, and that you could take advantage of that.

A few years later those same folks all ended up working on cable modems, and it was back to the purely analog world again.

computator• 7 months ago

if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher

But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?

Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:

  Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem

Suppose you're saying that the link between the ISPmodem and the HomeModem is a bare unfiltered copper wire. In that case, I have a different question: Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

I hope you can clear up my confusion.

db48x• 7 months ago

No, it’s more like HomeModem ←A→ Exchange1 ←D→ Exchange2 ←A→ ISPModem. The digital parts were all inside the telco’s networks that connect the exchanges to each other.

Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

No. The exchange is sampling the analog signal coming in over your phone line at 8kHz and 8 bits per sample. They just designed modems that sent digital data over that analog link, in a way that would line up exactly with the way the exchange will sample it.

ycombiredd2• 7 months ago

Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire

Yes, but you need the bare copper wire without signaling. We operated a local ISP in the 90's and did exactly that by ordering so-called "alarm circuits" from the telco (with no dial tone) and placed a copper T1 CSU on each end. We marketed it as "metro T1" and undercut traditional T1 pricing by a huge margin with great success to the surrounding downtown area.

immibis• 7 months ago

It's ISP←A→Telco←D→Telco←A→You

Traditionally both the ISP and you pay for analog phone lines from the telco. The telco uses digital internally (remember you and your ISP probably aren't at the same exchange), which puts a hard limit on data rate - there is no trick you can do to get more bits through than the bits used in the digital part of the call.

If you (as the ISP) buy enough lines you can get them delivered in digital format. A T1 is designed to carry 24 simultaneous phone calls, acting virtually as a bundle of 24 analog phone cables. So the obvious next stage was to have a modem that can handle 24 simultaneous connections on one cable.

Now you have ISP\_modem←Ax24→ISP\_muxer←Dx24→Telco←→Telco←A→User

The ISP's modem generates analog signals for up to 24 simultaneous incoming calls, and they pass into a multiplexer that connects 24 analog lines to a T1 line and they go through the telco digitally to users. The maximum bandwidth is still as before - the modem has to generate an analog signal that will still be receivable at the other end after A2D and D2A conversion. Even though the digital bandwidth for the digital part is 56kbps, the maximum achievable bandwidth through this digital-bottlenecked analog call was found to be 33.6kbps.

But the industry had an idea: by convincing the telco to install the modems into the user's exchange, the analog portion would only be between the telco and the user, without a digital segment in the middle of it, and therefore wouldn't be bottlenecked the same way. The same digital backhaul from the ISP through the telco was used, but instead of transmitting a digitised analog modem signal and therefore causing degradation of quality, it transmitted your actual internet traffic bits, up to 56kbps. The analog signal was made at the user's side of the telco and didn't have to fit within 56kbps when digitised.

Pedantically, the digital circuits are 64kbps but one bit in some bytes is used for call status signaling, which is okay for voice, but the ISP equipment can't predict which bytes have a bit overwritten (and it could be multiple if there are several hops) so it just used 7 bits in each byte.

phire• 7 months ago

Yes, the actual bandwidth of the last-mile analog line was much, much higher. Hence why we eventually got 8mbit ADSL or 24mbit ADSL 2.0+ running across it. Or even 50-300mbit with VDSL in really ideal conditions.

Though the actual available bandwidth was very dependent on distance. People would lease dedicated pairs for high bandwidth across town (or according to a random guy I talked to at a cafe: just pirate an unused pair that happened to run between their two buildings). But once we start talking between towns, the 32kbit you could get from the digital trunk lines was almost always higher than what you could get on a raw analog line over the same distance.

CamperBob2• 7 months ago

Not quite, and an interesting story that fits these engineering maxims better than you might think.

Huh? The SotA for dial-up modems in the 1990s was indeed 56 kbps, achieved with various encoding and compression hacks in both domains including trellis coding.

Weirdly enough, you can apparently still buy them from US Robotics: https://www.usr.com/products/56k-dial-up-modems/

kinkyusa8• 7 months ago

Thanks!

kinkyusa8• 7 months ago

https://cruzio.com/member-tools/support/dialup-faq-troublesh...

mlyle• 7 months ago

An analog channel with the bandwidth and SNR characteristics of a landline phone line has (IIRC) a Shannon capacity of 30-something kbit/s,

The problem is that the ADC in the telephone exchange is not clocked coherently to your modem. You're paying various companding, quantization (time and level), etc, losses-- it is not a nice linear channel.

An end-to-end analog connection could be capable of significantly more-- while there's noise, there's no "8KHz cliff." A 45dB SNR for 0-4KHz has a >60kbps Shannon bandwidth, and there's not exactly a 4KHz cliff even with loading coils present.

kinkyusa8• 7 months ago

Thank you so very much!

kinkyusa8• 6 months ago

https://www.stsci.edu/~jordan/other/ALSD.html

kinkyusa8• 6 months ago

http://archive.today/

putzdown• 7 months ago

What's the story with the Avro C102 (per law 20)? What's the connection with "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately"? I'm intrigued.

nxobject• 7 months ago

Two references come to mind – the first is that the Avro C102 was beat by the de Havilland Comet, which was an example of a bad design with a good presentation. It had a series of mysterious hull losses that were eventually attributed metal fatigue accumulating around a square cut-out in the hull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet#Comet_disas...

The second, more depressingly, is that the Avro C102 was cancelled to redirect resources to the Avro Arrow: Canada's mythical last jet fighter, of which only a handful were produced before the program was (painfully) cancelled, and Avro wound up. IIRC, the Canadian government was the main-to-sole bankroller of the project, and ballistic missiles became increasingly more important.

Aloha• 7 months ago

I'll argue that Comet was a good design, but with too many unknowns being solved at once - while we had limited experience with pressurization the comet took more cycles, and had a much higher service ceiling.

I dont think the Comet was a materially worse design than the Avro C102 (both aircraft are similar) and the C102 may very well have had other unknown issues only to be found if it went into series production.

inamberclad• 7 months ago

I have these taped up above my desk at work. I've been able to point to at least half of them from one time or another

OrvalWintermute• 7 months ago

My general issue with this is that it is overly hardware centric and not as accurate when it comes to Aerospace Software

Law 4 Bhargava’s Law: Only 1 out of 10 research ideas make it into industrial practice is wrong anecdotally particularly when it relates to software.

Law 13 is flat-out wrong in that there is a huge amount of potential SWaP trades & innovation trades to be made, and the changing requirements environment where it is easy to predict where a requirement will be, despite a space program with a legacy requirements baseline.

An example of Law 13 errors would be the JPSS security redesign campaigns, and a less ideal retrofit

iancmceachern2• 7 months ago

Lol, see the recent HN post on TRIZ and my comment there pointing folks to this. And here I complete the cycle.

cainxinth• 7 months ago

Adapted to writing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Akin%27s_Laws_of_Art...

buildsjets• 7 months ago

Buildsjets laws of spacecraft design:

The propellant storage shall be designed and located such that a catastrophic failure of propellant storage will not damage the passenger compartment.

The propulsion system shall be designed and located such that a catastrophic failure of the propulsion system will not damage the propellant storage or the passenger compartment.

The launch system shall be designed to ensure a minimum of two survivable abort alternatives at each phase of the flight. Each abort scenario shall be validated by a flight test before certifying the system for general use.

The re-entry system shall be designed so there are no single points of failure. If single points of failure are unavoidable, a method pf inspection or surveillance shall be developed to detect the failure prior to de-orbit.

In-orbit repair procedures for foreseeable types of damage shall be developed and validated prior to certifying the system for general use.

Yeah, this is all 20/20 hindsight. But we really need to avoid developing ANYTHING similar to the STS in the future. I truly believe it set us back by 50 years.

dvrp• 7 months ago

“Avoid the temptation to believe a completely new product will always be better than an evolution of an old product”.

ricksunny• 7 months ago

These are awesome. I took that capstone spacecraft design course at MIT in 2003, and can't recall encountering this list (based on the archive snapshot, he would have shifted on to UMD more than thirty years prior). The project was satellite-focused rather than launch vehicle, so maybe his instructions were imbued implicitly into the course?

• Much of the design-conservative ethos permeates aerospace development. It's unsurprising that astronautics evolution has been slow at least until Elon came along. I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles).

• Also the one that was conspicuously maintained at the end across the different archived versions:

"Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)"

It's notable that the wayback machine's first crawl of Akin's list is late 2003 (so presumably when the source page went live) the year in which the Columbia disaster took place.

Nevermark2• 7 months ago

I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles).

Perhaps, based on specific context, let the Law's vote!

Law 11: Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
Law 16: The previous people [...] did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis [was optimal].
Law 31 (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development): [...] understand the fundamental limitations of [the existing] technology/approach.

IMHO: Law 31 is the kicker. That triggers Law 11. With general support from Law 16.

JumpCrisscross3• 7 months ago

> I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles)

SpaceX has designed 3 (four if you include Falcon 1) launch vehicles: Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship. The first three run the same engine family and are arguably in the same vehicle family.

SpaceX has absolutely embraced avoiding designing new launch vehicles (and even major components) until the fundamental limitations of the existing approach are exceeded.

dctoedt• 7 months ago

Ask any industrial engineer about MBAs (in Law 7)

In the Navy-nuke world there was a saying, purportedly by Admiral Rickover, about non-technical "managers": There but for the grace of God goes God.

jaynate• 7 months ago

Many of these laws can be applied to any discipline. Business, politics, etc.

jmux• 7 months ago

when I was at JPL, Akins laws (html version) were linked on the front page of the wiki. still one of the best (funniest) sources of engineering tips I’ve come across.

My favorite is still Mar’s law:

Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]

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