[ExI] Engineering

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 10:18 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> rocket's don't really scale down.

But we're not talking about rockets.  Most things on a solar
satellite DO scale down.  (Pressure vessels are not as
important to a solar satellite as to a rocket, for instance.)

More importantly, we're talking about testing subsystems,
not throwing EVERYTHING together in a single scaled-down
model - including the few parts that don't scale down.

And even those parts that don't scale down, can be built and
tested without the rest of the satellite.  That didn't happen
with critical parts of the X-33.  (Again, note that the entire
project was cancelled because of the scaled-down tanks'
failure, rather than doing the scaled-down tanks as a
separate project first.  Investors learned from that, that such
parts should be funded and developed first, before funding
the entire project: if they fail, that's much less money lost.)