Title: Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design
Context: You may not be designing a spaceship, but it probably often feels like you are designing something just as complex.
Synopsis: Imagine the hardest thing in the world to design. OK. Got it? WRONG! Sorry, trick question. The hardest thing to design isn’t on our world, it’s in space. Designing spacecraft is super-duper hard. Which should put your current job – you know the one that you complain about being so hard all the time – in context. Not that I want to denigrate the difficulty of designing left-handed corkscrews or apps that sort pictures of cats or even the latest design breakthrough in those little plastic things on the end of your shoelaces, but – and this is just my opinion mind you – designing a spacecraft is probably harder than all of that stuff. And with great difficulty comes tremendous disappointment and emendation and plenty of plain old wrongness. So the next time your design task has got you down, chin up. It could be worse. You could instead be designing a spaceship. Not that your job isn’t hard too…
Best Bit: “Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.”