November 20th, 2015, 2:39 pm
There's a category of engineer like Elon Musk that knows a lot about a lot and is really good at just getting stuff done. Someone like Musk might not know the intricate details of PhD-level physics, but he knows enough about the fundamentals and the bigger-pricture engineering issues to both guide and push the design process.Although rockets and electric cars seem very different, they really aren't. Both seek the highest-performance subsystems of the lightest possible weight. If anything, the electric car design problem is the harder one because: fewer people care about the cost of rocket, everyone accepts that about 1% of rockets blow up, a rocket only has to perform for a few minutes, and you can have best-of-the-best engineers hand-build & tweak a rocket but a car has to be mass-produced by high-school grads.