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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Because being exact and precise is just useless, is that right?"

Being exact and precise is the point of this discussion.  It is neither exact nor precise to claim that all or even most of the majority of engineers' work doesn't involve, "getting the job done and on to production or testing."

RIT has a useful graph that helps explain what engineers actually do.  http://www.rit.edu/emcs/admissions/academics/majors/engineering-tech-or-engineering

I doubt there are many engineers that spend their entire careers at one level of the chart but very few ever get to the big league of space vehicles.

Those that do have overlapping checks and balances that weed out imperfections in the overall project and don't often rely on one person being infallible.

The engineer who works on Mars vehicles fall under what RIT calls "Complex design and analysis" that would be say the top 10% of engineers.  The average 50th percentile engineer works in what RIT calls "Development and design" a much more forgiving field.

"So, your idea is that it's okay to say, send an exploratory Mars vehicle crashing into the planet after the LM ' engineers' (loose term because LM often hires non engineers to do engineering jobs - saves money!) didn't know how to make an accurate calculation or to understand how a result didn't make sense and was wrong. Because being exact and precise is just useless, is that right? I mean, what's $125 million and 5-10 years of an army's worth of people designing, testing , launching and monitoring the vehicle, right? No biggee!"[/quote]

FYI - One of the main engineer who did the landing gear on Mars had a community college degree.

Also, by the time millions are actually spent on the final version, there were many, many imprecise and "good enough" attempts that occurred to get them there.  That's what the engineers do to get to the point where things work and buildings don't fall down.  A good engineer knows the difference between times when precision matters and times when it doesn't.[/quote]

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