Jeff Thornburg

Reliability goes up as part count goes down.

Well, in fact, they couldn't reuse it the way they wanted to because of that fact.

You know, the shuttles were going to launch 25 times.

Every couple of weeks.

And then they're like, oh, these engines aren't as easy to refurbish as we thought.

We actually have to rebuild them after every flight.

Oh, we got wiring issues that we hadn't accounted for.

Oh, we've got tiles.

Yes.

I mean, the Russian development of rocket technology is interesting because you have to go all the way back to the end of World War II.

We cherry-picked rocket scientists.

The U.S.

grabbed their lot, including von Braun.

Russians grabbed their lot.

And what happened was the Russian lot of German rocket scientists really ended up focusing on reliability and part count and manufacturability.

Von Braun and his team, and what later became the bulk of NASA, focused on performance and perfection.

And so there was two completely different thought processes between Russian rocketry and American rocketry at that point that can trace themselves all the way back to the end of the Cold War.

It is, and it has had heritage dating all the way back to the 50s because they've never changed it.

And their technology, there was so much elegance in their manufacturing that we ended up buying a lot of their engines at the end of the Cold War.

because we didn't want the Russian rocket scientists going to Iran and North Korea and other places.