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Asked by dp13 to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 13 Mar 2014.
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Jessica Marshall answered on 13 Mar 2014:
Business is part of everything we do – we may come up with a solution but is it is too expensive then it is not a practical solution. Equally important is other areas of business, such as how to run a project on-time and how to report the projects finances. As I progress through my career and manage bigger teams then the business side will become more important for me. We also have people in the industry who are not engineers, they are part of the business side and look at the whole company’s finances and organisation.
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Alexander Finch answered on 13 Mar 2014:
Jess is completely right. A good engineer needs to know more than just his or her area of technical expertise. In a large company, you don’t necessarily have to do much business work if you don’t want to, but you definitely need to be aware that technical aspects of a project are only a part of that project…
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Neil Bowles answered on 13 Mar 2014:
Understanding and planning the cost of building things is absolutely essential to being an engineer. I work mainly in the science part of the space industry, but here as with everything else it is important to be within budget and on time delivering things.
When you are designing anything for space, the tricky bit is balancing the performance you want, like the how small an object a camera can see on the ground form space, versus the mass and power it would take to do it. I might be able to design a camera that can see a pebble on Earth from orbit, but the lens would be so big that you’d need an enormous and therefor expensive rocket to get it into space! We do a lot of this when we study new instruments to answer new space science questions. In these ‘trade studies’, we consider what we would really like to do against how complicated/new/risky and costly it is to do it.
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dp13 commented on :
Thank you all for responding!