One of Watson’s top discoveries at SpaceX was the test bed on the third floor of the Hawthorne factory. SpaceX has test versions of all the hardware and electronics that go into a rocket laid out on metal tables. It has in effect replicated the innards of a rocket end to end in order to run thousands of flight simulations. Someone “launches” the rocket from a computer and then every piece of mechanical and computing hardware is monitored with sensors. An engineer can tell a valve to open, then check to see if it opened, how quickly it opened, and the level of current running to it. This
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