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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dan Kreigh about his experiences as the lead structural analyst working on SpaceShipOne and his personal interest in designing and building a flying car.

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• 0:26 Introductions
• 0:48 What a structural analyst does
• 1:32 The story of SpaceShipOne
• 1:55 The Ansari X Prize as a motivator for building SpaceShipOne
• 2:35 The unique design aspects for safe re-entry from space
• 4:01 The parallels with software engineering
• 4:12 The minimum viable complexity needed to solve the problem of getting into and out of space safely
• 5:48 Building the space ship in small increments and learning from feedback
• 6:35 Because the mother ship used the same designs as the space ship they were able to learn faster
• 6:58 Describing the increments in building SpaceShipOne
• 7:20 Contrasting the incremental approach with other space vehicle designs
• 8:05 The challenges of building flying cars
• 8:46 Dan’s definition of a flying car is one that you can drive on the freeway and to the store, then drive to an airport and take off and fly to your next destination
• 9:02 Many of the vehicles being talked about are not flying cars, they are electric helicopters, which address a completely different challenge – they won’t be able to drive on the road
• 9:50 Dan is working on a true roadable aeroplane that can fit in a home garage
• 10:42 The problem with most flying car concepts is they don’t fit in a garage
• 11:10 The AeroMobil flying car is priced at over $1M
• 11:20 A flying car should not be more expensive than a home-built aeroplane
• 11:56 One of the great debates among flying car enthusiasts – 3 or 4 wheels
• 12:15 Dan’s design is a 3 wheeled version; the DMV considers 3 wheeled vehicles as motorcycles which will make registration easier  garage
• 12:24 The second great debate is to have detachable wings which stay at the airport or not – if you’re clever enough you can take them with you
• 13:08 The last great debate is whether to have one or two engines – Dan’s design has a 50HP engine for the road and an aircraft engine for flying
• 15:08 Having two engines means that in the event of a problem with the flying engine you can still drive home, even if it is a long drive
• 14:46 Dan feels he can have one built within the next two years
• 16:02 Dan’s ambition to ship the flying car to Hawaii and use it to travel from island to island
• 16:57 The incremental approach Dan is taking to the design and development of the flying car
• 17:14 This is an intentionally simple design using well understood technologies
• 17:58 Describing the design
• 19:28 The great resources and support that Dan has from the people at Scaled Composites
• 19:57 The approach is similar to using design patterns in software

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