For those of you with experience building and firing a liquid-propellant
rocket engine, plus the test stand and tanks, which should come first in
design and construction - the engine or the stand?
Construction, and spending the money to truly get started seems like the
point of no return (without losing money, at least), so my team wanted to
do this bit right.
The engine seems like it would be the hard part, so building that first
would get it out of the way. Beyond that, the test stand should be much
easier to build (or so we think).
But then there's also the issue that building the engine before you have a
test stand (that you know can support it) might be putting the cart before
the horse. It could also lead to issues where we find that the test stand
can't match what we designed the engine for.
If anyone can tell me from experience what the best way to go about this
would be, my team and I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.
