aerospace iteration cycles usually take six months per loop. a UK startup called Acme Space founded in 2024 is doing this in minutes. they are using a stack of agents to design an orbital vehicle called Hyperion.. and the output is unexpected. 🧵

2/ the setup uses three specialized agents. one digs through Cold War patent libraries for materials. another kills 98% of designs via physics sims. the third is the most interesting.. it rewards off the shelf parts and penalizes custom machining.

3/ by forcing the design toward what can actually be built with standard machinery.. they avoid the months of friction between engineering and the shop floor. humans still do final drawings but the agents clear thousands of dead ends in minutes.

4/ when tasked to find the most efficient path to orbit.. the agents bypassed the dense atmosphere. they proposed a rockoon (rocket plus balloon) launched from the stratosphere at 30km. (this method fires the engine in near vacuum conditions).

5/ the rockoon idea did not come from the founders. the agents identified it as the optimal path. we are hitting a point where agents revive forgotten 1950s physics concepts because the math finally pencils out!

6/ founder Tomas Guryca says they work with a core team of less than ten. a traditional approach would require 50 to 60 senior engineers. that is a 6x compression in human capital. watch out SpaceX and @elonmusk.. R&D is changing.