These are awesome. I took that capstone spacecraft design course at MIT in 2003, and can't recall encountering this list (based on the archive snapshot, he would have shifted on to UMD more than thirty years prior). The project was satellite-focused rather than launch vehicle, so maybe his instructions were imbued implicitly into the course?

• Much of the design-conservative ethos permeates aerospace development. It's unsurprising that astronautics evolution has been slow at least until Elon came along. I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles).

• Also the one that was conspicuously maintained at the end across the different archived versions:

"Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)"

It's notable that the wayback machine's first crawl of Akin's list is late 2003 (so presumably when the source page went live) the year in which the Columbia disaster took place.

> I wonder how Elon / SpaceX folks would respond to these laws esp. #39 (avoid designing launch vehicles).

Perhaps, based on specific context, let the Law's vote!

> Law 11: Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

> Law 16: The previous people [...] did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis [was optimal].

> Law 31 (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development): [...] understand the fundamental limitations of [the existing] technology/approach.

IMHO: Law 31 is the kicker. That triggers Law 11. With general support from Law 16.