I would say, a rocket engineer should definitely start with a simple rocket to be designed on their own - before proceeding to something modern and complex.

And I did not study rocket science, but in my CS studies we definitely started with the simple ("hello world") basics, too, before touching real systems, so I would think, they do likewise. Because it makes sense. How can you understand and design something complex, if you cannot even make a simple version of it?

> If you want to be a rocket engineer indeed the Falcon Heavy is a better study reference than making a fresh design in your backyard.

If you can't yet do so much as slap together some Estes kit and launch it in your backyard, what gives you the impression that you'd have the requisite knowledge to be able to gain anything from studying the Falcon Heavy?

Well, some people think failure is the best teacher. As an example the first generation of german rocket engineers whose work culminated in Saturn V and thus enabling the first moon landings basically started from scratch.

So your advice is to just suck it up and accept that interested people need to spend billions and study for decades on the issue, because learning from previously successful endeavors is a worse teacher. Right.

It's fine to just half-ass it if the interest is only superficial or for a hobby. Otherwise it might create a very unrealistic expectation in the student, because the gained knowledge by doing it like that is pretty worthless in a professional setting

No, I was not suggesting education is not useful.

But if one is to study rocketry without an aeronautics degree I'm guessing it's better to start from hobby level engines and vehicles and then scale up.

There is lot of added complexity due to size and mission constraints that is vehicle specific in Falcon Heavy, and I'm not sure how one would even use it as a learning platform - unless there is a university curriculum built around the vehicle.

There are lot of basics that model rocketry probably gives a good intuition for but then to my limited understanding it becomes (drumroll) rocket science.

Learn from the past but don't take it as gospel because people probably worked with different constraints and assumptions that might be completely different today.