engineers need to acquire “back-of-the-envelope” survival skills to obtain rough quantitative answers to real-world problems, particularly when working on projects with enormous complexity and very limited resources. in the case studies treated in this book, we show step-by-step examples of the physical arguments and the resulting calculations obtained using the quick-fire method. we also demonstrate the estimation improvements that can be obtained through the use of more detailed physics-based back-of-the-envelope engineering models. these different methods are used to obtain the solutions to a number of design and performance estimation problems arising from two of the most complex real-world engineering projects: the space shuttle and the hubble space telescope satellite.