tl;dr: Fair exams/hw (albeit time consuming), good TAs/discussions. Terrible lectures.

Out of all of the engineering, math, and science professors I have taken at UCLA, Wirz may quite literally be the worst professor I have had.

He is clearly knowledgeable in the topics he teaches in class (He will mention his work history at JPL very often), however, it seems abundantly clear to me that he cares a lot more about his research than teaching.

All lectures are recorded lecture videos from a previous section of the class + a live Q&A session that is usually around 30 minutes. Although this is alright, it is most definitely not an engaging learning environment.

I am normally okay with lecture videos being prerecorded. However, the presentation of the course material is very lazy. Some of the lecture videos, which are quite old have issues (some don't have audio for substantial portions of the video and other technical issues). If we are being given old lectures that have been recorded, having this many issues is just lazy. Additionally, a lot of the topics required on the Homeworks are not covered in the lectures and are sometimes not even present in the reading material. At this point, I only really learn from going to the TA sessions and reading the text on my own. The lectures are useless and rambly most of the time.

The exam was pretty fair. I have no complaints about the quality of the exams or homework.

On another note, the TA's are usually very responsive on piazza (and very helpful in their own office hours).

He is terrible. Homework and exams are very hard.

Super cool class for anyone going into aerospace, and Wirz is a homie. It's really cool learning from someone so experienced and well-regarded; he works at JPL and is the god of electric propulsion. Homeworks are pretty intense, but super relevant and prepare you well for the midterm and final

Professor Wirz is a really great professor, and for anyone interested in space and space systems this is the most interesting class that I have taken. The exams were timed, but a 72 hour window to do the midterm and final were given. The exams were extremely fair and tested not only a math basis, but a conceptual understanding of things as well. Professor Wirz had all of his lectures pre-recorded so they could be watched on your own time, and helpful Q&A sessions similar to office hours instead of lecture during the normal lecture hours. This format was surprisingly helpful. He is passionate about getting the students to learn the material. This class is nonetheless quite hard and dense, but manageable

Homework and tests are unnecessarily difficult. Take with someone else.

All the lectures were prerecorded, with live qna sessions during the scheduled lecture time. This meant that you would have to watch the lecture videos the night before the qna (which were at 8-10am) if you wanted to understand what was being covered in the live sections. Depending on the person, this would either make it so you didn't have to wake up early, or made it so you had to watch additional content outside of the scheduled time causing conflicts.

About 70% of the class was taught from slides and 30% with on-screen writing. The slides were often information-dense, and I found the textbook to be a much better learning experience than any of the lectures.

Wirz would often mention his own experience (Which came off as somewhat annoying imo). It's different to use your own experience as teaching material, but often he would just mention how he went to CalTech and worked at JPL, which added little to help us understand the material.

The homework and exams are extremely difficult, and while I did well on the midterm and homework, the final was completely out of my league (I think wrote it for both graduate and undergraduate students). The questions weren't at all representative of our understanding of the course material (besides some conceptual short answer questions). I understand his goal was probably to determine whether or not we could apply our understanding of the course material to harder questions, it felt to me that these questions were just written to be unnecessarily difficult.

And the TA made a lot of mistakes in the discussion videos, so they were honestly not much of use. The same applies to the homework answers.

A good point would be that they were very responsive to questions on piazza.

You could say I'm leaving a negative review due to my own poor performance, but I wholly anticipate getting a good grade overall despite all my complaints.

tl;dr. Take it with somebody else. You will both learn more, have a better time, and have easier work.