from Hacker News

NASA-SP-287: What made Apollo a success?

by 2bluesc on 12/3/23, 8:05 PM with 4 comments

  • by TheAceOfHearts on 12/3/23, 11:31 PM

    This is likely linked here after it was shown in Smarter Every Day - I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) [0]. Which discusses the new moon landing program and how there appear to be many unresolved details and low openness in discussion, as well an explosion in complexity. It reminds me of software development where sometimes people lose sight of the main goal (make a great product / tool) and become fixated on the underlying tech while increasing complexity.

    In the software engineering world there's a few well known blog posts which seem to encode similar lessons, for example the Things You Should Never Do series by Joel which discourages doing full rewrites.

    Going a bit meta, one problem with this kind of post is that it's a bit long (87 page PDF) so reading it to make comments or spark interesting discussion takes longer than your typical blog post or news article. I'll probably get started reading it tonight, but there's no guarantee I'll finish it. I love the general idea of learning from past generations and building upon their achievements, although I expect many lessons from this era have already been integrated in our understanding of engineering as it relates to software development. However, maybe there's still value in rehashing this understanding to make sure that hard-won lessons are not forgotten.

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

  • by dexterous on 12/9/23, 3:08 AM

    Someone converted those to other digital formats (EPUB, etc.) and uploaded them to The Internet Archive. There's a link to the Archive catalog entry in their reddit post -> https://www.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_...

  • by 2bluesc on 12/3/23, 8:07 PM

  • by bberenberg on 12/3/23, 11:27 PM

    Just saw this referenced in a Smarter Every Day Video [0] and it's now on my to-read list.

    [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU