I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293

I am not affiliated, but as a fan… Smarter Every Day did a walkthrough with an actual Apollo engineer on the rocket and it was absolutely amazing. Definitely worth watching if you want to understand what this engineering program was up against — it’s kind of insane what they were doing with 1960s tech. [link] Same guy also have one of the bravest talks I’ve seen in a while about the lessons of the Apollo program for Artemis, including some criticisms that I thought were deeply valid. Much to learn about Apollo from this talk as well. [this video] Thus very document is the foundation of that talk and I’m sure why this is ending up on hacker news, so credit where credit is due please.

This thinking, or questioning, is needed everywhere. There is so much security paranoia, that it affects any one, just trying to do something. From setting up a wifi router, to seeing up an email account. Passwords must be used. Walt for 2FA before proceeding. Change your password to include upper lower Roman numerals and at least 5 different fonts... Why? Instead of saying up a website in 15 minutes, there is an hour of preparing to set up a webpage. If I live in the country side, have no neighbors for 50 miles, I must secure my router going to my starlink. Why? Added complexity and regulations, seem to grow around us just as the beurocracies; schools, governments, companies - maybe our lives are just all dependent on the 3rd law of thermodynamics. Higher disorder? I recommend this amazing presentation, questioning the basics, and attitude in teamwork, of the Artemis project: [this video]

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] [this video]

I find 'rocket science' quite interesting, who not :) But my knowledge is limited to what can grasp from watching the channels discussing the topics every now and then and reading some of the lightweight books. (I find the design and creation of the space suits very interesting). Nevertheless when I saw the Smarter Every Day video the first time the biggest question mark for me was the number of rockets required to reach the moon _once_ [1] There were some other topics from the talk like the cryogenic refueling never done before [2], the orbit around the moon [3]. But for these I cannot evaluate who much of a problem they are. But more than eight rockets for one flight sounds a lot, even without expertise. [1] [this video] [2] [this video] [3] [this video]