5 ms·

What Made Apollo a Success? (1971) [pdf]

112 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

charliepark 8y ago
This looks really interesting. "A series of eight articles … from the March 1970 issue of Astronautics & Aeronautics." Quickly summarizing the table of contents and some of the internal content, these seem to be the main takeaways: • Create design principles that stress simplicity. • Test exhaustively. • Develop mission rules, procedures, and plans for potential issues ahead of time; iterate as new information comes in. • Execute rigorous post-mortems. • Prioritize flexible yet disciplined management. It's notable that this was published before Apollo 13. It'd be interesting to see what changes Kranz et al. would make to these articles after that.
- usermac 8y ago
  I've heard or read of this before, the first bullet, and can't help but to compare this to what has happened with the 737 Max 8 current issue. From the PDF comes: "Apollo gains a measure of simplicity from features simple both in design and operation, complex in design but simple to operate, or simple by being passive in function. The concept of simple design and simple operation is best illustrated by the Apollo rocket-propulsion systems (fig. 2-2)."
  - sizzzzlerz 8y ago
    For a machine as complex as the Saturn 5 rocket, it is truly a credit to the builders that it never suffered a major failure in any of the manned missions. Same for the LM rocket which returned the astronauts to the command module. Both had to absolutely work and both did. As John Glenn quipped "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract."
    - delibes 8y ago
      Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee :( I do get your point, and it's amazing it worked as well as it did. Space is tough, and things are likely to go wrong, just as they still do with civil aviation.
      - arethuza 8y ago
        Silly nitpick: Apollo 1 was a Saturn 1B not a Saturn 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
        sizzzzlerz 8y ago
        It also wasn't a "mission". They were performing in a test. And, in any case, the fire wasn't a fault of the rocket; it was a fire in capsule.
- openasocket 8y ago
  All of these apply to software development as well, but especially that first point. I'm on a project right now that has a bunch of things that can be simplified. Some duplicated state, multiple code paths for computing the same thing, etc. When problems arise it's very tricky to debug and it's almost always caused by that complexity. The temptation is to just add another layer of checks or validation on top of it or make a slight tweak. But of course the best path is to just roll up your sleeves and work to remove as many moving parts as you can. Most of our bug fixes have actually resulted in substantially fewer lines of code. Anyway, the point is to always try and keep things simple, and even better to make sure that principle is followed in the initial stages of design.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  > Test exhaustively. > It's notable that this was published before Apollo 13 One of the causes of the Apollo 13 service module explosion was damage caused during a pre-flight test. The SM included a pipe whose only role was to drain out oxygen after pre-flight launch-pad tests. It had no in-flight role. The pipe was damaged during assembly (nobody noticed) and failed to drain the oxygen tank. The test team instead decided to drain the tank by heating the oxygen using an in-tank heater and in effect boiling it off. The heater temperature gauge didn't show (it was badly designed) that the heater had in fact got so hot that it had melted electrical insulation on a fan in the oxygen tank. All of this was pre-flight. 56 hours into the mission, the crew used the fan to stir the tank, causing sparks and the eventual explosion.
- robotresearcher 8y ago
  This document must be post Apollo 13. Copied verbatim from the linked PDF: > Even the Apollo 13 oxygen tank rupture, by far the most critical problem of any Apollo mission to date, was overcome by relying on preplanned emergency procedures and the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the astronauts and the ground support team.
swozey 8y ago
Funny timing on this, I just came across my grandfather's letter from the Apollo program astronauts thanking him for his testing prowess and awarding him the "silver snoopy" for professional excellence. My other grandfather was the first shuttle launch director, the shoes we fill.. Might interest some. https://lensdump.com/i/W1GAd0 https://lensdump.com/i/W1GAd0
- sizzzzlerz 8y ago
  What did your grandfather do and which astronauts signed the letter?
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    You can read the letter yourself, which answers all the details.
  - swozey 8y ago
    It's signed by Ronald Evans of Apollo 17. Both of my grandfathers and a lot of my family worked for nasa for decades, though. We're all space coasters. A few pilots. My grandmother was a typist there for instance. He was some sort of rocket propulsion engineer back then, I'm not sure what the actual title would have been. I asked him to write some memoirs a long time ago but I don't bug him about it. He doesn't seem to think it's very interesting. Guess that happens when it's your day job.
    - EvanAnderson 8y ago
      I certainly wouldn't ask you to bug him, but you might mention to him that there are lots of people who would find anything he has to say about his involvement with Apollo (and the space program in general) fascinating. His stories are important and interesting, even if he doesn't think they are. I wish I had a pointer to somebody who is collecting this history before it's lost. (I wish I had the time and financial freedom to be doing that!)
      - japhyr 8y ago
british_india 8y ago
Stanley Kubric
bspammer 8y ago
The very first sentence is confusing to me: > On July 20, 1969, man first set foot on another planet. Has the definition of planet changed over time?
- daveslash 8y ago
  I so wish that your username had been "Pluto" when you asked that question. Snarkiness put aside, I searched around online to see if maybe I was missing something. It looks like it was simply a misuse of the word. I would have suggested using "celestial body" or even "world" in place of "planet". Perhaps he was using it in the colloquial sense (in the same way a tomato is a "vegetable").
- basseq 8y ago
  This question struck me. I, too, googled it, and came up empty handed. I then asked on Quora, which at the time of this comment, has 5 not-unreasonable answers. My favorite answer is Joshua Engel's: > It’s just a turn of phrase. He’s evoking the idea of “planet” as “one of the lights in the sky”, something people have long dreamed of. > It was an awkward phrase even at the time, though. George Low may have been a great administrator, but he’s a lousy writer. My red pen itched at every word. (In the very next sentence he misspells “mankind”.) He meant to be poetic, but his audience would have been confused by it, and that wouldn’t be the last time in that document. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-NASA-refer-to-the-Moon-as-a-planet-in-1970 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-NASA-refer-to-the-Moon-as-a-pl...
- Someone 8y ago
  https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planet https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planet: ”1.2 Astrology historical A celestial body distinguished from the fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own (including the moon and sun), especially with reference to its supposed influence on people and events. ‘the planets are presently influencing you in a positive way’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet: ”In classical antiquity, the seven classical planets are the seven non-fixed astronomical objects in the sky visible to the naked eye: Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the Sun, and the Moon. The word planet comes from two related Greek words, πλάνης planēs (whence πλάνητες ἀστέρες planētes asteres "wandering stars, planets") and πλανήτης planētēs, both with the original meaning of "wanderer", expressing the fact that these objects move across the celestial sphere relative to the fixed stars.”
tra3 8y ago
Brady Heywood Forensic Engineering Podcast [0], has an amazing series on Apollo 13 [1]. It's 6 episodes, mostly narrated by Brady Heywood, with some audio recording from Houston as well as the Apollo astronauts. It's riveting. [0]: http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com [1]: http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com/episode-21-apollo-13-p1-head-for-the-hills http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com/episode-21-apollo-13-p1-head-...
wespiser_2018 8y ago
From the article: "If the design has been verified and if a thorough test program has been completed it should not be necessary to make any changes. Of course, this idealized situation does not exist in any program like Apollo where design, test, and flight often overlap and must be carried out at the same time." Wow, these remind me of the Joint Strike Fighter program, where design/test/production all overlapped (concurrency) and cost overruns where a huge issue. No doubt, we spared very little expense in the Apollo program, cutting only the last two missions!
hguant 8y ago
>the main point is that a single man can fully understand this interface and can cope with all the effects of a change on __either side of the interface__ (emphasis mine) This is a really great and subtle point, and something that takes a lot of rigour to turn into reality.
shmooth 8y ago
Had to be Agile dev with CI/CD

112 points by hownottowrite 8y ago

This looks really interesting. "A series of eight articles … from the March 1970 issue of Astronautics & Aeronautics." Quickly summarizing the table of contents and some of the internal content, these seem to be the main takeaways: • Create design principles that stress simplicity. • Test exhaustively. • Develop mission rules, procedures, and plans for potential issues ahead of time; iterate as new information comes in. • Execute rigorous post-mortems. • Prioritize flexible yet disciplined management. It's notable that this was published before Apollo 13. It'd be interesting to see what changes Kranz et al. would make to these articles after that.

usermac 8y ago
I've heard or read of this before, the first bullet, and can't help but to compare this to what has happened with the 737 Max 8 current issue. From the PDF comes: "Apollo gains a measure of simplicity from features simple both in design and operation, complex in design but simple to operate, or simple by being passive in function. The concept of simple design and simple operation is best illustrated by the Apollo rocket-propulsion systems (fig. 2-2)."
- sizzzzlerz 8y ago
  For a machine as complex as the Saturn 5 rocket, it is truly a credit to the builders that it never suffered a major failure in any of the manned missions. Same for the LM rocket which returned the astronauts to the command module. Both had to absolutely work and both did. As John Glenn quipped "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract."
  - delibes 8y ago
    Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee :( I do get your point, and it's amazing it worked as well as it did. Space is tough, and things are likely to go wrong, just as they still do with civil aviation.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      Silly nitpick: Apollo 1 was a Saturn 1B not a Saturn 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
      - sizzzzlerz 8y ago
        It also wasn't a "mission". They were performing in a test. And, in any case, the fire wasn't a fault of the rocket; it was a fire in capsule.
openasocket 8y ago
All of these apply to software development as well, but especially that first point. I'm on a project right now that has a bunch of things that can be simplified. Some duplicated state, multiple code paths for computing the same thing, etc. When problems arise it's very tricky to debug and it's almost always caused by that complexity. The temptation is to just add another layer of checks or validation on top of it or make a slight tweak. But of course the best path is to just roll up your sleeves and work to remove as many moving parts as you can. Most of our bug fixes have actually resulted in substantially fewer lines of code. Anyway, the point is to always try and keep things simple, and even better to make sure that principle is followed in the initial stages of design.
KineticLensman 8y ago
> Test exhaustively. > It's notable that this was published before Apollo 13 One of the causes of the Apollo 13 service module explosion was damage caused during a pre-flight test. The SM included a pipe whose only role was to drain out oxygen after pre-flight launch-pad tests. It had no in-flight role. The pipe was damaged during assembly (nobody noticed) and failed to drain the oxygen tank. The test team instead decided to drain the tank by heating the oxygen using an in-tank heater and in effect boiling it off. The heater temperature gauge didn't show (it was badly designed) that the heater had in fact got so hot that it had melted electrical insulation on a fan in the oxygen tank. All of this was pre-flight. 56 hours into the mission, the crew used the fan to stir the tank, causing sparks and the eventual explosion.
robotresearcher 8y ago
This document must be post Apollo 13. Copied verbatim from the linked PDF: > Even the Apollo 13 oxygen tank rupture, by far the most critical problem of any Apollo mission to date, was overcome by relying on preplanned emergency procedures and the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the astronauts and the ground support team.

swozey 8y ago

Funny timing on this, I just came across my grandfather's letter from the Apollo program astronauts thanking him for his testing prowess and awarding him the "silver snoopy" for professional excellence. My other grandfather was the first shuttle launch director, the shoes we fill.. Might interest some. https://lensdump.com/i/W1GAd0 https://lensdump.com/i/W1GAd0

sizzzzlerz 8y ago
What did your grandfather do and which astronauts signed the letter?
- hellofunk 8y ago
  You can read the letter yourself, which answers all the details.
- swozey 8y ago
  It's signed by Ronald Evans of Apollo 17. Both of my grandfathers and a lot of my family worked for nasa for decades, though. We're all space coasters. A few pilots. My grandmother was a typist there for instance. He was some sort of rocket propulsion engineer back then, I'm not sure what the actual title would have been. I asked him to write some memoirs a long time ago but I don't bug him about it. He doesn't seem to think it's very interesting. Guess that happens when it's your day job.
  - EvanAnderson 8y ago
    I certainly wouldn't ask you to bug him, but you might mention to him that there are lots of people who would find anything he has to say about his involvement with Apollo (and the space program in general) fascinating. His stories are important and interesting, even if he doesn't think they are. I wish I had a pointer to somebody who is collecting this history before it's lost. (I wish I had the time and financial freedom to be doing that!)
    - japhyr 8y ago

british_india 8y ago

Stanley Kubric

bspammer 8y ago

The very first sentence is confusing to me: > On July 20, 1969, man first set foot on another planet. Has the definition of planet changed over time?

daveslash 8y ago
I so wish that your username had been "Pluto" when you asked that question. Snarkiness put aside, I searched around online to see if maybe I was missing something. It looks like it was simply a misuse of the word. I would have suggested using "celestial body" or even "world" in place of "planet". Perhaps he was using it in the colloquial sense (in the same way a tomato is a "vegetable").
basseq 8y ago
This question struck me. I, too, googled it, and came up empty handed. I then asked on Quora, which at the time of this comment, has 5 not-unreasonable answers. My favorite answer is Joshua Engel's: > It’s just a turn of phrase. He’s evoking the idea of “planet” as “one of the lights in the sky”, something people have long dreamed of. > It was an awkward phrase even at the time, though. George Low may have been a great administrator, but he’s a lousy writer. My red pen itched at every word. (In the very next sentence he misspells “mankind”.) He meant to be poetic, but his audience would have been confused by it, and that wouldn’t be the last time in that document. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-NASA-refer-to-the-Moon-as-a-planet-in-1970 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-NASA-refer-to-the-Moon-as-a-pl...
Someone 8y ago
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planet https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/planet: ”1.2 Astrology historical A celestial body distinguished from the fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own (including the moon and sun), especially with reference to its supposed influence on people and events. ‘the planets are presently influencing you in a positive way’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet: ”In classical antiquity, the seven classical planets are the seven non-fixed astronomical objects in the sky visible to the naked eye: Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the Sun, and the Moon. The word planet comes from two related Greek words, πλάνης planēs (whence πλάνητες ἀστέρες planētes asteres "wandering stars, planets") and πλανήτης planētēs, both with the original meaning of "wanderer", expressing the fact that these objects move across the celestial sphere relative to the fixed stars.”

tra3 8y ago

Brady Heywood Forensic Engineering Podcast [0], has an amazing series on Apollo 13 [1]. It's 6 episodes, mostly narrated by Brady Heywood, with some audio recording from Houston as well as the Apollo astronauts. It's riveting. [0]: http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com [1]: http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com/episode-21-apollo-13-p1-head-for-the-hills http://bradyheywood.libsyn.com/episode-21-apollo-13-p1-head-...

wespiser_2018 8y ago

From the article: "If the design has been verified and if a thorough test program has been completed it should not be necessary to make any changes. Of course, this idealized situation does not exist in any program like Apollo where design, test, and flight often overlap and must be carried out at the same time." Wow, these remind me of the Joint Strike Fighter program, where design/test/production all overlapped (concurrency) and cost overruns where a huge issue. No doubt, we spared very little expense in the Apollo program, cutting only the last two missions!

hguant 8y ago

>the main point is that a single man can fully understand this interface and can cope with all the effects of a change on __either side of the interface__ (emphasis mine) This is a really great and subtle point, and something that takes a lot of rigour to turn into reality.

shmooth 8y ago

Had to be Agile dev with CI/CD