Currently reading On The Shoulders of Titans about the Gemini program. It gets slammed for being very poorly edited & formatted, etc. but it's dirt cheap if you

Currently reading On The Shoulders of Titans about the Gemini program. It gets slammed for being very poorly edited & formatted, etc. but it's dirt cheap if you can see past that. Quite a good collection of interesting engineering problems & solutions like that, and some very good lessons on how (and how not) to run major engineering projects (but as the reviews will tell you, it's just a human-readable series of events drawn from memos and calendars, etc - there's little analysis or real commentary). One of my favorites is that the maneuvering & attitude thrusters used ablative cooling, but ablated way too fast. They got incremental improvements by messing with the orientation of the laminated layers and other tweaks, but the real break through was squirting fuel down the inner walls of the cone immediately prior to ignition: got something like 4x the previous engine life and double their target.