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I don't believe that's a good portrayal of the situation. I doubt that there's anything all that special about the actual Saturn V engines. Sure, maybe nobody r

by ufmace 7y ago

I don't believe that's a good portrayal of the situation. I doubt that there's anything all that special about the actual Saturn V engines. Sure, maybe nobody remembers all of the engineering details about those particular engines, and it would be hard to reverse engineer them. But I'm pretty sure we would find it much easier to design and build new engines of similar spec today. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and several other new space companies don't seem to have had all that much trouble designing and manufacturing new, powerful rocket engines. Ditto guidance systems. Why try to replicate something designed around the constraints of hardware that seems ancient by today's standards? No reason to think we couldn't build something new with equivalent or better features on modern hardware.

dfox 7y ago
The F1 engine is interesting from this PoV because the thing as it is documented does not work (and even the documented design is full of weird design decisions that nobody today knows the reason for) and it worked by combination of luck and institutional knowledge of the actual machinists who built it not exactly to specifications. In fact if you take various “high tech” designs from middle of the 20th century you will see a pattern of things that cannot work if built as designed, but work because of random effects that are certainly outside of what the original designers thought of (I have seen large amount of instrumentation electronics where voltage sag on supply voltage is part of feedback loop and it will not work without it. I highly doubt that the original engineers consciously designed that.)
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  This reminds me of the story about using genetic programming to design hardware, where it would reliably generate designs that worked... somehow. Complete with apparently nonfunctional parts that couldn't be pruned without breaking it.
- Corrado 7y ago
  Your comment reminded me of the story of the MIT "Magic" button [0]. [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

by ufmace 7y ago

dfox 7y ago

The F1 engine is interesting from this PoV because the thing as it is documented does not work (and even the documented design is full of weird design decisions that nobody today knows the reason for) and it worked by combination of luck and institutional knowledge of the actual machinists who built it not exactly to specifications. In fact if you take various “high tech” designs from middle of the 20th century you will see a pattern of things that cannot work if built as designed, but work because of random effects that are certainly outside of what the original designers thought of (I have seen large amount of instrumentation electronics where voltage sag on supply voltage is part of feedback loop and it will not work without it. I highly doubt that the original engineers consciously designed that.)

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
This reminds me of the story about using genetic programming to design hardware, where it would reliably generate designs that worked... somehow. Complete with apparently nonfunctional parts that couldn't be pruned without breaking it.
Corrado 7y ago
Your comment reminded me of the story of the MIT "Magic" button [0]. [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html