Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it. Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology

Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it. Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades. Example, the CSM’s umbilical connection was a work of art, it had to be reverse engineered from museum pieces for current gen spacecraft, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbilical_inspection.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbil... The F-1 engine’s turbopump and gas generators had to be taken apart by hand because we haven’t built anything close to their throughput for decades, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield. IIRC, there’s a fairly direct line between the Apollo parachutes and SpaceX, https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better. Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.