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What made Apollo a success? (1971) [pdf]
- highfrequency 3y agoLots of wise advice. It's telling that one of the most frequently occurring words in this document about landing a man on the moon is "simple." - "Build it simple and then double up on many components so that if one fails the other will take over. Examples are ablative thrust chambers that do not require regenerative cooling; hypergolic propellants that do not require an ignition source; three fuel cells, where one alone could bring the spacecraft back from the moon" - "Another important design rule, which we have not discussed as often as we should, reads: Minimize functional interfaces between complex pieces of hardware. In this way, two organizations can work on their own hardware relatively independently...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. If there had been 10 times as many wires, it probably would have taken a hundred (or a thousand?) times as many people to handle the interface." (interesting proposed scaling) - "Generally, tedious, repetitive tasks are best performed automatically...but the entire rendezvous sequence was designed so that the pilot could always monitor the automatic system's performance and apply a backup solution if deviations were noted." - "The single most important factor leading to the high degree of reliability of the Apollo spacecraft was the tremendous depth and breadth of the test activity...Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft and their systems. Such experience -- together with a detailed analysis of all previous failures, discrepancies, and anomalies -- led us to the conclusion that we were ready to fly a lunar orbit with Apollo 8" - "Throughout Apollo, many discrepancies or failures occurred daily...the result was the same: The failure had to be understood and, if applicable, some corrective action taken. - "Pay particular attention to what seem minor details, especially for substitute parts and 'explained' failures."
- dotancohen 3y ago> Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft. Surely they mean man-hours and not aggregate time. Apollo 8 was only a year and a half after the Apollo 1 fire, and much of the spacecraft was redesigned afterward.
- sandworm101 3y agoI think they meant aggregate. Remember that most of the people leading the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo charge had WWII experience. Safety was based on "at least nobody is currently shooting at us" and development cycles were influenced by the fasttrack programs during the war. Similar trends happened in other areas (motor racing). Those with wartime experience just shrugged off safety, accepting danger as they did during the war.
- massysett 3y ago"Build it simple" I once heard a story from a NASA employee. She said that regular ballpoint pens don't work in space due to the zero gravity. So she said NASA got some engineers to develop some sort of fancy ballpoint pen that would move the ink even in zero gravity. She said the Soviets just used pencils.
- sandworm101 3y agoAnd pencils are famously dangerous in space. Graphite is a conductor. You don't want conductive dust floating around a pressurized chamber filled with electronics, oxygen and people. There are lots of little health details about zero gravity, things that literally never come up on earth. Dust is a big one. Dust doesn't settle to the ground in space. You end up inhaling it. Graphite (also glass) is not the sort of things you want to inhale.
- gorkish 3y agoYeah that's probably why the soviets (and the americans) used grease pencils instead of graphite pencils in space. The absurdism of this pencil/pen lore goes so deep that even the corrections can't get it right. Seriously does everyone just assume that people in the 60's were that stupid?
- psunavy03 3y agoNo, it's just a meme about how Americans are supposedly nerds who overengineer things while Russians are supposedly commonsensical manly alcoholics.
- lovecg 3y agoIt’s a compelling story that’s fun to tell at parties. These are often 90% untrue. Seriously think of any historic “fun fact”, it’s probably mostly false. The reality is much simpler. Pencils suck for long term record keeping. Grease pencils especially. A guy developed a space pen and asked NASA if they wanted it. They tested it and it worked pretty well, so they ordered a bunch. The Soviets then bought a bunch too by the way! But yeah that’s not nearly as fun as “dumb rich Americans over-engineer everything”.
- ryandrake 3y agoA lot of this advice can be applied without much additional cost, too! Whenever one of these "engineering lessons you could learn from aviation (or spaceflight)" threads comes up, there's always a few people who come out of the woodwork with the tired old "LOL aerospace has infinite budget" excuse. Yes, some things in aerospace are cost-prohibitive to bring to your company that does CRUD apps, but things like simplicity, minimizing interfaces, automation and so on probably wouldn't cost as much as you imagine. That hot mess of 50 microservices talking to each other through 20 layers of abstraction and frameworks in your code base probably cost more than a simpler one would. And things like attention to detail, thorough defect analysis and so on are more of a culture change than something your company has to pour money into. As someone who used to work in the marine and aerospace industries, joining a "normal" application development company was a bit of a culture shock. It took some adjusting to what passes for Quality Assurance, Failure Analysis, Robustness, Stability, in regular commercial software.
- serialNumber 3y agoAny resources you'd recommend for learning those principles/standards used in more "rigorous" fields? thanks :)
- ryandrake 3y agoOP’s article is a good start. For avionics, look up DO-178C, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification.
- lovecg 3y agoSpeaking from experience with software engineering which might not apply everywhere, but complexity is one of those things that’s often easy to point out and very difficult to get rid of. It’s often a form of organizational disease where a ton of people’s jobs are tied to maintaining or introducing new complexity - once it becomes entrenched, watch out. Requires good (and rare) leadership to pull out of this. > Examples are ablative thrust chambers that do not require regenerative cooling Now imagine that there’s already a team with a vested interest to make regenerative cooling work no matter what. The real puzzle is how do you get them to stop working on it altogether gracefully without hurting too many egos or careers. I have a feeling that Apollo had a different culture in the early days that was focused on the mission, and these problems didn’t show up. This is often true of early stage startups as well.
- Animats 3y agoMan. Moon. Decade. That was the goal. It was achieved. It was a dead end. Cost per launch was so high that nobody ever went to the moon again. All that technology was special purpose and single use, not useful for much other than moon missions. Apollo didn't lead anywhere.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y ago> All that technology was special purpose and single use, not useful for much other than moon missions. Apollo didn't lead anywhere. To the contrary, the lineage that underpins modern computing traces directly back to Apollo and the work that supported the program. Apollo was a force multiplier in going from “adding machines running on buildings full of vacuum tubes” to solid state technologies and running higher level software that could control hardware. Similarly, what we learned about building human-rated spacecraft directly led to the follow-on programs, some of which would become ISS. Many of these advancements would be synthesized into modern defense, weather forecasting, and other technologies. The need for NASA to interconnect facilities far afield from one another was a huge force for advancing what telephony and telematics could do. Apollo wasn’t meant to go beyond the moon, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t go anywhere. Apollo accomplished what it set out to do and became a scientific foundation for the next several decades.
- credit_guy 3y agoCompletely tangential here, but there's an important exception to the Keep-it-simple-stupid rule. It's Admiral Rickover's nuclear reactors. He looked at all the options and decided that there's just no way to "keep it simple". He decided that his reactors will be what they'll need to be, and the operators will be extraordinarily well trained so that accidents don't happen. There's a well known Rickover diatribe [1] where he goes on a rant against know-it-alls who propose different designs that work only on paper. It gets posted on HN regularly, I won't quote it again. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
- chrisbrauns 3y agoWow, this is a treasure trove. The thing that stands out to me is the idea that testing is the essential ingredient: > The single most important factor leading to the high degree of reliability of the Apollo spacecraft was the tremendous depth and breadth of the test activity. And the most valuable reason for testing: > Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft and their systems.
- wolfd 3y agoThis document was referenced by Smarter Every Day in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
- hazrmard 3y agoThis was a good presentation. I liked how he didn't pull punches, but was also friendly with the audience. It was an intervention, more than a confrontation.
- engineer_22 3y agoBeing an outsider he approached it in a psychologically correct way. To harken to mythology, it is the court jester who tells the king what no one else will say. Not to say Devin is a clown - far from it! Much respect for him.
- gstrike 3y ago*Destin
- arein3 3y agoI think he missed the point. His entire focus is the landing on moon as the only objective, and doing that with minimal features, which is logical if your goal is just landing on the moon. US already landed on the moon, now they want a framework that will allow a lunar base, taking into account a mars base. With that in mind, you need extra features. So I think his entire talk is based on a wrong assumption (and funny to watch from aside, as it is a bit headstrong).
- elteto 3y agoI felt the same way. Also, asking for things to be "simple" is an empty ask because nobody is trying to come up with ways to make things more complicated on purpose. It is very hard to take action on such ask. Going to the Moon/Mars is hard. Establishing a permanent base is even harder, probably orders of magnitude harder. That's just the basic nature of the problem. And I also noted, most likely subjectively, a certain anti-SpaceX bias. Maybe it was just me?
- jhoechtl 3y agoCold war money
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago3% of yearly GDP budget
- elteto 3y agoYou can throw N% of GDP at _anything_ and come out empty handed if the project is mismanaged. While true that the Apollo missions had the political and financial backing of the most powerful country on Earth it was by no means an assured success. The point of the study is to look beyond the budget and try to understand why the project succeeded. What was done right. You can apply most of the same lessons to high and low budget projects.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago> > by no means an assured success In fact it was a failure, like everything space related failed to deliver the promised ROI, either monetarily or in terms of quality of life.
- avmich 3y agoCitation please?
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoYou know those Lunar rocks that were supposed to hold god knows what secret to the universe and reality itself? Yeah, it turns out they were just useless rocks
- avmich 3y agoSo you insist on negating the benefits of not only engineering, but also science? :) The question of what benefits space program brought to humanity is old and well known, I'll only remind of one of it. The modern generation of space engineers and explorers was born and raised with the awe of the Apollo program achievements - of man setting foot on another celestial body for the first time. Statistically many people working on space developments came to the industry inspired by the spirit of Apollo.
- cubefox 3y agoThe enormous budget doesn't strongly suggest that Apollo was efficiently organized, though it also doesn't rule it out. One thing to notice is that the Soviet N1 moon rocket development was very iterative (trial and error based, perhaps somewhat similar to SpaceX today) before it was cancelled, while the Saturn V development apparently was more perfectionist or risk averse. Though the modern SLS rocket development was even more risk averse than in the times of Saturn V.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoThe project was optimized for shortest critical path to land a man on the moon and bring them back in the shortest amount of time. It was not optimized for lowest cost.
- cubefox 3y agoWell, I was writing this because the PDF doesn't seem to mention "large budget" as a reason for the success, perhaps because it would be too obvious. But the Apollo program might still not have been particularly optimized for speed, even though that was the goal. For example, they possibly could have taken a more iterative approach in the Saturn V development, which could have resulted in an even earlier moon landing. It is hard to tell, because for such a large projects there is no good comparison class.
- psunavy03 3y ago. . . except the N1 wasn't testable. Among other things, engine valves used pyrotechnics to operate, so they couldn't static fire the engines.
- cubefox 3y agoThey did test the N1 rocket prototypes by launching them. Static fires are a much less expensive way of testing, but they only partially replace test launches.
- 3y ago
- schneems 3y agoI highly recommend the book “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon”. It focuses on the logistics, coordination, and innovation by the other 400,000 people involved in getting us to the moon. It makes a compelling argument that the most innovative thing to come out of the program wasn’t tech, but rather project management techniques that allowed parts produced thousands of miles apart to mate perfectly for the first time on tight deadlines and the highest levels of safety and reliability. It’s also an easy read. If you like space it’s worth checking out from your local library.
- a_square_peg 3y agoAnother book that I enjoyed on the topic - "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs". This also comes to the same conclusion that it was the systems engineering process that allowed it to succeed.
- wmab 3y agoI have been looking for similar recommendations so I'll definitely check it out - thanks for the rec!
- nickt 3y agoRelated - the Apollo Mission Reports make great reading. https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-mrs.html https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-mrs.html
- engineer_22 3y agoGreat stuff but don't forget Apollo was plagued with problems. - Apollo 1 burned up on the pad killing 3 of our best men. - Neil Armstrong's landing simulator suffered catastrophic failure, almost killing him. - Apollo 11 had several in-flight incidents that jeopardized the mission. - Apollo 13 explosion causes a mission abort. And these are just the major incidents - indicated that low level failures may have been commonplace. The achievement is never-the-less awe inspiring, and it's wise to study the blueprints Apollo team left behind. Those engineers are now out to pasture, nobody from that program is building the next missions.
- nexuist 3y agoI think you're missing the bigger picture - these are the failures that happened even with all the rigorous testing and procedures. Imagine what would have happened without these regulations in place. Of the incidents that seriously injured or killed astronauts, none happened in space. Of the incidents that happened in space, none led to the loss of any life. It's remarkable, especially considering manned flight itself had only been achieved 50 years earlier.
- engineer_22 3y agoNo, I didn't miss the bigger picture. But thank you for providing context.
- WalterBright 3y agoThere were numerous incidents and failures on the Apollo 11 mission, it's just that the astronauts were able to overcome them. One rather terrifying one was nobody thought to put a door handle on the outside of the LEM. This meant that if Armstrong or Aldrin reflexively closed the door on their way out, there was no way back in. I've been reading "Rocket Men" by Nelson.
- whartung 3y agoIn the movie "The Right Stuff", Gus Grissom is not portrayed in a very positive light, particularly regarding the incident with the hatch blowing after splashdown on his Mercury capsule. Grissom asserted that the hatch "just blew". The investigating panel countered that there had been done all sorts of tests on the bolts and they never "just blew", putting suspicion that Grissom somehow managed to trigger the hatch. Later investigation found that, indeed, there was a problem with the way the explosive bolts worked, that they could "just blow", and for that reason, they were not on Apollo 1. If Grissom had not encountered that problem with his Mercury flight, then Apollo 1 would likely have had a different hatch design and they may well have survived that fire. Later Apollo capsules had a different hatch design. They talk about this in the "Apollo 1" episode of the mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon".
- mutagen 3y agoEbook (epub and others) version of this on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/what-made-apollo-a-success https://archive.org/details/what-made-apollo-a-success This was created by a kind individual after this document was referenced on Smarter Every Day as mentioned by a sibling comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_converted_sp287_what_made_apollo_a_success_into/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_...
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- happytiger 3y agoI 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. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLHIM2IPRY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLHIM2IPRY 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. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU 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.
- wallflower 3y agoYes, credit was given previously. None of us would have heard about this without Destin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38670760#38671309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38670760#38671309
- sandworm101 3y agoFor reference, these rockets were far from perfect. They had a very different approach to design and safety. Construction/fabrication errors that today would never be allowed anywhere near a human-rated rocket were accepted and dealt with. It was a different time. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/f-1-moon-rocket https://www.wired.co.uk/article/f-1-moon-rocket "That's one thing we were trying to get knowledge on: what imperfections were OK to live with versus what imperfections are going to give us problems?" "Like with the injector," said Case, speaking of the 44-inch (1.1 metre) metal plate that spewed the propellant into the engine's nozzle. "There are hundreds of holes drilled into the main injector - all drilled by hand, too. And one of the holes you can actually see where the drill bit came down at the wrong spot, and the guy just stopped - you can see where he moved over to where the hole was supposed to be and finished drilling the hole. They kept that and would have flown with that engine. Those kinds of things were pretty neat."" https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/injector-plate-rocket-engine-liquid-fuel-f-1-recovered/nasm_A20160018000 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/injector-plate...
- rawgabbit 3y agoPage 71 has this paragraph on the Apollo Data Management network. I wish the paper provided more detail on what they did besides "assigning personnel". Early in the Apollo Program, considerable difficulty was experienced in the exchange, standardization, and dissemination of critical data required both by and from the mission planners. In view of the interdependency of most mission-planning milestone documents, the need for coordination and tight control in disseminating these data became acute. As a result, the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in conjunction with the hardware contractors and operational elements exercised strict controls and procedures in governing mission-planning data. As a part of this program, most organizations appointed key personnel on a full-time basis to support the data-management network. In retrospect, this action must be regarded as vital in consolidating and strengthening the Apollo mission-planning process.
- a_square_peg 3y agoThis was the practice of 'configuration management' - I mentioned it in another thread but a lot of this is discussed in the book 'The Secret of Apollo'. It's a quite a good read and gave me a whole new appreciation for the practice of configuration management and document control, something that many engineers abhor.
- aj7 3y agoThe Apollo 3 disaster removed all overconfidence. That’s my answer.