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The 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
by cubefox 3y ago
The 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.