Engineering for the Long Haul, the Nasa Way

Almost all of the real engineering done by "NASA" at KSC is done by government contractors. The actual NASA employee pool had a higher than usual proportion of lazy and incompetent members because it's virtually impossible to terminate a federal government employee. The rest were hard core bureaucrats who spent most of their time jockeying for bigger offices, more responsibility, etc.

Don't confuse the two; APL is actually becoming quite a rival to JPL. I recommend the book "Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto" [1] if you care to read about some of the politics.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-hor...

The following is an extended quote from the book, to give you a flavor:

APL had not done many planetary missions—only one, in fact—but it had an impressive, decades-long track record of building and launching Earth observation and military satellites that performed well and were inexpensive.

…

APL’s Discovery mission was called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.” The craft launched in 1996 and became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, circling for a year around the asteroid Eros. Later, it would even land on Eros, a bonus achievement that was not even conceived of in the original mission proposal. And to top that, the APL team had completed the spacecraft ahead of schedule, and ended up doing the mission for $30 million under budget, giving the money back to NASA.

…

[After the Bush administration tried to cancel the Pluto mission competition,] I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, and I smelled something fishy. If Europa went forward, JPL would be guaranteed to get the work, because that mission had simply been assigned to JPL—without competition—and it was also a far bigger monetary prize than winning Pluto would be. Alan speculated that JPL had worked behind the scenes to persuade the Bush administration more or less to trade the Pluto mission for a new start on Europa. He also believed that JPL had another interest in killing Pluto, because if APL actually won, APL’s hand would forever be strengthened as a powerful competitor in all future outer solar system exploration.

…

Tom decided to fight fire with napalm, calling his political ace in the hole—the powerful senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where APL is located, and then chair of the Senate funding committee responsible for space exploration. At Tom’s behest, Mikulski wrote a sharp letter to NASA, demanding that NASA resume the Pluto mission competition …

Somewhere I have a link to hundreds, if not thousands, of Kodachrome images of the work: machining, fabrication, and wiring done by those women back in WWII. I'm kind of a machinery geek and it's mindblowing to see the machines I've only known with decades of dirt, surface rust and patina, shown brand-new and gleaming.

Check out /r/cableporn if you're into OCD-grade wire harness building :-)