The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now | Hacker News Reader

The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now

mathworks.com

116 pointstobinfricke14 comments

I recently read a book about the design of the LIM. It amazes me how young many of the people were. The guy in charge of the LIM design, IIRC, was late 20’s. Just a little older than the guy in this article.

In 1962 when Grumman was awarded the contract for the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), Thomas Kelly was promoted to be the lead engineer. He was 32 or 33.

He was 40 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

There's an episode of "From the Earth to the Moon" called "Spider" that focuses on Thomas Kelly. Highly recommended.

The "From the Earth to the Moon" series is by far my favorite series/movie/documentary about the moon missions.

I can also recommend the BBC podcast “13 Minutes to the Moon”, great listening for the commute

"Spider" was one of my favorite episodes.

There is a scene depicting the Saturn launch but from inside the LM. Poetic.

Looks like it is about 39 minutes in: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x447gmx

> It amazes me how young many of the people were.

Maybe not so different from startups today?

NASA wasn't a startup. It was (and is) a full blown government bureaucracy. The idea that there'd be a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings making critical decisions for a big organization like that is very foreign today.

The NASA bureaucrats were used to 20-to-30 somethings making critical decisions during WW2 and Korea. There was much less of a culture of delayed adulthood as we have today.

Actually I think it was much more streamlined than today

Also, bureaucratic BS usually melts when faced with pressure from above. (Though then you might have things like the Challenger disaster)

Maybe NASA wanted to make sure most of them are still around until the end if the program, which could theoretically have taken 20+ years to complete.

I think, when you are building things that no one has ever built before, age is of little concern.

Could you please give us a name of the book?

https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Lander-Developed-Smithsonian-Spa...

There's a bunch of "preliminary" apollo drawings at https://apollopreliminarydrawings.com/ They show the apollo command module designs that North American Aviation came up with before they were approved for a contract.

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