Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.
1) The tribal knowledge to even implement Apollo era technology is pretty much gone
2) Apollo flight hardware doesn't exist, probably couldn't even be manufactured without extremely expensive tooling and build up to recreate outdated hardware.
3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard design, since every iteration was changed to be "better" by throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticked.
I believe the F-1 specifically does have full CAD models now after a reverse engineering effort, though in general your point still stands. They attempted to restart J-2 production for Ares, but ran into so many complications that the J-2X was basically a clean-sheet design
This is the best article I could find about this: https://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/8/227/2019/g...
This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits. For metallurgy it's like trying to write down your family's double chocolate chip cookie recipe except your chocolate chips are atoms, your oven's temperature varies +-500C, and all of your ingredients can spoil when mixed in the wrong order, cooled at the wrong rate, heated at the wrong rate, aren't mixed with trace elements of other ingredients that came in your ingredients, etc.
I have no experience with this but I've heard this also applies to chemistry glass blowers: https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/news/20150127/nearly-lost-ar...
This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal?
Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.
Then somebody leaves and suddenly work grinds down to a halt for a week, because people try to recreate a small but crucial piece of lost tribal knowledge.
Now imagine that, but across more serious domains like metallurgy or jet engine design, and imagine trying to recover that knowledge after the company no longer exists and most employees are either retired or dead.
In this there's a sense that "unused muscles atrophy" applies to technology. As a human race, we currently do not have the capability to put a man on the moon. We had it once, but it's gone now.
(Specifically with commit messages as Gemara and wikis as the much more organized and impersonal Mishnah.)
Having written the above it appeared to me this could be an ironic illustration of tribal knowledge vs technical documentation issue. Knowing when something happened and reading about it are two separate things.
Much of that tribal knowledge would have been very esoteric and focused on technologies that are no longer critical. for example, fabricating magnetic core memory. I'm sure some of the required skill is gone, but we don't need to use that memory technology anymore.
there would've been a huge amount of knowledge about how to operate apollo spacecraft in general. there is no way it is preserved.
and this thread is beneath a comment suggesting that we don't start from scratch, and reuse apollo designs. as you point out, we can make better stuff now. the only value to the apollo designs would be if we had operational experience to go with them.
Stuff like
> Finally, the parachutes were folded and packed by hand. During the Apollo missions in the 1960s and early 1970s, only three people in the country were trained, and then licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, to fold Apollo parachutes—Norma Cretal, Buzz Corey and Jimmy Calunga —and they handled all 11 Apollo missions. Their skills were considered so essential that NASA forbade them from ever riding in the same car together. The agency couldn’t afford to chance that all three would be injured in a single accident.
I also doubt that the seamstresses techniques to sew those parachutes are something easily written down
The loss of this kind of thinking isn’t so much a failure of people to write documentation, but a natural consequence of things being hard.
No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized.
Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that knowledge will be lost unless is followed up by an equally massive project by a horde of technical writers to nail everything down.
(It's the same thing as the "you only have a backup if you actually restored it at least once" adage.)
Especially in an era where you had to literally write things down versus throwing in a link to a slack message onto a Jira ticket somewhere (Which no one will ever read anyway since text search in Jira sucks)
Also its worth emphasizing that a lot of the actual physics regarding like rocket combustion was not understood so the design process had elements of "make a rocket engine that satisfies some generic constraints and we can figure out the black magic parts such as POGO". Not that useful to write down.
The real specification of the airplane was the tools and jigs created to make and assemble the parts. Those are long gone. The mechanical drawings were made after the fact to satisfy some DoD requirement.
Given the advances in control systems, simulation, and materials I think this is very doable, but it's work.
The money is there. The challenges are mostly, as other's have noted, large changes in safety requirements and general execution challenges for large scale projects in today's America.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2020_...
You can’t write everything done and for an ongoing concern you always have people around.
In fact one of the problem is these Organization memory is sometimes in the way and you do not know why or even that exist.
But here is about the absence, as it is not an on-going concern.