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.

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.

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.

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