So you want to run a space shot (2021)

The author mentions early on that they don’t believe any written guide exists. Maybe there aren’t public guides from amateur rocketeers or college groups, partly because these efforts are (by definition) amateur. The “pros” have all sorts of guidance written down. And they’ve proven that it works by launching things into space. Here’s a link to a NASA guide to program management: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150000400

There are several other documents publicly available from NASA. The Department of Defense has thousands of pages of acquisition guidance for space launch, and the general process is mostly unclassified and publicly available if you care to search.

One could argue that the guidance from agencies that run billion dollar programs are overkill for a space shot that is very simple and cheap by comparison. But I’d say that one correct approach is to adopt a complicated process that has been proven to be successful, and then trim out some pieces which are completely unnecessary. This must be done with knowledge of what every board and review process is for.

I’d say that perhaps a more important thing isn’t so much having a 400+ page NASA guide available, the most important thing is having people around they have had successful launches. Any group with the funds to run a space shot would be well served by getting a hold of some industry veterans. Not veteran rocket engineers, although those are important, but veteran program managers and systems engineers. They exist and some are passionate, you could find them to mentor your group and vastly improve the chance of success.

To be clear, it’s nice that the author wrote down their lessons learned, and more college/amateur groups should do that. I’m not trying to disparage their work, just trying to point out that other resources exist.

One has to wonder why no successful team tried to share their innovative solutions. Either for academic credentials (e.g. as master's or PhD thesis project) or even commercially. This strikes me as a huge waste of effort - anything that can be replicated by students seems to be very valuable for future projects, no?

hmmm, not really about rocket-science, but probably one of the reasons software world is where it is (overgrown and bloated and sinking megatons of resource to produce next to nothing useful), is because rarely someone burns/blows hirself with just making software. One can go nuts, but that's entirely different option.. and gets easily available/delivered on the other end - users - as well.