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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why?

Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money.

In order to progress and learn and improve you must do things you've never done before. You must be ambitious and you must attempt things that are difficult and will probably take many attempts to master.

This logic is exactly the same as saying "we've been burning toxic liquids for generations to get around. Why are we making things complicated with all these batteries and electric motors".

The whole point is improvement.

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This strikes me as a moment where you should watch the video there's a moment specifically at 41:40 where he basically says what you're saying and it's an integral part of his point

I find that a lot of people myself included like to argue against an imagined version of something they hear second hand often not going to the source material to realize they're standing on the same side

A counterpoint to his thesis that the orbit and design have to be simple to succeed is the Mars rover sky crane lander system. It was terribly complex and, famously, worked very well. Compute has made a big difference since the 60s. Roughly every line of code today used to be a handful of physical components, whether it was an analog circuit or additional core memory wire-wound in the flight computer. Then there's the fact we test differently today because we finite element analysis every part down to the smallest component. That wasn't possible in the 60s.

> Because if we do it the same way we did 50+ years ago, we learn absolutely nothing and the whole thing is a pointless waste of money.

I would argue that if we did it exactly as we did back then that we would actually learn something because we forgot how to do so much. Literally can’t build an F-1 engine. It would take a ton of work just to recreate it.

However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagrams, specs, etc) to build it and one built we can iterate.

But building what we had is already a tremendous challenge because of the lost knowledge. Were it not for that, I would agree with you.

I agree - there would be tremendous value in taking the 1960s approach, keeping it simple, and optimizing with modern electronics.

What they seem to be doing is a code rewrite while adding features.

Revival of Saturn-V today would likely be very expensive comparing to Starship variants.

> However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagrams, specs, etc) to build it and one built we can iterate.

Hypothetically we've lost the diagrams,designs,knowledge to build a 386.

Is it worth building one today just so we can remember how, and then iterate on it?

No, absolutely not. The F-1 (and the 386) are ancient. Don't start from ancient and work up. Aim higher.

> However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagrams, specs, etc) to build it and one built we can iterate.

To me the current state looks like as if we

    1) recreated F-1
    2) had plans and diagrams
    3) iterated - first to the level of NK-33, then to the
       level of RD-270, then to the level of Raptors
    4) carefully put those original plans back on the shelf
       and forgot about them.

Yes we can't do F-1 today verbatim. We also can't do many other things, not easily - steam engines, telegraphs, airplanes, cassette players of the time would all require some re-engineering. We however can often do better using very different approach.

Sure you always learn something when you do anything.

> Literally can’t build an F-1 engine.

We can. There has been lots of work done on that already. But you wouldn't want to do an engine like it was done back then anyway. It would be crazy to do it the same way. A modern version would be better, better controls, lighter and so on.

> However, the benefit is that we would then have plans (diagrams, specs, etc) to build it and one built we can iterate.

Those would be more like constraints. So many things that are not the same anymore. You would literally reconstruct the economy from the 1960s first. That would be totally insane thing to do.

Its not because of 'lost knowlage' its because first of all, it just doesn't make any sense to do it the same way even if you could. Both the tools and the people are totally different, the structure of the economy is different.

It depends on your mission. If the mission is to go to the moon, well, we've done that, we don't really need anything new. If the mission is to reduce carbon emissions, that will require something new.

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