Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

I didn't live through the early space programmes, but having read about them recently, I'm surprised by how incremental they (and the Soviet Sputnik and Vostok counterparts) were.

- The early Mercury flights developed the idea of putting a human in a capsule on top of an ICBM to see what happens at altitude and during re-entry.

- Later Mercury flights experimented with de-orbiting techniques. (The early flights didn't need that because the ICBMs that launched the first people into space did so on a ballistic trajectory – they never achieved orbit.)

- With Gemini we figured out things like endurance (what is it like to have humans in space for weeks), rendezvous and docking (incredibly difficult), and extravehicular activities (preparation for walking on another astronomical body.)

- Early Apollo was focused entirely on solving multi-stage flights without humans on board.

- With Apollo 7 we verified the command module was good enough to attempt to send a few laps around the moon, which happened with Apollo 8, while we were still waiting for a fully functioning lander.

- Apollo 9 was a dry run of the entire moon landing sequence – except in low Earth orbit.

- Apollo 10 repeated the same exercise from Apollo 9 except in Lunar orbit.

- Apollo 11 is often considered the first moon landing, but from the perspective of the program, it was really just another experiment: can we repeat Apollo 10 except also make a brief touch-and-go anywhere on the lunar surface?

- Even Apollo 12 isn't really a moon landing proper, but another experiment: can we repeat Apollo 11 but now also make a precision touchdown?

It wasn't until somewhere around Apollo 14/15 where the main purpose of the missions started becoming scientifically exploring the moon.

That's something like 25 crewed flights at various stages of development that had as their purpose to explore/learn about just one or two new aspects of the future moon missions, pushing the envelope a little further.

Granted, many of these things we have fresh practise in thanks to the space station, but also many of them we don't. It seems a little weird to bet it all on a small number of big bang launches.

This is an excellent narrative, but I think it omits the many risks the program took to get to the moon before the Soviets.

For example, Apollo 8 was the first time a Saturn V (and command module) was sent all the way to the moon, and it was done with a crew. Because there was no lander, there was no backup in case the command module had a problem. If the explosion on Apollo 13 had happened on Apollo 8, the crew would have died in space and never returned.

Remember also that Apollo 8 orbited the moon--it wasn't just a free-return trajectory. The command module had to fire to get into lunar orbit (for the first time ever) and even more importantly, fire to get out (also for the first time ever).

Apollo 8 was originally supposed to have a lunar lander--everyone felt safer with a "lifeboat" just in case. But delays on the lander program meant that they either had to delay Apollo 8 (and miss the end of the decade deadline and maybe the claim to land first) or fly without. The safe course was to delay, but NASA decided to take the risk.

The magic of the Apollo era is that they made it look so easy that we forget how hard it was. The tragedy of Apollo 1 highlights that even simple things, like testing a new capsule on the ground, are incredibly risky.

Apollo 6, the second uncrewed flight of Saturn V was almost a disaster. The booster vibrated badly because of engine instability, and two second stage engines shut down early. But on the very next flight, they decided to send it up with a crew. This would be the equivalent of putting humans on board the next Starship test launch (IFT-4).

Sure, the timeline seems incremental, but only because the dates are omitted. Mercury 1 was in 1961 and the first moon landing was only 8 years later. In contrast, SLS started development in 2011, using existing Shuttle engines and solid rocket motors, and the first landing probably won't happen before 2028.

Yeah, the risk appetite was much higher. Those are good reminders on Apollo 1/6/8, but the problems didn't stop there. The first 5 landing missions all had huge problems that nearly killed everyone, too. Only the last 2 landings were sort of OK.

Apollo 1: burned all astronauts alive

...

Apollo 10: POGO oscillations on launch (Saturn V still trying to tear itself apart), LEM tumbling

Apollo 11: Computer kept crashing all the way down to the moon (it controlled the engines)

Apollo 12: Brownout in the command module during launch, "Set SCE to Aux"

Apollo 13: Oxygen tank fire. So rough they made a movie.

Apollo 14: Shorted abort button almost killed everyone

Apollo 15: Parachute failure

---------

We have no shortage of people who would be willing to put their life on the line, but we do have a shortage of the political urgency/unity to tolerate actual problems. Just look at people dig into Elon Musk every time he explodes a prototype with his own money and nobody on board, and realize that accelerating a human program creates 10x the political sniping opportunity.

You're sensationalising a little.

The abort button on Apollo 14 would at worst have rendezvouzed the lander with the orbiter prior to landing on the moon. It would have killed the mission, but definitely not the astronauts.

The brownout also had several safe abort alternatives and the question was only ever about how to continue the mission, not how to save people.

Apollo 13 also had severe pogo on launch. Obviously it's overshadowed by the unrelated oxygen tank issues later, but that mission actually got extremely lucky that the oscillations happened to occur in such a way that the computer noticed the issue and shut down the affected engine. That could easily not have been the case, and if the oscillations had continued for a few more seconds it would have destroyed the vehicle.

Counterpoint: all of those incidents, except Apollo 1 are proof that the engineering was great, because nobody died.

For example, you mention the computer on the Apollo 11 lunar module crashing. In fact, it was recovering and working properly. The astronauts had left the rendezvous radar on during descent, in case it was needed for abort. That was not a nominal configuration, and the radar kept stealing cycles and causing the guidance computer to be overloaded with tasks. Remember, it was a hard real time system. What did the computer do? Reset and prioritize the key task: landing.

Apollo 12: Got hit (twice) by lightning. The electrical system wasn't fried, it survived it, in a protective mode. Importantly, the computers in the Instrument Unit, placed on the third stage, were completely unaffected.

Apollo 15: One lost parachute, still landed safely (if a bit hard) because of redundancy.

I could go on, but you get the point. It was a well-engineered system backed by a team of engineers.

Maybe. But it's hard to tell whether nobody died because the system was robust vs. nobody died because we got lucky.

For example, there were several cases of burn-through on the O-rings before Challenger. The engineers thought there was enough margin to not worry about it, so they didn't

Similarly, when Columbia was hit by foam-ice on ascent no one worried because it had happened before and nobody had died.

Correction -- at least for Challenger, engineers did not think there was margin, and argued against the launch.

At the technical level, both tragedies were caused by design flaws. Organizationally and culturally, multiple factors contributed, but an attitude of "nothing has happened yet, so this is fine" (normalizing risk) was a major one.

Normalization of deviance is how my professor described it. At least it’s taught in school now.

In my mind I have stored this phrase that "production pressures move the Overton window of acceptable shortcuts closer to disaster."

I think it captures several important nuances, like how it's a gradual process, how it ecpnomises/improves things at first, that there is a destination, that it covers even things such as discussions about shortcuts and not just their usage.

We don't disagree about the engineering being excellent. I was commenting on safety culture. A few days ago I saw Tory Bruno explain with visible frustration how they canceled the launch due to a valve that had to be cycled before it behaved. In that environment, the Apollo risks would not have been tolerated, even though they turned out to have been good bets.

> with his own money

Could someone confirm that? SpaceX raised money last year [0], however I couldn't find how much of this money (if any) went to the Starship program.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/spacex-raising-750-million-a...

Iterative development is the only way you can do R&D. That truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s in a way that clearly isn’t today.

I think it’s probably a symptom of wider culture. In the 60s every major industry was in the middle of a massive improvement cycle, a lot of the engineers would have learned their skills during the R&D boom of the Second World War, and everything was still manufactured locally. It was the perfect environment for rapid engineering improvement.

Most of that has gone today. The major physical technologies we use - vehicles, appliances, manufacturing technology, have largely been solved. Improvement is incremental. If you did a survey of 100 engineers across the aerospace industry you’d probably find a handful who had any experience of boundary pushing R&D - most of the work is in documenting changes and making slight tweaks. SpaceX is definitely an exception.

> That truth was clearly known by NASA leadership in the 60s in a way that clearly isn’t today.

Maybe the current generation grew up on way too many vivid SF movies. And their intuitions are that we should know it enough already to wing it on the large parts.

waterfall project, cost-plus contracting and congressional appropriations "report language"

On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station. [0, linked from 1]

0. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234554226_On_Self-L...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone

Iterative (repeating) and incremental (additive). We sometimes forget that last part in software development, too.

We used to have leadership by people who knew how to do and make things and we've replace them by people that only know how to "manage" things. MBAs, finance types, lawyers, marketeers and their like make up the bulk of people in the decision making seats. They only know how to extract value from companies, creating said value largely eludes them. And as a side effect, America now can't build things(), or only can build them at ridiculous expense and absurdly long timescales.

() yes, there are exceptions; it is interesting to study how those companies differ in their leadership.

The space race likely necessitated NASA to show some improvement frequently. Otherwise the Soviet Union would have filled the large gaps between infrequent launches with their incremental successes.

Sure, that's probably true.

As the saying goes, the Apollo program was one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the Soviet Union.

The other thing you have to remember is that back in that era, the various military agencies all had a vested interest in rocket technology. Either for suborbital attack profiles or for orbital reasons like recon satellites (which at one point were assumed to be manned, but that didn't prove required).

NASA wound up giving Congress a way to partially unify some of this. Saturn V obviously isn't an ICBM, but if we have the people and technology to make a man-rated rocket to get to the moon it's pretty safe to assume we can build ICBMs to any specification. The military wasn't thrilled with this early on because it meant rockets that were seen as weapons needed to be designed with huge safety margins.

In the end a sort of uneasy truce arose from this and lead to the Space Shuttle. This was intended to create a civilian program with indefinite access to low earth orbit, servicing military and intelligence needs when required. Once it became apparent this was impossible, Congress gave the DoD the go ahead to resume spending on their own ride to space. This in turn lead to the absolute debacle that was the Titan IV. This lead to the EELV program which gave us Atlas V. By this point the US's capabilities had declined so much the best we could do was strap a US made fuel tank to a bunch of Russian made rockets.

>The space race likely necessitated NASA to show some improvement frequently.

One could add agile + jira +standup

They were incremental but they were incredibly accelerated and ambitious. From nobody ever been in space to landing on the Moon less in 10 years. It's mind boggling how fast they were, and how many projects were running in parallel that all had to work when integrated or no "landing on the moon before the decade is over".

I’m interested in what we committed enormous effort to researching and testing and discovered it’s simply not something to worry about or be bothered with.

Would you recommend any books to read on this history?

From the Earth to the Moon is a brilliant TV series that shows it all really well.

I love the episode where they sit down and list out the ~10 things they'll have to figure out how to do in order to achieve Kennedy's promise of landing within the decade.

Then they just assign teams and get on it, working on each item until they can actually do it.

I really enjoyed Sunburst and Luminary by Eyles, from the perspective of one of the young students who stumbled into the space programme and ended up writing a lot of the code for the LM.

I also found Go, Flight! enjoyable. It is about the recruitment and culture of the young flight controllers ("ground control") who figured out as they went how to direct and orchestrate missions in space.

Both are from a specific set of people's perspectives rather than an attempt to summarise. With some care on what one accepts as truth I think that's the more intriguing way to follow the program.

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