Comment by JesseObrien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JesseObrien | Hacker News Reader

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I came here to post something like this, though I'm not a NASA engineer. I feel like there's been a few articles that have had the same strange claims of "lost" technologies. They lead the reader into thinking that since 1960 we haven't discovered or done anything significant to be able to recreate the space vehicles of that era.

The laws of physics haven't changed significantly since 1960, we understand a lot more about the same challenges of getting things to orbit now than we did even then. Technology, however, has changed a huge amount since then and if our priorities were still to land things on the moon then we would still have great success at it. Priorities and end goals have shifted around the scientific space community since 1960 and the average person seems to think that there's more value in lunar operations than anything else, which is simply not true.

Ignorance of the fact that we don't know enough about what long-term habitation of humans in space means for the body and mind seems to blind people into saying things like "we should have moon bases!", and call for "permanent settlements on the moon!". The research happening on the ISS, very close to home in case things go wrong, is essential to the steps needed to achieve things that people think should just happen because hey, they went there 40 years ago!

I think there's also this naive notion among people who haven't thought it through and/or aren't very familiar with manufacturing processes and the like that if you have the "blueprints" for something, it's straightforward to cart them down to a general-purpose factory and build the thing. After all, if we built it once, how hard can it be to build it again? And even some who may understand that it's not quite that simple still don't necessarily appreciate just how complex and intertwined the relationships are between suppliers, tooling, processes, experts in very specific and narrow domains, and so forth are when building any sort of complex machine.

Yeah, even with the exact blueprints, you couldn't just make a new Saturn V. The tools that made those parts probably don't exist any more, and the properties of metal under stress depend on a bunch of weird circumstances, like exactly how you cooled down the molten metal.

And even if you wrote that down and had all that equipment, the people who actually operated the things are retired or dead. Are you going to operate it the same way they did?

Does your incoming metal to your smelter have all the same properties as it did in the 1960s?

(I'm not a metallurgist, apologies to those who are.)

Yep, we haven't lost the tech, just the in-house skills. Each Saturn V engine had an absolutely insane number of extremely fine welds by master welders. Welding is an art form, and we definitely don't have the same number of welders we used to.

That said, we could potentially replace some of that with new fab techniques. But we probably couldn't do it the same way we did.

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