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Comment by gclaramunt | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure the ppl of Nasa/JPL who actually put a man on the moon, worked reasonable hours and almost never missed dinner with family. So, I don't think they're mutually exclusive

EDIT: So, everybody was screwed then? I must have mixed anecdotes :)

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I am pretty sure that is completely false, from what I have read of the early space program, it sounds like it had a way of devouring lives.

"The Apollo 11 crew calculated they spent 2000 hours in simulators between their selection in January and their flight in July 1969." http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-8-3.html

And the book makes numerous references to others at NASA working long hours too.

"Apollo had become intimately interwoven in the fabric of the waking hours of my life and often caused the remaining hours to be fewer than they should have been." http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-7-1.html

"I'd be checking on alertness, especially among men who had been working long hours. Were they fatigued? Were they concentrating on the dials? Was there any unnecessary chit-chat going on?" http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-6-3.html

That is approximately 10 hours of simulator work a day, plus other regular work.

Agreed that you need work very hard for success. But at what cost? There is a balance. If a person can't be there for their newly born child, one might as well not have a kid at the first place.

All of us have been in situations where we had to put our head down and work marathon hours straight for days to get things done. We've also had days when we had nothing to do. We are not bots to clock $x amount of time of time everyday.

There is always time to accomodate family and other commitments.

"The room, the hours that we worked were incredible. I don't think anyone ever worked anything less than 10 to 12 hours each day. Saturday was a normal day of work; in fact, that's the way we felt it should be. We were given this impossible dream by President Kennedy, and we were living it. We were doing the kinds of things that engineers would kill for. And as part of this process, we'd go and open up our pay—we were surprised we were getting paid by this thing here. As long as we had enough money to make things meet, that's all we needed. The job was our life, and we lived this literally every day."

- NASA Flight Controller Gene Kranz

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tothemoon/kranz.html

Gene Kranz is an interesting case here. He had a loving and very supporting wife who would make him new vests for every mission, which became symbolic for the team he worked with.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gene-kranzs-apollo-ves...

10 - 12 hours a day is pretty typical in the entertainment business. Most tv shows do 12s for an entire year, movies about the same for less, and VFX workers during crunch time (which is near permanent for some) 12 is usually the minimum. Plus your weekends are gone.

At least the guys in the Space Program were doing for a far more valuable reason.

Your statement couldn't be farther from the truth (or you forgot the /sarcasm tag?). Watch "Moon Machines" mini-series (6 episodes), with many interviews of the engineers behind the Apollo program. They were all working crazy hours, many divorced during the project because of work/family imbalance.

RE your edit - that's probably part of the reason it took only 12 years after Sputnik to get a man on the moon - because for people working on it this wasn't a job, this was their life. They did it for the goal itself, and not for money.

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