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".
Are all names in Mathematica really all together in a single namespace? Seems odd not to have such a specific function like SolarEclipse behind some kind of importable module.
I was gonna say, they were always on alert. It's in the book. The inertial platforms at least were always spinning because it took a long time (minutes) to spin them up, or down.