The Apollo Program was a wonder of the world…what we call it when a country takes some of the vast resources they normally only ever spend on military and takes the incredible step of building something else.
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4.5% is enough to include it as a line item in a stacked bar chart (pie chart if you really must, but lets really retire the pie chart). At 1.5% it’s likely sitting in a grey box marked “other”.
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Diane Vaughan’s ‘The Challenger Launch Decision – Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA’ should be required reading for anyone working in technology and engineering. The lessons of ‘normalising deviance’ apply almost everywhere.
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Greece’s worst railway disaster happened because a driver was told to pass several red signals. The signalling system on the line hadn’t worked properly for years.
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NASA explored plenty of alternatives in the 1960s including a completely reusable design called DC-3 by Max Faget’s team using a winged booster and the orbiter mounted on top and in front of the booster so it would not have had suffered from foam strikes and would never have relied on the dangerous SRBs. When it was clear that the money for the DC-3 wouldn’t be flowing, the programme was progressively cut back.
Liquid boosters were considered but didn’t generate enough thrust, there was even a Saturn V-based design with the orbiter on top.
The project was crippled by cost-cutting under the Nixon regime and an insane desire to accommodate the USAF’s mission parameters. From there on, a failed design was baked in based on promises of cheap, powerful, reusable boosters and liquid fuelled engines that never met their original specification.
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I’ve seen arguments that part of Japan’s post-war economic miracle was that their treaty with the USA almost entirely forbade military spending, so it got funnelled into productive stuff instead.
There’s the occasional useful spillover, but largely military spending is a sink. Look at the nuclear submarines - we take a few hundred men in the prime of their life and pay them well to sit underwater and maintain some kit we hope they never need to use. We don’t even get scientific data out of this.
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As just one example - we got the Pressurised Water Reactor out of the nuclear submarine programme.
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Seriously. If there’s one type of project to serve as an exemplar for situations waterfall development makes more sense than agile… it’s fucking ROCKETSHIPS.
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And just spitballing here, I think, oh, same might hold for chips embedded in your brain?
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More details on the damage to the launch facility and surrounding area:
Someone who reported finding a piece of the rocket says that SpaceX asked where he found it but isn’t making any efforts to retrieve it from him, so free souvenirs, I guess? Some of the Elon superfans out there would pay good money for that on Ebay, I reckon.
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