Funny timing on this, I just came across my grandfather's letter from the Apollo program astronauts thanking him for his testing prowess and awarding him the "silver snoopy" for professional excellence.
My other grandfather was the first shuttle launch director, the shoes we fill..
It's signed by Ronald Evans of Apollo 17. Both of my grandfathers and a lot of my family worked for nasa for decades, though. We're all space coasters. A few pilots. My grandmother was a typist there for instance.
He was some sort of rocket propulsion engineer back then, I'm not sure what the actual title would have been. I asked him to write some memoirs a long time ago but I don't bug him about it. He doesn't seem to think it's very interesting. Guess that happens when it's your day job.
I certainly wouldn't ask you to bug him, but you might mention to him that there are lots of people who would find anything he has to say about his involvement with Apollo (and the space program in general) fascinating. His stories are important and interesting, even if he doesn't think they are. I wish I had a pointer to somebody who is collecting this history before it's lost. (I wish I had the time and financial freedom to be doing that!)
You might be interested in a book called Moondust. The author realized in the early 2000s that at some point soon all of the astronauts who walked on the moon would be gone. He set out to interview each of them about their experiences at the time, and since visiting the moon.
It's a mix of space history and personal reflections on the perspective they got, that none of us will likely have.
A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin (1998)[0] is also a great read. The author explains in the forward that that was also part of his motivation to write the book. I have the 23 hour audiobook, which is also quite well narrated.
If nothing else, see if you can get him to sit down and tell YOU the stories while you record them on your phone or a handheld audio recorder. Much lower barrier to entry.
It's not widely appreciated that Feynman didn't write either of his famous books ("Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" and "What do you care what people think?"). Both were compiled by his friend Ralph Leyton from audio recordings of Feynman sitting around telling stories.
Please try. Even if you don't publish his stories, you'll be glad to have heard them later on. I was fortunate to have lived through that era and watched all the landings. Now, I try and find and read anything by those who were actually there: astronauts, flight directors, flight controllers, and government or contractor personnel. It is a fascinating and important era and it is worth documenting.
> It's notable that this was published before Apollo 13
One of the causes of the Apollo 13 service module explosion was damage caused during a pre-flight test. The SM included a pipe whose only role was to drain out oxygen after pre-flight launch-pad tests. It had no in-flight role. The pipe was damaged during assembly (nobody noticed) and failed to drain the oxygen tank. The test team instead decided to drain the tank by heating the oxygen using an in-tank heater and in effect boiling it off. The heater temperature gauge didn't show (it was badly designed) that the heater had in fact got so hot that it had melted electrical insulation on a fan in the oxygen tank. All of this was pre-flight.
56 hours into the mission, the crew used the fan to stir the tank, causing sparks and the eventual explosion.
All of these apply to software development as well, but especially that first point. I'm on a project right now that has a bunch of things that can be simplified. Some duplicated state, multiple code paths for computing the same thing, etc. When problems arise it's very tricky to debug and it's almost always caused by that complexity. The temptation is to just add another layer of checks or validation on top of it or make a slight tweak. But of course the best path is to just roll up your sleeves and work to remove as many moving parts as you can. Most of our bug fixes have actually resulted in substantially fewer lines of code. Anyway, the point is to always try and keep things simple, and even better to make sure that principle is followed in the initial stages of design.
I've heard or read of this before, the first bullet, and can't help but to compare this to what has happened with the 737 Max 8 current issue.
From the PDF comes: "Apollo gains a measure of simplicity from features simple both in design and operation, complex in design but simple to operate, or simple by being passive in function. The concept of simple design and simple operation is best illustrated by the
Apollo rocket-propulsion systems (fig. 2-2)."
For a machine as complex as the Saturn 5 rocket, it is truly a credit to the builders that it never suffered a major failure in any of the manned missions. Same for the LM rocket which returned the astronauts to the command module. Both had to absolutely work and both did.
As John Glenn quipped "It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract."
I do get your point, and it's amazing it worked as well as it did. Space is tough, and things are likely to go wrong, just as they still do with civil aviation.
This document must be post Apollo 13. Copied verbatim from the linked PDF:
> Even the Apollo 13 oxygen tank rupture, by far the most critical problem of any Apollo mission to date, was overcome by relying on preplanned emergency procedures and the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the astronauts and the ground support team.
Brady Heywood Forensic Engineering Podcast [0], has an amazing series on Apollo 13 [1]. It's 6 episodes, mostly narrated by Brady Heywood, with some audio recording from Houston as well as the Apollo astronauts. It's riveting.
A celestial body distinguished from the fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own (including the moon and sun), especially with reference to its supposed influence on people and events.
‘the planets are presently influencing you in a positive way’”
”In classical antiquity, the seven classical planets are the seven non-fixed astronomical objects in the sky visible to the naked eye: Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the Sun, and the Moon. The word planet comes from two related Greek words, πλάνης planēs (whence πλάνητες ἀστέρες planētes asteres "wandering stars, planets") and πλανήτης planētēs, both with the original meaning of "wanderer", expressing the fact that these objects move across the celestial sphere relative to the fixed stars.”
This question struck me. I, too, googled it, and came up empty handed. I then asked on Quora, which at the time of this comment, has 5 not-unreasonable answers.
My favorite answer is Joshua Engel's:
> It’s just a turn of phrase. He’s evoking the idea of “planet” as “one of the lights in the sky”, something people have long dreamed of.
> It was an awkward phrase even at the time, though. George Low may have been a great administrator, but he’s a lousy writer. My red pen itched at every word. (In the very next sentence he misspells “mankind”.) He meant to be poetic, but his audience would have been confused by it, and that wouldn’t be the last time in that document.
I so wish that your username had been "Pluto" when you asked that question. Snarkiness put aside, I searched around online to see if maybe I was missing something. It looks like it was simply a misuse of the word. I would have suggested using "celestial body" or even "world" in place of "planet". Perhaps he was using it in the colloquial sense (in the same way a tomato is a "vegetable").
>the main point is that a single man can fully understand this interface and can cope with all the effects of a change on __either side of the interface__
(emphasis mine)
This is a really great and subtle point, and something that takes a lot of rigour to turn into reality.
From the article:
"If the design has been verified and if a thorough test program has been completed it should not be necessary to make any changes. Of course, this idealized situation does not exist in any program like Apollo where design, test, and flight often overlap and must be carried out at the same time." Wow, these remind me of the Joint Strike Fighter program, where design/test/production all overlapped (concurrency) and cost overruns where a huge issue. No doubt, we spared very little expense in the Apollo program, cutting only the last two missions!
My other grandfather was the first shuttle launch director, the shoes we fill..
Might interest some.
https://lensdump.com/i/W1GAd0