NASA Learns Anew From the Apollo Program

solitas writes "NASA isn't just "going back to the drawing boards" to get back to the Moon, they're also going through the museums and archives so that the new engineers can rediscover/learn how it was done the first time." From the article: "Some old Apollo engineers are even being brought back on a contract basis to work with the young folks, some of whom were not even born when the Saturn V was flying lunar missions. The new manned exploration project, called Constellation, is deliberately drawing upon lessons from the past as the space agency works to meet a congressional deadline of flying the Ares rocket ... In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as 'Apollo on steroids.'"

Comments

Re:To the Moon, Alice!

[roystgnr]

Why do they need to - they've got calculators and computers.

First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.

Second, because most engineering problems are far more complicated than "what's 250 times 7" but involve many, many such simple arithmetic steps. If you have to turn to the calculator on every trivial step it makes solving the whole problem correctly much harder.

Seriously. Who gives a ****?

In this case, mostly the taxpayers and the astronauts.

Actually the early NASA engineers had Slide Rules

[Name Anonymous]

The ealry NASA engineers probably learned to use sliderules - http://www.hpmuseum.org/sliderul.htm and therefore learned how to approximate real well.

If you punch numbers into a calculator and hit the wrong buttons and don't know how to approximate... well you don't always realize your answer is off.