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Peregrine lander suffers anomaly after launch
(spacenews.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Amusingly, I recall reading how a lot of the knowledge from the Apollo program has now been lost. People who worked on it mostly retired, and a lot of the documentation is now gone. So, US would have to rediscover a lot what's been learned from scratch to replicate the program today.
That is a common myth that was spread about specifically the Saturn program (the rocket that got Apollo to the moon).
The information is not lost at all; and the blueprints for the rocket and practically all the data NASA collected are stored on microfilms kept in NASA headquarters. It was simply never released to the public at large, only academics and research institutions, because the information could be retrofitted to create ICBM’s. It is set to be declassified in a decade or two.
Ironically the source for this myth is the same Apollo conspiracy morons mentioned before. It’s supposed to be some sort of “Gotcha”, but is a straight lie.
While some original documents were lost, that was only really due to neglect, as those documents have been copied many times or were generally not useful, so losing the original wasn’t a concern.
I actually suspect there's at least some truth to this. I've worked on large software projects and I've seen this problem first hand. My experience is that no matter how much documentation you aim to write, a lot of the knowledge stays in the heads of the people who designed the project because all the information requires a lot of context to work with meaningfully. When a new person inherits a project it's practically impossible for them to understand all the nuances of how and why things work the way they do. This same problem applies to any sort of large projects where lots of people have to work together to design a complex system. Once you shut down the program and people who built it retire, much of that knowledge becomes lost.
And here's an example of this happening at Raytheon recently where they had to call up retirees to help them make stinger missiles https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/06/raytheon-calls-retirees-help-restart-stinger-missile-production/388067/
Nonsense, they just need to make a Dockerfile and Bob’s your uncle 😜 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
ha