Space engineering is really conservative, in part because we spent a lot of resources testing Apollo tech to Hell and back. We can prolly make better tech but NASA has not been alotted sufficient resources to test much stuff as well as Apollo stuff was tested. NASA sticks with what’s proven.

April 11, 2026 - 03:05 UTC

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I remember learning that they could copy older rockets but they would have to build them from first principles, because the institutional knowledge is long gone.

We can look at them and figure out how they did it, but we don’t know the practical stuff about building giant rockets!
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This is okay; we don’t always need to be revisiting plans made in the 50s and 60s. But there is some stuff that we have to relearn: problem solving issues. Like ‘but how did they keep the x from depolarising?
Hmm.’ Or seeing an idiosyncratic layout of wires and trying to figure out why. Random? Not?
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