alt Hacker NewsHave we actually forgotten how to land to the moon? That sounds very fishy, I’m pretty skeptical that’s not the case, that was done at a time where we had good records and still have access to them. And it’s close enough to current time that people who worked on it are still alive (not all of course). Coming from musk makes me believe that’s not true, he’s far from a reliable narrator
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Many of the manufacturing processes used to make the Apollo spacecraft were not followed in the production floor - and nobody wrote those changes down. That's one well-known example of Apollo-era knowledge lost, there are a few others if you seriously care to DDG them.
There are two parts to manufacturing technology: The written knowledge of what to build, and the process knowledge of all the gotchas and tricks and skill that people experienced in their craft rarely write down. (In many cases the great craftspeople with the knowledge are not great teachers or writers). Manufacturing an object is not like compiling code, where if you pick the right inputs and machines you get the same output. The actual process of building is so full of domain knowledge and variability that ten different people following the same written instructions can get wildly different results.
Derek from SmarterEveryDay ran into this when trying to get a product manufactured in the US and shared his experience: https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?t=1386
It has been a common meme within NASA since before SpaceX was founded.
The hard part of putting humans on the moon and bringing them back safely is not a problem if basic scientific knowlege, it is more an engineering challenge in an incredibly complex and bespoke domain. It is the know how that this component from this manufacturer has this kind of failure rate under these conditions, but when interacting with this other component under these conditions the failure rate is much higher, but that can be mitigated if we apply this kind of technique, but only if the temperature stays within X....
In the same way we've forgotten how to write Windows 1.0 programs. Sure, we can work it out again - specially with modern reverse engineering tools. But that's the point - we'd have to work it out again.