Timeline for What kept the Soviets from going to the Moon (before the US)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 1, 2023 at 0:19 | vote | accept | MWB | ||
| Nov 28, 2023 at 23:42 | comment | added | fectin | @GremlinWranger @ joncuster If you want to get into that, the right book is Morris' The Management of Projects from the early 90s. The technique flows are actually pretty clear, and he goes through that history. Comments are likely not the right place to rehash it though :) | |
| Nov 28, 2023 at 13:52 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @GremlinWranger - and the Polaris SLBM project also was heavy on the new project management stuff, which came 'first' is hard to tell. But having multiple large rocket programs trying hard to get it done helped the whole field. | |
| Nov 28, 2023 at 13:04 | comment | added | GremlinWranger | @mwb make sure to check the sources, and the dates. There was a lot of new, or at least newly formalised project management stuff that came out of Apollo (waterfall) that gets credited for the success. There is also some modern re-assessment that maybe some of what they did only worked with an Apollo sized budget and should only be directly copied by your business if you also want to spend money like they did. | |
| Nov 28, 2023 at 9:15 | comment | added | MWB | @Cadence "the NASA administration" -- And then these admins commissioned a study to find out why the US won the space race, and the study discovered that it was the admins? :-) | |
| Nov 28, 2023 at 9:09 | comment | added | user71659 | To this day, NASA is very strict about having Headquarters in between engineers, and Congress and the public. There's also a realization that NASA had talented politicians on board during Apollo... one of them got a space telescope named after him. | |
| Nov 28, 2023 at 8:48 | comment | added | Cadence | @MWB In a manner of speaking, we did, by keeping an insulating layer between the engineers and politicians: the NASA administration. A dedicated management who can play politics and push the merits of various missions, while letting their subordinates focus on the technical details, changes the calculus immensely. For instance, read up on the Apollo debate between Earth Orbit Rendezvous and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and then imagine that each side had their own bureau complete with their own political patrons! | |
| Nov 27, 2023 at 20:01 | comment | added | MWB | +1 and thanks for the link. They do give a "simple" root cause though (p. 858), which is, basically "Their politicians did not understand the tech, and so their techies got too much power, which they abused". I don't think anyone would argue that the US politicians are great scientific minds. So this kind of reads like "the US managed to keep the techies in their place", which is ... interesting. | |
| Nov 27, 2023 at 19:28 | history | answered | fectin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |