Re:Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C Chargers
by segfaultbuserr on Friday February 07, 2020 @05:09PM
(#22271588)
> We'd have to re-engineer a lot of things that aren't just off-the-shelf to do it again.
Yes. I think this is the perspective that people trend to overlook - every engineering project is unique, in the sense that it's optimized to do the job under very specific constraints - costs, production capabilities, available materials, etc. When the circumstance changes, sometimes you simply can't just pull the same blueprint out of the archive to make another one - redesigning it is sometimes unavoidable, even if the older design is nothing wrong from a technical point-of-view. I think the same applies to software development.
>whether the Saturn V architecture has survived
We understand very well the basic approach that was taken to land on the moon and the hardware we used to do so. We'd have to re-engineer a lot of things that aren't just off-the-shelf to do it again. But we could do so pretty quickly if there were any compelling reason to do so.
As I understand it, current technologies that could include moon landing are being worked on in the broader context of going to Mars.