Bootstrapping a working metal workshop from first principles would require you to re-run a substantial part of history including the re-invention of lost processes. You'll also likely get killed because quite a few of those processes are anything but safe. Our modern days materials science is very hard-won knowledge, and there aren't a whole lot of shortcuts on that route even if you have the knowledge itself.

https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/

http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/

I assume you didn't mean A Deepness In The Sky (second published, but almost stand-alone, super interesting dealing with practicalities of interstellar civilization in a universe with real speed limits) or A Fire Upon The Deep (second in-universe timeline)

There was also a lot of discussion about bootstrapping technological advancement in the first book published, which was interesting.

a cpu is just a rock that we tricked into thinking. but not to make it seem overly simplified, first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside it.

    ― Carl Sagan

If all you have is a hand. Even getting the wood to make a handle for your axe is hard.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF...

I vaguely remember reading something about how even in the earliest days of making flint arrowheads, there were massive centralized mines that archaeologists have found. It wasn't like just because you were in the stone age chipping rocks, every location was equally accessible to the resources you needed. Similar to now, where you need a particular type of sand for concrete, or for fracking, or...

Particularly nuclear technology, since so much early experimentation was dependent on ores like from the Shinkolobwe mine in Congo with 65% uranium. These days finding ore with 1% uranium is considered a good find.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkolobwe

Maybe our nuclear waste will fill the same niche in a post apocalyptic reconstruction of society?

Its tempting to go “woah I just figured out how SpaceX lands their rockets!!”, but sadly, that’s not really true.

Once you have generated a physically possible trajectory that gets you where you want to go, there’s a whole host of things that you need to do to actually go follow that trajectory: state estimation, closed loop feedback control, dynamically updating that trajectory based on real time conditions… and many more that someone who is an actual aerospace engineer (which I am not) would know. Beyond that, these solvers take a long time to run, and online (real time) optimization is incredibly hard to pull off correctly and safely: one wrong input and your solver could just spit back “fail”, causing the thing to fall out of the sky.