> It's like saying a service is designed by PMs and engineered retroactively

Which is a genuine problem on some teams right? The most effective teams I've worked on had engineering a part of the product design process from the beginning. On the worst teams we received a "fully specced" ticket and no engineer had ever seen it.

Can anything be engineered retroactively? I mean: the thing flew and landed, so there was clearly some successful engineering going on, before launch.

The requirements were heavily influenced by politics, that is for sure.

Biggest problem was that since the astronaut office demanded it should always be manned, design changes were very conservative. No rapid iteration was possible.

The usual way of describing Shuttle in this way (which I assuming they are paraphrasing here) is it was “zip code engineered,” meaning it was intentionally designed with contractors spread across the country so as to maximize its political support base.