Apollo:  Race to the Moon

Skip Chapters 10, 26-29 (But Read Chapter 30, Epilogue,  and Apollo As History)
There are a lot of names!  Try to keep the main ones straight, but you do not have to remember them all!

For Sept 4 We will try to keep our discussion on pages 1-178  (That is up through Chapter 12)
For Sept 9  We will consider the whole book.

Some things to think about as you read:

Why do you think the authors wrote the book?
Are you familiar with the Apollo program? Are you familiar with it the way it is told by these authors?  What does that tell us?
The authors have a section on abbreviations.  Is it important to get the pronunciation of the abbreviations right?  Why or why not?  Why do the authors give us so many acronyms–MOCR, EECOM, MSC, ASPO, PGNS…..
There are a lot of names in this book. Why?  Should the authors have tried to reduce the number of names?
What are some of the most important social groups you see in this book?  Pick a group or two and think about how their ideals and goals differ from other groups.
Do you see paradigms in this book?  Where?
What sort of engineering cultures do you see in this book?
Langley, the Germans, the systems engineers (see Chapter 11)  How do they see things differently?
The authors say at the beginning “Apollo was an epic and epics must be captured in miniature”  Prologue, p. 17.  What do they mean by this?
The epigraph to Book I says
“I talk to people who say, Gosh, John, all we gotta do is think back twenty-five years ago and then we can go to Mars the same way.”  I say “No, you can’t.  It was a unique set of circumstances that lined up all these dominoes.”  Do you agree?  What were the circumstances?
How might you define the qualities that make a good engineer? Are there a single set of them?  Do you think they are specific to this context or are they universal?  Pick an engineer and describe what qualities they have that make them either good a good engineer or not.

Do you think there are any indispensable engineers in this story?  Why or why not?

How would you describe Murray and Cox’s perspective?  What other perspectives might Murray and Cox have written Apollo from?  What are the strengths and weakness of their perspective?

In our next book Steven Johnson talks about the idea of the adjacent possible, a state of development from which it is possible to make certain new developments, but not others.  How would you define the adjacent possible for the Apollo program?  That is, what was the preceding state from which it was possible to go to the moon?

Today Elon Musk has a program to put people on Mars.   How do you think the NASA/Apollo paradigm might be different from the commercial/Musk paradigm of space travel?