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Years ago I was at the space museum in White Sands, NM, gazing up at a Saturn V rocket engine. Another visitor next to me turned out to be an engineer from JPL. He explained they were studying old rockets to try to reverse engineer how they actually worked. Because the blueprints had been lost.

10/8/26, 2:15 pm2 reposts8 likes

Patrick

@vectorpark.com

10 Aug

An example he gave of the crazy engineering hacks they were trying to understand was (iirc) how the hose carrying the fuel from the tanks wrapped around the engine cone in such a way that it simultaneously cooled the cone and pre-heated the fuel for ignition

Patrick

@vectorpark.com

10 Aug

At the time (~2016) it kind of blew my mind that NASA of all places has *lost knowledge* but ten years later it's much, much clearer to me that the erosion of expertise is the default