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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.

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