Follow-up: Landing on the moon: three visions attained

This summer will be the 50th anniversary of the launch and landing—and launch and landing—of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. At the risk of sounding morbid: it will be the last major anniversary of the event that will be attended by any of the original participants. Maybe the great-grandchildren will celebrate the 100th anniversary.

So if you want to throw a party to celebrate Apollo, the time is now.

I wasn't thinking of the anniversary myself. I got a note from the NASA JPL Education Office email list (join) about using the anniversary to teach kids about the moon (Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of NASA's Apollo Moon Landing with Educational Resources and Projects for Kids). And we were looking for something to do for our local systems engineering professional society, INCOSE, anyway. So I opened my big mouth and volunteered to give a talk about Apollo and systems engineering.

I don't know exactly what I'll talk about. There's too much to talk about. Project Apollo was an enormous engineering project with many, many different subprojects and systems and interfaces and so on—an enormous number of starting points from which to explain the project in terms of systems engineering, so it's hard to limit myself to just a few. Also, I haven't thought about spacecraft of any kind in years, having nudged myself out of an orbit where I got to work on space projects into, well, several orbits that don't, so my understanding of the concepts involved are a little rusty.

Anyway—problems and opportunities. Learn something, teach something. Get excited by something, throw a big party.

I know vaguely what the format will be. I want to pick three or four topics or episodes or players and present them as vignettes. Instead of trying to paint the entire picture of systems engineering in Apollo, I want to paint just a few bits in detail and give a map to the audience to find the rest. Here are a few interesting topics that I think I can be explained, in too much detail, in systems terms:

• George Mueller and "all-up testing" of the Saturn V rocket
• Tom Kelly and the moon lander (#NowReading: Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module)
• Joseph Shea and systems engineering management
• John Houbolt and lunar orbit rendezvous
• The Apollo Guidance Computer

That's a short list, but each topic quickly goes fractal and then there's too much. So access to materials and finding unusual angles will determine which few things to talk about.

In the meantime, as I'm tracking down references, I'll add a page here to collect it: /ref/apollo.