We’ve all heard them – the persistent rumors that the United States faked the moon landing. These rumors have gained enough traction that you see them mentioned in the mainstream press and even see documentaries focused on refuting specific claims of fabrication. How can this possibly happen given that millions of people, including me, grew up watching live broadcasts of spacecraft launches and lunar missions.
The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs that culminated with landing a man on the moon were done in public view. For some reason, back in the 1960s, it was not a security threat for every foreign power in the world to know the American aerospace capabilities. The public nature of what had happened and what was planned provided an opportunity for everyone, the knowledgeable and the uninformed, to critique the approach.
With information freely available, the academic community provided detailed positioning information for the in flight trajectory of the spacecraft. I was an amateur astronomer (yep… once a geek, always a geek) and made use of this information. The brightness was near the limit of my inexpensive equipment, but with young eyes and a strong desire I was able to imagine that I was watching a craft created on earth en route to the moon. In addition, ham radio enthusiasts with sophisticated equipment claimed to be able to hear unscrambled conversations between the astronauts and ground control.
The launches themselves were open to the public. As a young student I had the opportunity to go with some friends to see one of the launches. Although I lived on the east coast it was a long drive to Florida and I had other things to do. Perhaps I had to mow the lawn or study for some upcoming tests. Spending a couple of days in a car to see the launch just didn’t seem very important. After all, I thought at the time, they would be sending people to the moon for the rest of my life. I, and others, thought we would have plenty of money to expand the space program once we stop spending a fortune in Vietnam.
Having lived through one of the greatest adventures the human race has ever undertaken, how could I entertain any doubts whatsoever about the veracity of the lunar landings? For me this is not about discrepancies in photos or flags waving in the non-breeze. Sadly, this amazing achievement conflicts with my years of experience in engineering.
Do I actually doubt that the United States landed a man on the moon? I guess not, but I am at a loss to explain how the engineering was done. While I worked with engineers who could have done this, I never felt great confidence that many of the organizations I’ve seen could have accomplished such an incredible feat. I joked that some of the places could have embedded a man in the moon – but bringing him back alive was out of the question.
Organizations I’ve experienced, some with great commitment to process, universally suffer from over optimism and excessive focus on short-term goals. They are universally worried about the schedule, the next demo, and what the customer will think of delays. At times they lose sight of the bigger picture and the importance of actually getting the engineering right.
A friend of mine once said the Apollo moon landings were not a triumph of engineering but of management. He was absolutely correct. While you need good engineers, without good management and leadership your project is going nowhere. This is why Netrino and other companies offer courses in engineering management to compliment their training for engineers. In particular, Netrino’s Team-Based Firmware Development course goes beyond traditional management topics of setting requirements and managing the schedule to help companies large and small establish proper management attitudes and corporate culture.
Commercial engineering is not an academic environment. You have a schedule and finite money. You may not have time to find a perfect solution, but it is your job to find a good solution. Getting it right with some engineering elegance is never a waste of time. Don’t be part of the problem. Do it right. If your corporate culture doesn’t support this, help change it or find another company. Good engineering is not about embedding a man in the moon, but about returning him safely to home.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Apollo program and the moon landings where real. Believing they were not real gives far too much credibility to the ability of the government to sustain a conspiracy for way too long.The Apollo program succeeded in putting a man on the moon for three reasons:1) Unlimited budget. So unlimited that they could afford to have two spare Saturn V’s ready to go in case the July attempt failed.2) Clearly espoused goal. “Put a man on the moon and bring him home safely…”3) Fixed project schedule.That covers all three of the classic legs of the PM triangle. What more could any PM ask for?
And in a few short months we're going to do our best to crash into the moon at high speed while filming the entire event. Nifty!
There's plenty of man-made junk sitting on the moon.Some things landed and other things crashed. Who would disagree? It's only 250,000 miles away. A legend says we put a man on the moon. We cannot do this at the present time. The future is uncertain.
In just a few weeks we might have proof of the moon landing from the currently lunar orbiting LRO (provided that you'd trust NASA to very that something NASA says is really true), not to mention the huge light show in October when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will impact. How cool is that?