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Yes, yes, Neil Armstrong first man on the moon blahdeblah yay space nerds. Everybody knows the story, been there done that.
What fascinates me, and I'm speaking semi-professionally here, is that a team of engineers, rocketry guys, and test pilots went from nothing to watching Armstrong wander around a lunar plain in less than 10 years. It couldn't happen today. Windows Vista took longer to develop than all of the Mercury and Gemini flights combined, and the results were a whole lot less impressive.
Honestly, I've learned as much about technical project management out of the space program history as anything I've read in the computer science field.
Anyway, for the interested, a couple of the better books on the subject:
Andrew Chaikin's A Man On The Moon was the semi-definitive history of the Apollo program, told mainly but not exclusively from the astronauts' point of view. Most of the HBO mini-series "From The Earth to The Moon" was cribbed from this book. It's not just insightful, it's entertaining as hell. Its downside is that it only touches briefly on anything that happened before Apollo 1.
Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox's Apollo: Race to the Moon has its flaws, but it's a highly readable account of the earthbound engineers who made the space program work, including most of the personalities involved. This is the one that all the current and aspiring program managers ought to read. It's out of print, but the local library might have a copy. EDIT: Scratch that, it's back in print under a different title. The book is now simply called Apollo.
There are enough astronaut biographies and auto-biographies to break a bookshelf in half by sheer weight. The best, by general acclamation, is Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire: graceful, poetic, fascinating, and not ghostwritten. (Collins was the command module pilot on Apollo 11, the guy who got to circle around the moon while the other two had all the fun.)
Food for thought. Also, for the grad students among us, a good way to read something besides articles titled "The Study of Ideologies and the Philosophy of Language."
- Mood:
tired
Comments
Keep in mind the other Kennedy program, the SST, was a failure. I don't think the 60's was a time of great project management, just that "putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" isn't that hard, just very expensive.
But it is an amazing story.
From Kennedy's point of view, his speech was meant mainly to distract attention from the then-current Bay of Pigs fiasco. Murray and Cox cover this in some detail.
The 60s NASA program was ferociously difficult from a project management point of view: totally new, untested technologies; new, complex systems management; cutting-edge engineering with thousands of workers, and an unforgiving deadline. I don't think the 60s space program was the be-all and end-all of good project management, but I do think anybody who studies the field seriously should look at this as an example of prior art. A lot of the conventional wisdom high-tech program managers take for granted was invented during the Apollo days.
It was unbelievably expensive, no question. Less so than the Vietnam war, though, and arguably of greater long term benefit.
Edited at 2009-07-08 05:48 pm (UTC)
Without knocking the complexity or accomplishment in any way, I'd say one advantage the Apollo program had over Vista is that its goal was concise and very well defined. The vision for Vista, not so much.
http://www.theworld.org/regions/the-ame
Smithsonian's NASM also has an exhibit about him.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal2