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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Part of it is cost

The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from.

But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communications and onboard computing, modern spacecraft deserved to be redesigned. (For the counterfactuals, see ULA and Arianespace.)

So until someone (SpaceX) started eating that node-transition cost, we entered a period of apparent stasis. But that vacuum was energetic, and it wasn't about rediscovering lost knowledge, but inventing new kit.

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Yep. One thing about manufacturing is that there are economies of scale everywhere. If we had to build a Saturn V from plans, we'd run into tons of problems. For one, the plans don't actually have everything you need to know. Tons of information is in people's heads. For a lot of the manual work, it's not even necessarily something they can explain. Building something with obsolete methods of fabrication is very difficult, but also the Saturn V was so optimized that switching materials or fabrication techniques would be very difficult. On the F-1 for example, they just barely got combustion to be stable. If you started substituting things, it's very possible it would become unstable again and they'd have to go do all the debugging they did out at the Edwards test stands again.

For almost everything, doing something a lot of times over a short period of time is way cheaper than doing something a small number of times, especially if there's a long time between them, and the employees have quit/retired and the tooling/machinery/suppliers have been disposed of, gone out of business, or moved onto other things.

North Hollywood? Looking through prop storage from studios or something?

Some interesting junk and scrap shops in the area. Spent a few weekend afternoons puttering around looking at random stuff.

There were/are a couple of aerospace surplus shops in the area. Apex and Norton are the ones I'm familiar with. The supply comes from the SoCal aerospace industrial base and a lot of the demand is indeed for movie props. It's a fortuitous pairing - the prop rental business seems to be keeping them going to some extent whereas a lot of industrial surplus businesses in other parts of the country seem to be struggling these days.

Isn't that the location of the soundstage where they filmed the Apollo landings? I would think it would be rich in appropriate resources. Flags and golf balls and stuff.

>Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from.

Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s

I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought

> the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought

I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a scrapyard with all kinds of space stuff (large and small) that I’m halfway sure isn’t ITAR controlled solely because the guy got it before 1976.

Was it run by Andy Griffith?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

There’s a reason droid parts in OG Star Wars looks like they were pulled off Apollo space suits or something. Practical special effects people raided all the surplus parts after the end of the program.

Relevant Scott Manley video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYGQwgId-Bc

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