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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

While what you are saying isn't entirely without merit, isn't that like saying that the success of the Apollo missions lie with the bureaucrats rather than the engineers and astronauts?

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I'm saying that man wouldn't have set foot on the moon without John F. Kennedy declaring it would be so, but man would probably still have walked on the moon if the Apollo engineering team were slightly less skilled. (Probably would have taken longer and had more deadly failures, so thank God for the highly-skilled people who worked together to make it all possible, but engineering skill adds incremental improvement because efficacy becomes more dispersed the further down the pyramid you go -- that's just the nature of human organizations, the implementers are fungible.)

You don't think a bunch of astronaut deaths and costly mission failures would've eventually eroded public will?

Depends on the mix. As long as there are some spectacular successes, there will be interest.

A bunch of astronauts did die at the very beginning: Apollo 1 blew up on the launch pad. There was outrage in Congress but it died down because LBJ (a huge NASA supporter) used his (in)famous strong-arm political leadership to push forward. Again: strategy and leadership were more important than implementation. LBJ was more important for pushing Apollo forward than NASA's engineering success (or lack thereof).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout

There is a very strong case for that line of thinking. The bureaucrats and politicians created an environment where society valued the work on Apollo as well as a very significant budget.

Without the politics, the Apollo missions wouldn't have happened.

Sure many individual engineers are remembered, such as Margaret Hamilton: https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-soft...

But nowadays projects are built by hundreds if not thousands of engineers. They are all necessary but no individual engineer is irreplaceable or particularly important.

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