An interesting retrospective/interview with one of the project engineers, Jack Crenshaw, of Project Apollo. Here's a bit:
Resonance: We are now 30 years past the Armstrong-Aldrin moonwalks of 1969. What feelings do you have when you view the films of the Apollo astronauts walking on the Moon?
Crenshaw: Mostly sadness. It seems to me such a terrible waste. The Apollo launch complexes, built at such huge costs, sit on Cape Canaveral, slowly decaying back into dirt. Our abilities to repeat the feat get worse with every passing year. Worst of all, all that incredible effort, all that hard-earned knowledge, all those careers spent learning the skills, all those marriages, careers, and even lives sacrificed for the goal to make Apollo a success, are mostly gone. Most of us who worked on Apollo are either dead, retired, or senile now. The knowledge is gone, possibly forever. I’m one of the lucky ones; I was young enough when Apollo began to still be able to remember how to do it. Even so, too few remain who do. If, today, we were given another Presidential mandate to return to the Moon in another eight years, I don’t think we’d have a snowball’s chance in Hell of doing it. Even if we simply tried to build another Apollo/Saturn V system, with no changes at all, I still don’t think we could do it. Apollo brought together thousands of the country’s best minds, all concentrating on a single goal. It’s the kind of thing that comes along only rarely in history.
I hope I may be forgiven feeling a bit of personal loss as well. I devoted some good years to the effort of learning how to steer a rocket to the Moon and back safely. I still have that knowledge (much of which was never written down – we were too busy doing, to write) rattling around in my head. Over the last 30 years, I’ve hoped someone would ask me again to show them how to do it. No one has.
For the full article/interview:
http://www.resonancepub.com/interview3.htm
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