I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't.
If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.
But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.
Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it.
Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades.
Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield.
There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better.
Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.
If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.
But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.