Wayne Hale remembers working with him. I hadn’t realized that he’s been supporting SpaceX.
Wayne’s anecdotes remind me of how hard we had to fight at Rockwell to get computers in the eighties. “We got to the moon without word processors” were the famous words of my boss at the time (now retired, of course).
As I remember the conversation, it was my boss, Chuck Gould, who had the “we got to the moon without word processors” quote. I don’t know if your boss was any more enlightened.
Your boss at the time, my boss later.
Actually, my boss at the time was Bob Budica (I think) and he was very into computers — he had a CPM system that he’d built himself.
Sometimes using the latest gadget or highest performance platform doesn’t help much. When Apple announced they were using a Cray supercomputer to design the next Mac, Seymour Cray quipped that he was using an Apple to design the next Cray.
Tools aren’t a replacement for human ingenuity and you are very much unlikely to find good tools if you are designing something that is completely novel. You probably will have to make your own tools and design methods, etc from scratch.
People often joke about how in WW2 you could design, test, and produce a fighter prototype in six months (e.g. P-51, P-80) while today with CAD/CAM methodologies it takes half a decade or a decade to do the same. Something got seriously wrong along the way.
Regarding the X-38 had it not been cancelled at the time there probably wouldn’t be a requirement to use Soyuz to transport astronauts to ISS right now. The stories surrounding Muratore are pretty interesting. He tried to make some reforms working inside the system at NASA and while he succeeded at some of them he failed at others for political (rather than technical or economic) reasons.
I was at CMU Robotics and SCS back in those days. I remember helping out Gene Miya on occassion as he fought a similar battle at Ames.
I had a boss once that said to his engineering staff that “the next person that uses the word computer will get fired.”
Remember the days where having a network meant that if one computer was disconnected the whole network came down?
We had two (count them, two) servers on our network of a dozen microcomputers. Mine had a nine track tape drive connected to it. Even our vender (a kid with a great success story, coming to the U.S. from S. America via Canada) couldn’t hide a smirk when we bought that tape drive to connect to a microcomputer. But we needed that drive to transfer data to and from the mainframe (mostly from. The real work was done by two shifts of key to disk operators that gave our mainframes their data.)
The X-38 program is the poster child for all that is right AND wrong about working for NASA. What a great opportunity to really build something cool, it attracted some top talent and got much farther than most concepts, but in the end still got killed. And *of course* it was an international program…
BTW, not sure what timeframes others are thinking of, but when I was at Rockwell (JSC) in the mid-1980s, it annoyed me to no end that the bean counters got computers before the engineers. But that was small potatoes compared to Mission Control’s needs!