Apart from the sheer awe of landing on the moon with that era's technology and the resulting scientific harvest, I am fascinated by the engineering process. I can't settle on whether it was methodically safe or recklessly dangerous. Consider the manned missions timeline:
Oct 1968 Apollo 7: earth orbit
Dec 1968 Apollo 8: lunar orbit
Mar 1969 Apollo 9: earth orbit lunar module docking
May 1969 Apollo 10: lunar descent test (no landing)
Jul 1969 Apollo 11: lunar landing
It seems so composed and laid-out, and at the same time so daring. There is a clearly logical progression there, each mission building on the previous one. But each new mission followed so soon after the previous, and each new mission involved so many new goals. It's wondrous that it just worked out that way with so few missteps. Could they really internalize the lessons? With so many moving parts and subsystems, so many hundreds of thousands of workers, spread across the country in goverment offices and subcontractors, I imagine the safety mindset varied wildly. I know more than a few astronauts certainly conducted themselves recklessly on the ground and in training, and there were large swathes of folk who were fanatical about safety.
Perhaps if we had an increased sample size, we'd know which way the Apollo project leaned on safety and methodology. Records show that the NASA administrators were anxious about losing a crew and were all too happy to cancel the missions after Apollo 17 (in addition to saving money for future projects).
I heartily recommend Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon for an excellent account of the Apollo program.
Apollo came dangerously close to losing a crew in several ways. There's Apollo 13 of course. There's also the POGO oscillation problem in the Saturn V which came close to destroying the launch vehicle. Then there's the lightning strike on Apollo 12 that came fairly close to catastrophe.
But aside from all that the biggest danger was a large solar flare while the astronauts were on the surface of the Moon. That could have quite easily exposed them to lethal radiation levels.
I may have made a mistake: risky and methodical are orthogonal. Space flight is inherently dangerous and the thousands of smart NASA workers were surely aware of the natural dangers, but their jobs were to minimize them. Thus, the apparent orderliness.
It's still incredible to me that Apollo 13 was the worst outcome and that the Apollo program, overall, ran "on schedule".
Oct 1968 Apollo 7: earth orbit
Dec 1968 Apollo 8: lunar orbit
Mar 1969 Apollo 9: earth orbit lunar module docking
May 1969 Apollo 10: lunar descent test (no landing)
Jul 1969 Apollo 11: lunar landing
It seems so composed and laid-out, and at the same time so daring. There is a clearly logical progression there, each mission building on the previous one. But each new mission followed so soon after the previous, and each new mission involved so many new goals. It's wondrous that it just worked out that way with so few missteps. Could they really internalize the lessons? With so many moving parts and subsystems, so many hundreds of thousands of workers, spread across the country in goverment offices and subcontractors, I imagine the safety mindset varied wildly. I know more than a few astronauts certainly conducted themselves recklessly on the ground and in training, and there were large swathes of folk who were fanatical about safety.
Perhaps if we had an increased sample size, we'd know which way the Apollo project leaned on safety and methodology. Records show that the NASA administrators were anxious about losing a crew and were all too happy to cancel the missions after Apollo 17 (in addition to saving money for future projects).
I heartily recommend Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon for an excellent account of the Apollo program.