Apollo: Learning From the Past, For the Future

Summary

This paper documents NASA’s effort to prevent the loss of Apollo institutional knowledge. In late 2006, the Constellation Program Manager at Johnson Space Center recognized a problem: the new generation of engineers building Orion and Altair — vehicles descended from Apollo hardware — had no working knowledge of Apollo systems, practices, or mission techniques. The vast majority of Apollo-era engineers still at NASA were in senior management; the rank-and-file workforce had experience only with the Space Shuttle and International Space Station.

The resulting “Apollo Mission Familiarization for Constellation Personnel” project assembled a team of roughly 40 volunteers — primarily senior Shuttle instructors and flight controllers, some Apollo veterans — to find, organize, and present Apollo-era documentation using modern tools.

The project’s scope grew organically because “it was not possible to explain many techniques without first explaining how the underlying hardware and software works.” This is a natural consequence of systems engineering: you cannot understand operations without understanding the system.

What They Built

Document Archive

The team gathered a 20 GB archive of original Apollo documentation from scattered sources:

JSC Technical Library
NASA Technical Reports Server
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (ALSJ)
Private collectors (notably Bob Andrepont)
AGC emulation projects: John Brown’s AGC project at Caltech, Ronald Burkey’s Virtual AGC at ibiblio.org, and Russ Katz’s AGC history site at klabs.org
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), accessed through individual researchers

Most source documents were reports and handbooks written between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, residing in various libraries in scanned electronic format. The team processed them through Adobe Acrobat OCR to make them searchable.

Lessons and Wiki

Using Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Producer, the team created:

47 video lessons totaling over 26 hours of material
345 pages of wiki content providing detailed reference documentation
An additional 18 lessons and 17 hours from Flight Design and “Moon 101” lunar science series
Final total: 75 lessons, over 53 hours of structured educational material

The content covered the full breadth of Apollo operations:

Vehicle familiarization for Saturn, CSM, and LM
Systems lessons on displays and controls, electrical systems, ECLSS, Saturn V, communications, GNC, and propulsion
Mission techniques from launch through recovery
Case studies including the Apollo 13 accident and Apollo 15 flight planning
Fundamentals of spaceflight including orbital mechanics
Moon 101 lunar science series

The Shuttle Instructor Bridge

A key methodological insight: the team used experienced Shuttle instructors to interpret and teach the Apollo material. These instructors could relate Apollo systems to Shuttle equivalents that their students already understood. They served as a knowledge bridge between eras — understanding enough about both programs to translate concepts effectively.

This is not a trivial approach. It requires people who are technically competent in a related domain, disciplined enough to distinguish genuine analogies from superficial similarities, and skilled at teaching.

Knowledge Preservation and Hamilton’s Legacy

The entire paper is about a specific kind of error prevention: preventing the “reinvention of the wheel” by making hard-won lessons accessible to a new generation. This directly parallels Hamilton’s emphasis on learning from the past — her Development Before the Fact methodology similarly seeks to prevent errors by encoding lessons learned into formal systems.

The project explicitly drew on resources that preserved Hamilton’s software:

Ronald Burkey’s Virtual AGC project (which preserves and emulates Hamilton’s AGC software)
John Brown’s AGC project at Caltech (historical documentation of the AGC)
Russ Katz’s AGC history site (technical documentation and history)

The Apollo AGC software was one of the documented systems in the project’s GNC lessons. The GNC Hardware Overview by Interbartolo was produced as part of this same project.

The ITAR Problem

The paper reveals an ongoing impediment to knowledge sharing: “only documents obtained from the JSC Technical Library had ITAR covers. Copies of identical manuals downloaded from other government-maintained web sites… did not.” This inconsistent classification — the same document treated differently depending on where it was obtained — is a recurring barrier to legitimate engineering knowledge transfer.

For an archive like this one, the ITAR issue is a reminder that the legal and regulatory framework around historical technical documents is not always consistent or rational. Documents that are freely available on one government website may carry access restrictions in another context.

Insights for Modern Practice

Knowledge capture timing matters. Capturing Apollo knowledge 40 years after the fact was still valuable, but far more difficult than contemporaneous capture. Documents were scattered, formats were obsolete, and many of the original authors were deceased. The lesson: invest in knowledge capture while the program is active and the people are available.

Multi-format delivery. The combination of detailed wiki references and shorter video overviews addresses different learning needs — deep technical reference versus conceptual orientation. This dual-format approach remains effective for technical knowledge management.

Scope creep as signal. The project’s organic expansion from mission techniques to vehicle systems to fundamentals of spaceflight is not a failure of scope management. It is a signal that the knowledge domain has deep dependencies. You cannot teach operations without teaching the system, and you cannot teach the system without teaching the fundamentals.

Document preservation as safety practice. The 20 GB archive of original Apollo documentation, much of it requiring physical scanning from paper or microfiche, represents irreplaceable engineering knowledge. Modern programs should treat documentation as safety-critical infrastructure, not as an afterthought.

Cross-References

GNC Hardware Overview (Interbartolo, 2009) — Produced as part of the same Apollo Mission Familiarization project
What Made Apollo a Success? (1972) — The type of Apollo-era “lessons learned” document that Grabois’s project sought to make accessible
Managing the Moon Program (1999) — The kind of institutional knowledge capture that Grabois’s project extended to a broader audience
Hamilton’s Apollo Flight Software (2019) — Covers the software systems taught as part of the project’s GNC lessons
The Software Effort (Johnson & Giller, 1971) — An example of the detailed technical documentation the project gathered
AGC Source Code — The software preserved by the Virtual AGC project that Grabois’s team drew on