Comments by "Halfdan Ingolfsson" (@Halli50) on "Real Engineering" channel.

  1. The current NASA budget is only a fraction of what the Apollo program had. Also, the learning curve of autonomous landing vehicles is well and spectacularly documented: Just review the spectacular crashes that preceded the first successful Falcon 9 booster landing, now being repeated on an even grander scale with the Starship program! There will be a lot of "flops" in NASA's immediate future. Much of the knowledge accumulated during the Apollo program has been lost, and has actually become irrelevant because the tool sets available now are totally different. The entire thing will have to be re-learned, and on a budget!
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  2. The main "computer" they had during this era was the slide rule. Another issue that makes the engineering feats accomplished by engineers of the era all the more outstanding (at least for British and US engineers) was the fact they had a severe disadvantage: The Imperial Measuring System that severely complicated things.
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  3. @webtoedman , ...and 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64. It is all the fractions that are silly - why not simply use milli-inches (thousands) for machine work? When Australia formally went metric, they went from imperial (feet, inches & fractions) to millimeters when building houses - no fractions or decimal points in sight. One builder did a test: Building 2 identical houses, one was built using the old imperial system and the other using millimeters only. The imperial-built house resulted in a full lorry-load of waste and scrap (indicating mistakes made) while the waste/scrap from the other house amounted to one wheelbarrow load.
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  4. @webtoedman, the house building story is possibly a bit exaggerated, but it is true. I came across it in one of the Imperial vs. Metric videos on YouTube. Working with feet, inches and fractions is more prone to error than working with whole numbers only. The scrap coming from the imperial-built house supposedly consisted of pieces of lumber cut too short or too long (those having to be shortened, creating scrap). A lorry-load of scrap would indicate that more lumber had to be ordered to complete the house.
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