My visit with a rocket scientist

Last week I was sitting the lobby of a small bed and breakfast when I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who turned out to be an actual rocket scientist. I don’t know about you but I don’t meet too many people who design rockets so I decided to quiz him a bit about his profession.

In doing so, we began talking about thrust rates. That is the power a rocket has in boosting a satellite into orbit. He mentioned in passing that the Saturn rocket that put up the old Apollo space crafts was the most powerful rocket the US ever built.

I asked him why we don’t make them anymore and he said: “We forgot how.”

Well, that stopped me. “What do you mean we forgot how?” I asked. 

He responded that everything in the old days of NASA was written with pencil on paper and they lost it. On top of that, the old engineers retired or died and no one remembered how to do it anymore.

I found that mind boggling. As I pondered it, it made me think about institutional memory and how fragile it is. There is a lesson in his story for us in the toy industry. I’ll talk about that in my next posting.