My father grew up on a subsistence farm, the kind that raised chickens and grew just enough to get by. Farmers were the original hackers. You couldn’t wait for the right tool or the right expert. You fixed what was broken with what you had, because the alternative was worse.
As a kid he taught himself rocket chemistry. Not from a kit. From whatever he could source locally. He was trying to make things burn hotter and fly farther, adjusting mixtures through trial and error long before he had words like specific impulse or oxidizer ratio for what he was doing.
The materials weren’t exotic. Potassium nitrate sold as stump remover. Sulfur and charcoal. Mix them correctly and you have black powder, the same oxidizer-fuel logic underlying every solid rocket motor ever built. More ambitious builders used potassium perchlorate from chemical suppliers, mixed with aluminum powder or sugar to control burn rate and energy density. All of it over the counter. All of it accessible to someone willing to read carefully and try things until they worked.
He wasn’t following a plan. He was just that kind of person.
Most people have forgotten that the Air Force had its own space program before NASA existed. NASA was carved out of NACA in 1958, but the Air Force had been running parallel efforts since the mid-1950s. That generation had grown up on science fiction and wanted to see it happen. When Sputnik launched in October 1957 the country went into a low-grade panic about whether it understood physics well enough to survive, and suddenly the kids who had been dreaming about space since they could read had somewhere to go with it. What followed was one of the rare moments in American history when technical aptitude was a genuine class elevator. The government needed people who understood this stuff badly enough to find them wherever they were.
He enlisted in his early twenties, aerospace degree in hand. The Air Force space program was what he was aiming at. He ended up working on attitude control thrusters for reconnaissance satellites, the kind that could resolve fine surface detail on Earth from hundreds of miles up. For that mission attitude control wasn’t a secondary problem. It was the central one. A camera that can’t hold still is useless. The thrusters are what made the intelligence possible. The underlying engineering was the same problem he had been teaching himself: oxidizer, fuel, combustion geometry, now controlled to tolerances that left no margin.
I remember him watching a satellite reenter on the cable news when I was young. I don’t know which one or exactly what year. What I remember is that he cried. He told me later there was a plate on that satellite with his name engraved on it. Work he had done, hardware he had touched, in orbit for years and now gone. Grief with no adequate audience, because the context was secret and the people who would have understood were scattered across programs that didn’t officially exist.
Years later my father was excited watching Iridium launch, Motorola’s commercial satellite constellation, first launches 1997. The same fundamental technology, now accessible to anyone with a phone. His generation had figured out how to do this, quietly, under classification, and here it finally was in the open. The knowledge had propagated. Just not through the channels that were supposed to carry it.
He kept a green chalkboard in the garage. He would pull out his slide rule and work through things with me. Orbital decay, thrust, specific impulse, delta-v, the rocket equation and why it makes everything harder than it looks. He had a worry he came back to often – society had forgotten how to go to the moon. The knowledge existed in aging engineers and partially classified documents and it was not being transmitted. The chalkboard was what he could do about that.
Last year Destin Sandlin, an aerospace engineer who describes himself as a redneck from Alabama, walked into a room full of the most senior people in American space policy and did something worth an hour of your time to watch. He asked questions that people inside the institutional food chain had stopped asking. Starting with the most basic one: how many rockets does it take to fuel the Artemis lunar lander?
The room went quiet. Nervous laughter. EPublic estimates have varied, but all point to a strikingly high number of launches and on-orbit refueling operations before a landing attempt depending on assumptions about boil-off and reuse, and nobody in the room had a confident answer.
These are not uninformed people. A core operational parameter of their own mission architecture was not common knowledge among the people running it.
Then Destin asked the room a simpler question.
“Is this the simplest solution?”
Silence.
Destin pointed them at NASA SP-287, a document the Apollo engineers wrote and left behind specifically so the next generation wouldn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch. The title is “What Made Apollo a Success.” It has been sitting there, public, for decades. Most of the people in that room had not read it.
The principle at the center of that document is blunt:
“Build it simple and then double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.”
Simple first. Then redundant. Not complex and hoping.
Simple isn’t just aesthetic preference. Simple is how you keep the system inside your head. Simple is how you build procedures all the way down to bolt cutters and still know what comes next. When a system gets complex enough that a room full of its leaders can’t answer a basic operational question about it, it has exceeded the boundary of what they actually understand. They are renting the complexity along with the capability.
The Apollo engineers meant it literally. When designing the ascent stage separation, the mechanism that gets astronauts off the lunar surface, they didn’t stop at one solution or two. They built redundancy on top of redundancy. Flip the switch. If that fails, go outside and trip the manual release. If that fails, depressurize, suit up, go to the bottom of the spacecraft with bolt cutters, and cut the straps holding the stages together. Harrison Schmitt said there was one more procedure after the bolt cutters. Nobody would say what it was.
That’s not genius. That’s a chicken farmer’s epistemology applied to the hardest engineering problem humans had ever attempted. You don’t wait for perfect conditions or perfect knowledge. You start simple, you build every fallback you can think of, and then you think of one more.
Destin argues that Artemis didn’t follow that logic. The NRHO/Gateway architecture was publicly justified in part on communications, surface access, stability, and operational grounds, but Destin argues that it also reflects deeper architectural constraints that accumulated into a more complex solution. Destin’s read, and he makes a detailed case for it, is that it’s an architectural constraint dressed up as a design choice, complexity that accumulated because the real constraints couldn’t be named publicly. A room full of program leaders who couldn’t tell you the basic parameters of the system they were running.
That’s what happens when you lose the thread.
Destin also interviewed an engineer who had worked on the lunar landing training vehicle, the machine that taught Apollo astronauts to land in one-sixth gravity by actually putting them in a vehicle where their life depended on getting it right. Destin asked whether the Apollo engineers were smarter than engineers today. The answer was no. What they had wasn’t superior intelligence. It was a bias toward doing, toward simplicity, toward keeping the system inside human heads rather than delegating it to complexity they couldn’t fully reason about.
NASA SP-287 exists because those engineers understood something important. Capability doesn’t survive on its own. Knowledge doesn’t transmit automatically. You have to codify it deliberately or it dies with the people who held it. It is ownership made explicit. Here is what we understood. Here is why it worked. Here is the playbook so the next generation doesn’t have to rediscover it at the cost of lives.
The space race created a machine for turning hands-on knowledge into national capability. It found people like my father wherever they were because it needed what they had already taught themselves. It was the on-ramp, the forcing function that pulled curiosity into programs that mattered and gave it somewhere to go. That same forcing function generated SP-287, the discipline to write it down, the institutional pressure to transmit it. When the race ended the machine stopped. The on-ramp closed. The knowledge didn’t vanish immediately. It aged out, program by program, engineer by engineer, panel by panel. What remained was credentials and institutional memory of having once known how, which is a different thing entirely from knowing how.
We took that gift and built Artemis anyway. More complex architecture. Estimates ranging from eight to fifteen or more rockets just to fuel the lander. A room full of its leaders who hadn’t read the playbook.
“Is this the simplest solution?”
Silence.
That’s not an aerospace problem. That’s the pattern. The knowledge transmission problem is older than aerospace. I’ve been writing about it in other contexts for a while, starting here.
My father spent my childhood pointing at this from a chalkboard in a garage. I didn’t become an astronaut. That was his hope, not my path. The chalkboard worked anyway. The knowledge moved. The Iridium launches proved it. The knowledge his generation developed under classification eventually became infrastructure anyone could hold in their pocket. You can’t fully control where it lands. You can only decide whether to try.
Now AI is doing to software what the end of the space race did to aerospace. It is consuming the early career tasks that used to serve as scaffolding for building judgment. The debugging, the boilerplate, the routine iteration that taught tradeoffs and edge cases before anyone trusted you with the hard problems. The visible work disappears first. The tacit knowledge becomes unreachable just as it becomes most important. The on-ramp closes. And at some point a room full of senior people goes quiet when someone asks a basic operational question, not because they’re uninformed, but because the complexity was delegated before the understanding had time to form.
That is the cautionary tale. Not that AI is bad. That capability outsourced before it is understood leaves you renting decisions you don’t control while keeping consequences you can’t transfer. The room goes quiet. And eventually nobody even thinks to ask whether this is the simplest solution.
My father saw it coming. That’s what the chalkboard was for.
The question isn’t whether you work in aerospace or software. It’s whether you’ve stopped asking basic questions about the system you’re running. Whether it has exceeded the boundary of what you actually understand. Whether you’re renting complexity along with capability and calling it progress.
You don’t wait for perfect knowledge. You read every playbook you can find. You build redundancy all the way down to bolt cutters. And then you think of one more thing.
The chemicals are still on the shelves. SP-287 is still public. The Destin talk is an hour of your time and worth every minute.
Read the playbook.
