Or it is but real good project management is overlooked. Sure regulation doesn't help, but if you look at recent big infrastructure or software projects failures it doesn't explain all. When I read about the Apollo project management it seems nowhere near the mediocrity of modern MBA corporate committee management.
But these days, we have established infrastructure, to manage a lot of the things that the Apollo guys needed to construct from whole cloth.
Also, the way that SpaceX does research is highly effective (and inflammable). Failing fast works, as long as we are set up to learn the lessons, and avoid doing things like sticking people on top of unverified tech.
There was an interview, recently with either Ben Nelson, or his predecessor, where they mentioned that NASA (or its directly-managed contractors) would never have been allowed to blow up a whole bunch of boosters, just to finally arrive at a design that normalizes what used to be considered impossible. On the first crash, he would have been hauled up in front of a Senate investigation committee, and forced to explain why it would never happen again.
It is not. The difficulty is that, mainly, we don't know lots of the variables there; and at the time the US was in a race to do it. But the moon is just a regular small planet that is much easier to escape its gravity than earth.
Yeah, I guess the several hundred thousand people involved were just slacking off a lot on government money.
Please don't forget to close such statements with an /s, lest some notorious software "engineers" on HN might be led to actually believe engineering the most powerful vehicle on earth mostly by hand was a negligible task.
