This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Apollo

How NASA Operated Before PowerPoint

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 8, 2022
Filed under ,
How NASA Operated Before PowerPoint

Book Review: The Apollo 11 Flight Plan: A Real Script Of Exploration
“The Apollo 11 Flight Plan” from relaunch.space is one of the more unusual books that I have “read” or reviewed. Let me get this out of they up front: this book represents a true labor of love and dedication to the art of making history available as if it happened yesterday.
This book contains a faithful recreation of the Apollo 11 flight plan. Not a good photocopy or scanned version done via print on demand. No, these folks recreated every letter, number, symbol, and diagram precisely as it would have appeared in the actual first edition used by the crew. Indeed, it is probably even sharper.
Some background: I know a lot about things like this. Everyone who has worked at NASA does. We now see things created by virtually the entire workforce in PowerPoint. Many NASA people use PowerPoint as a crutch – either to remind themselves of what they are supposed to say or to give the impression that they actually have something to say. Or both.
Flight plans now – and then – are no nonsense things. Lives and mission success depend on them. You train with them, study them during down times on a mission, and then hope that you can find that one arcane thing in the midst of a crisis when you really need it. Today we see astronauts floating around with these things on iPads. Otherwise, not much has really changed.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

One response to “How NASA Operated Before PowerPoint”

  1. Bob Mahoney says:
    0
    0

    And let us not forget the contributing factor “honorable mention” that PPT received in the CAIB Report.

    I was working at NASA when PPT crept in and displaced the viewgraph* as the primary medium of conference room communication. It was painful to watch the landslide of multiple levels of diminishing consciousness.
    *Viewgraph engineering will of course always remain viewgraph engineering, no matter how slick the particular presentation equipment

    Handy tools can all too easily become debilitating dependencies.