People and organizations are so cautious today that it takes ten times as long to get anything done. Any hint of trouble leads to years of delay. Remember (well, many of you don't) how long it took for the Space Shuttle to fly again after the Challenger crash? Challenger and Columbia crashes both grounded U.S. manned flight for two and half years each.
Here's the way things worked in the "old" days.
Apollo 8 was to be the very first manned flight on a Saturn V booster. It was to be a test flight in
Earth orbit with the Lunar Module as part of the package...scheduled for early 1969. But there were problems that delayed the LM and it wouldn't be ready in time. What to do? Today, the answer would be obvious: Delay the mission until the Lunar Module was ready for it's earth orbit test.
But what did they do in 1968? Rather than wait for the LM to be ready for the Earth orbit test. They decided to forget about the LM and they
moved the mission ahead of schedule by three months and, instead of orbiting the Earth, they decided to lauch the very
FIRST manned Saturn V test as a manned shot to orbit the moon. So they compensated for a hardware delay by moving up the rest of the schedule.
Now here is a hoot of a video. This is the unmanned Apollo 4. This is the very first flight of a Saturn V. NOBODY had ever experienced anything like this before. This was a giant cannon in a world of peashooters. Listen to the second half of this video when poor old Walter Cronkite (who reported from London during WWII) thinks the building is about fall down around him.
http://youtu.be/1uoVfZpx5dY
