It's funny because the Soviets did it right, in that they funded smart people and gave them control. The Nasa's approach was to have people create proposals and get approval for funds.
We have forgotten that the "fund smart people and let them do what they want" is the best approach. Look at Xerox Parc, Bell Labs, etc. Nasa's modern approach with SpaceX and other companies seems to reflect these hard learned lessons.
"fund smart people and let them do what they want" - well, that's not exactly how it worked - for example, while Korolov was mostly able to get the resources he needed in the 1950s, in the early 1940s he did his engineering work on bomber design from a prison labor camp (which is a bit far from "let them do what they want" or "give them control") after losing most of his teeth from malnutrition during forced labor in a gold mine. This probably provided a perspective for him of what the limits of "do what you want" are in reality.
Since Spring 1945, Korolev was much more able to control resources, getting to reconstructing V-2 manufacturing - Soviet version, of course, dubbed R-1 - then upgrades to R-2 and R-3, then even more powerful R-5 - all alcohol-based - and then, starting from 1953, working on R-7.
One interesting piece of history (Chertok wrote about it in his memoirs) - in Spring 1961, just before Gagarin's flight, which, of course, was priority number 1, Korolev managed to worry about upcoming R-9 testing, saying to his people "after Gagarin, they won't allow us to work on R-9 as easily".
Korolev did enjoy significant freedom in how he did things - the Council of Main Designers was created thanks to that freedom, and von Braun's decision to add fifth F-1 to Saturn just because he felt it will be needed - bypassing all bureaucracy - would be quite understood by Korolev and his team, they had similar things done themselves. It was often the case that Korolev went to Kremlin with some space-related offerings, and got green light, after the principal work was already done, and more scaled-up development was all what remained. You have to work your asses off this way of course, but you have full support of your political bosses and you're a hero for everybody.
These smart people did not have any semblance of control in the USSR. The Soviet space program was 95% political, heavily influence by the politburo and Soviet interests. Smart people would not have developed the Buran if all options were on the table
Surely that’s the same with NASA pork barrel politics affecting who gets to build it and therefore the particular companies and manufacturing capabilities the engineers have to work with. The space shuttle wasn’t engineering lead either.
It's interesting to see that during Moon Race, in USSR there were 3 space design teams - Korolev's (later Mishin), Chelomey's and Yangel's - competing for resources, while NASA established centralized planning with everybody doing parts of the common project (with lots of money of course). It seems that "capitalistic" approach in USSR lost to more "communistic", central planning approach in USA.
Sure, but start of the "race" was pretty much the reverse - factions in the USA fighting for who will be allowed to launch the first satellite, resulting in the Vanguard fiasco. They had to bring in Von Braun in the end to do it, starting the centralization.
And in the USSR Glushko also played along initially, designing R-7 engines that are in use till today basically. Only later he stopped and started demanding all future engines to be hypergolic, which didn't go well with Korolev, especially for crewed vehicles.
> Glushko... started demanding all future engines to be hypergolic
I think Glushko owns a big share of Soviet problems with the Moon.
On the other hand, at the time the leading idea in USSR was that hydrogen is a rather advanced fuel (which, by the way, Glushko also supported at a time), and given good existing engines, rocket designers wished to use proven fuels. In general, and to compete with hydrogen in particular, Isp was an important goal, so rocket designers set goals to engine designers - make rocket engines with good Isp. There was created a conflict between high Isp/high pressure engines - as required - and large thrust engines, as was needed for big, Moon rocket. Glushko had the opinion that they won't have enough time to create large thrust high Isp engines with kerosene, only with UDMH/NO2 . Kuznetsov could only create relatively low thrust (1500 kN) high Isp kerosene engines, and those were late.
If Glushko tried, those engines could possibly work. At least Glushko experience with large thrust chamber of RD-270 helped later with large thrust 4-chamber kerosene RD-170.
It's more funny that both primarily used thousands of Germans as their rocket technicians, and both german parties used their german style, based on engineers as heads.
This all changed with Lyndon Johnson taking over, getting rid of the Germans, introducing the well known inefficient NASA/gov-style management style known from the Shuttle era, and moved the technicians out of Alabama to Houston. This was the anti-modern democratic approach.
SpaceX simply went back to the old modern style, which worked well for the US and Russia.
The trick was not using smart people, but experienced engineers in control, and not fresh anti-engineer PM's out of college. Everybody can control a budget, esp. engineers, but only engineers can control engineering problems.
I have watched PMs actively contribute nothing to a project by entering false metrics. It really is either you can build something, or you can't and contribute nothing to the project.
Well, those managers are only there for the hype. You need liars apparently. I can name a couple of popular of software projects who went this route, and were successful because of this. But NASA?
Not always. Some of the software guys just zone out in meetings and don't pay attention while their managers and PMs do the talking. Can confirm, I wasn't paid nearly enough in that job to care about what my manager or PM said.
