#1: Najak seems to have the idea that everyone involved with Apollo downed tools and stopped work...
#2: Apollo didn't somehow achieve a magic 50% improvement. It continued with its intended aim: landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
#1: NASA was under political pressure of cancellation. Future uncertain... it became a viable question of "throwing more good money after badly spent money..."
If Baron's reports would have become more publicized, it might have lead to more investigations of MORE of the sub-contractors... because if it looks THIS-UGLY at the very end of the production chain -- and WASN'T KNOWN - this indicates problems elsewhere. If you see some roaches, you assume you likely have a bug problem.
For NASA to continue - they needed this 500-page report and Baron to be gone.
#2: Yes, they did change their pace of development by 50% by cutting-corners... and they all declared it was crazy and shouldn't be done. They did it anyways, and pooof, it was magical.
Here's Alan Bean giving a first hand account.. "That's Crazy! You can't do that!
https://youtu.be/Qr6Vcvl0OeU?t=1211Bean's monologue here:We’re gonna put them all together and test them all at once! Because we’ve run out of time and we want to get to the moon by the end of the decade. And people thought that was a CRAZY IDEA! People said “No way! It’s too many unknowns! We couldn’t possibly do that! There’s no way!”
George Miller kept saying, “If we want to get to the moon by the end of the decade, we’re going to HAVE to do this. And I can remember when that was proposed, I thought it was a really crazy idea. Not a very good idea. Looking back, it was a great idea.
Now, Von Braun might have been in favor of it, or he might not. But I’m sure if we asked him after it was all done he would have said, “What a great a idea! We never thought of that when we began.”
And that compressed the flight schedule by a whole year, maybe by 8 months or something like that. We did a LOT of that. We had a goal to get to the moon by the end of the decade. And we were trying to do it. That doesn’t mean we were being careless. But it meant we were doing everything we possibly could, to make that ahh… goal that president Kennedy set for us. And we did in fact make it.
Clearly NASA became "Schedule driven" way more so than before.
MLH says yes, they did "everything they possibly could - to meet the JFK goal". And for all practical purposes, they achieved that victory.
I've worked in product development too long to know that if you are too "schedule driven", bad things happen - and this is for small teams who work in the same building. NASA's project spanned 50 states, and was coordinated on PAPER (no computers to help them out).