Devil's advocate:
Given that the Gemini/Apollo program was in its early days when it was written, how much could a Physics professor be reasonably expected to know about it - what position would he have been in, without the benefit of our 20/20 hindsight, to judge what was correct or not?
Well, we're not talking about
a physics professor but rather
that physics professor. And according to our author, the guy is no longer around to answer questions or defend himself. So any answer would be second-guessing. Some professors know a whole lot about the periphery of their fields. Others do not.
We trust university professors not to give assignments out of their ken. We trust them to be able to grade them fairly as representatives of the body of knowledge, not just from their personal understanding which may be limited. If Prof. Allen doesn't know much about the United States aerospace industry, then it's a poor assignment. And his judgment of one student's performance does not equate to endorsing the content as fact.
How many of the marks were for reasonable suggestions rather than factual correctness?
We'll never know. We'll never know if any such marks were ever actually given. Burns reproduces the essay from memory, and simply claims he got a good enough grade on it. He has specifically enjoined further discussion, as that would apparently violate his "Modesty is my middle name" maxim.
We have to keep in mind that the assignment was to identify challenges, not to prove they couldn't be overcome. Graded simply as a survey of requirements, you might expect some leeway. But Burns gets the requirements wrong, so no.
About half the purported obstacles are based on Burn's deeply flawed knowledge of orbital mechanics theory. From any physics professor's point of view, I think, that would be inexcusable. Especially abject ignorance of the contributions of Kepler and Newton, two of the minor deities of physics, and in its place the praise of a popular author of the time, who contributed practically nothing to the theory of the field, but only named one practical application of others' work. So 1963 is irrelevant to that -- Burns' errors date back about 400 years on that score. Correct those errors and the "requirements" largely evaporate.
On the rocketry part, Burns just alludes to mass ratio, says there are "problems" (but doesn't name them), and then says NASA won't be able to solve them. The irony is that his example is one of the most successful and straightforwardly-developed rockets in history: the Saturn 1B. From any professor's point of view that's poor argumentation. It's like saying all telescopes are governed by Rayleigh's and/or Dawes' law, therefore some particular telescope can't work. In either case, as the professor, I would be looking for evidence of specific problems, and the line of reasoning that connects those to the student's conclusion.
Very well, "NASA must build a suitable rocket" would be a proper statement of a challenge to be overcome. But then as a professor I would be wondering why the student would profess a skepticism that wasn't solicited in the assignment.
A few of Burns' claims allude to the space race, but were anachronistically naive even in 1963. Disorientation, orbital insertion difficulty, etc. were not significant problems in 1963. They had been solved previously. We have no idea whether Burns' professor knew of them, but we can presume he was aware that Mercury missions had been flown several times. I would have marked those away as solved problems, not as challenges to be faced.
Ditto the whole line of reasoning starting with communication problems and ending with "disaster" on the far side of the Moon. NASA had already demonstrated the ability of its spaceships to operate autonomously and semi-autonomously within mission parameters. Based on facts known in 1963, that would still have been a poor line of reasoning. Yes, mission coordination is a challenge to be faced all the time, but the specific problem examples given were those that had already been solved.
The problems I identify in his statistical argument would have been detectable in 1963. They aren't related to the state of the art of American aerospace, but rather to an ages-old understanding of how statistical probability is employed in quantitative reasoning. Since the entire purpose of statistics is to replace guesswork, I'd have immediately marked off the answer for having taken a guess and then tried to apply pseudo-statistical rigor to the guess in order to dress it up to look like science. In 1763, 1963, or 2013, that's just eminently poor reasoning.
Is systemic complexity a challenge? Yes, always. But how much of a challenge depends on a correct quantitative argument and a correct qualitative line of reasoning.
If I read your devil's advocacy right, you're looking for ways in which Burns' essay would have been viable in 1963 as an expression of the state of the endeavor, and have received the high mark claimed if only on the basis of the general or specific -- on the professor's part -- lack of knowledge. Overall I would have written at the bottom, "I didn't ask whether the problems could be solved or not, but rather only for a defensible formulation of the problem." And I'd have taken points away for answering a different question than what was asked.
So there's my first stab at putting Burns' essay in the context you suggest.
The problem is that Burns expects his essay to be so much more than a paper written in the early 1960s to survey Apollo. He expects it to continue to stand as proof that the Moon landings, from the expert physics point of view, were impossible. Since that's the context into which he puts it, that's the context in which we have to evaluate it.
Writing in 2013, why would an author not think to omit the failed predictions? Given, for example, that the Apollo Guidance Computer is a nearly incontrovertible fact, why would his ignorance of similar embedded systems in 1963, and the eventual development of the computer itself, be even remotely probative in 2013? If we propose to forgive Prof. Allen for a similar lapse of knowledge, how is that professor's grade then remotely indicative of success? We would have an ignorant professor praising an ignorant student, and that's not the stuff from which erudition is made.
We can step back and say, Well the whole thing was just an undergraduate classroom exercise, simplified to the knowledge at hand, etc. That would make many of Burns' claims more credible. But then it severs the exercise from what Burns needs it to say: that the essay represents generally applicable, generally correct information that is still pertinent in 2014.
