The Huntsville S&RC has a Mercury Atlas on display with an air compressor squirreled away behind a shrub that cycles on/off to keep the thing pumped up. Adds an audible element to the otherwise static displays. After viewing such an artifact I have enhanced respect for John Glenn & Co. climbing onto those beer cans with a pocketful of matches! Hopefully the center will reopen soon.
The whole thing looks quiet 1960's space opera film like.
I wouldn't be surprised if Musk at one of the early design meetings said he wanted some thing that would work and look cool and chucked a 1960's space comic on the desk and smiled...…
And the design team leaders just smiled straight back and said we won't have a problem selling that idea to the troops.
Yes, I know some of the people who started with Space X as they hired a lot of engineers who used to work for McDonnell Douglas, particularly the team from Huntington Beach. As Space X was a client of ours (they used our CAD/CAE/CAM software) I've actually visited their Hawthorne facility where they assemble the Falcon rockets. I also saw the first mock-up of their Dragon capsule and watched them put the finishing touches on one of the Falcon engines. It was a very cool place to visit, and people I knew, who had been at McDonnell Douglas, confirmed that it was a really cool place to work. Now this was maybe six or seven years ago, when I was last there, but from what I've seen and read, it's probably still a pretty exciting place to be.
I have strongly suspected that since the beginning.
In the Boeing culture, most of the best minds would be looking for a better job.
Somewhere that they would be valued and respected.
Bill
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"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
To do the video in your above post, "[ youtube link ending]" should work (again without that initial space and only the text after the ".be/") though I don't think the start time adjustment works in that format though.
[youtube 5JJL8CUfF-o?t=126]
When I was in school, we had a lecture program that brought famous people to campus to give lectures and conduct programs. I can remember in my Freshman year, 1966, when Dr Wernher Von Braun gave a lecture about using satellites to gather date to help manage farmland and forests (our university had one of the country's largest and well known schools of forestry). Anyway, at the time I was struck by the fact that he didn't look at tall as he did in the movies ;-)
charliealphabravo,
That video was interesting. I particularly liked the scene at 35 minutes, where about 20 people are standing around the base of the fully-fueled V2 rocket. They can't touch it any more, can't do anything else to get it ready to launch, but it hasn't occurred to them it's TIME TO LEAVE THE AREA.
If I'd been there at that moment, I can imagine myself backing away outside the crowd and then shouting "Five, four, three..."
Ever see those photos of Kim Jung Un sitting at a table watching a launch of one of those North Korean missiles?
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be caught sitting out in the open with nothing between me a ballistic missile sitting on the launch pad. All it had to do was fall-over in the wrong direction right after the engine had ignited or veer off course once it was in the air.
