Quote:
On 2001-11-21 19:04, JayUtah wrote:
The Geek Squad rummaged around in the brush and found a set of logs sufficient to lay into a framework upon which the bus could be driven. A ramp of sorts. This allowed us to use one of the jacks since the frame was now high enough to slip the jack underneath. The jack had originally been too tall to fit between the ground and the frame.
Not a very hard problem to solve. The charm of the story lies in having found a bunch of closeted engineers in a very unlikely setting.
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This is wonderfully relevant to Apollo 13: we're a nation of tinkerers, fixers, fiddlers, and gadgeteers. Is there anyone here who *didn't* grow up in a home with a tool drawer? Most of us (yanks) grew up with hammers, screwdrivers, drills, wrenches, etc. For so very, very many of us, our formative memories consist of being little ones, playing with tools alongside papa in his workshop, hammering nails into sawhorses, sawing pieces of scrap lumber, etc.
In WWII, this was one of the keys to our victory: while European troops would wait for the breakdown van to come, we hands-on yanks would try to fix things with baling wire and metal shims.
And, in Apollo 13, the famous air-filter fix is a celebration of our ability to "kludge" things together.
I'll warrant that the bus load of engineers could have been replaced by a bus load of Americans of darn near any stripe, and the same thing would have happened: we'd have gone out, found the logs, found fence posts, found flat rocks, found a castoff trash bin...
It is no coincidence that we love to watch "Junkyard Wars."
And -- again, this is really on topic! -- this strikes at the heart of the question: should we have a manned exploration program or a robot exploration program?
In favor: men can get their hands dirty, can jerry-rig, can put two incongruent parts together and get a working subsystem, whereas a robot cannot.
Against... We place an artificially large value on the lives of our explorers.
(Not to be disrespectful: the death of seven astronauts all but stopped space flight for a number of years... And yet 50,000 of us die on our freeways every year, yet the 55mph speed limit was repealed...)
Miracle: no one has died in "space," but only in launch or re-entry...
And, alas, when that evil day does happen, and an astronaut/cosmonaut/navistella/etc. does die in space... What do you wanna bet there will be people insisting it was a hoax?
Silas...