[caption id="attachment_171791" align="alignright" width="300"] The Apollo 13 crew onboard the USS Iwo Jima after splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean.[/caption] You will be familiar, I suppose, with Apollo 13—if not the phenomenal movie, perhaps the unfortunate outer-space incident that inspired it. Seriously. It was in all the papers. An oxygen tank explosion in the command module forced the astronauts to take refuge in the lunar lander, but their stubborn insistence on breathing quickly filled the small spacecraft with poisonous, exhaled CO2, and it needed to be scrubbed from cabin’s atmosphere. That could be accomplished with onboard canisters of lithium hydroxide, but the canisters from the command module had square openings and the ports to the lunar module's filtration system were cylindrical. Oops. In the movie, you may also recall a scene at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, during which the flight director emptied the contents of a cardboard box on a table surrounded by engineers. They were told that these were the components aboard the craft available for repurposing. And the engineers were told to use them to fit a square peg into a round hole. Which, incredibly enough, they figured out. Whereupon the astronauts were instructed to rig the equipment with such items as tube socks, air hoses from a suddenly-unnecessary spacewalk space suit and, obviously, duct tape. Which, incredibly enough, they figured out, as well. It was like a MacGyver episode in... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'
[ Folio Magazine | 2019-10-01 15:35:11 UTC ]
Expect much higher capital expense costs and much greater need for in-house digital development skill. Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2011-02-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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