Re: Mission of Gravity, China Lake style (was Re: A case for the eradication of unmanned Mars missions)

From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 22:52:12 MST


Michael M. Butler wrote:

> <Hey-what-happens-to-this-grasshopper-if-I-put-it-in-my-Estes-payloader...

Not much. Tried that one too. Frogs and Grasshoppers make willing
astronauts. Never had one object too much, and they seemed none
the worse for their flight into the stratosphere. {8^D

> >I just KNEW this was the kind of thing my tax dollars were paying for in
> >those super-secret high-tech installations in the desert!

This one was not so super secret. The one we spent a few bucks on
was the vacuum chamber. We had one about the size of a single car
garage. Some guys and I were arguing about the effect of the ambient
air on moment of inertia measurements. I set up the torsional pendulum
in the vac chamber, pumped the air out, found out even I had underestimated
the effect, and I was the high guesser. Wrote up a technical paper
on the experiment, received the nickname "spike", won best
presentation at the conference, got a job offer at Lockheed, took
it, and here I am today. {8^D spike



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