A couple weeks ago, we had the opportunity to go and visit the Aerospace company down in Pasadena. The trip was pretty cool- we got to see a lot of important rooms (such as the flight control / mission headquarters place you see in all the movies) and talk to a lot of really interesting people. 'Course, my favorite part of the trip was a bit less exciting- I liked piloting around the RC vehicles they put in a corner for us to play with.
Speaking of exciting, something interesting Aerospace is developing right now is their lithium-ion battery deorbiter- basically a little device that sets dead satellites' batteries on fire to push them into our atmosphere, clearing up our low-Earth orbit. Fun, if nothing else.
Okay, last up, I gotta impersonate a historical figure from aerospace's (the science, not necessarily the company's) past. Looking at the timeline given to us, I'm gonna choose something easy- the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS). I'll pretend to be some nameless engineer who worked on the project and got zero recognition. Here goes-
"Yeah, after World War II the government realized that the old Doppler system kind of sucked. It was only two-dimensional and had pretty bad range, not to mention it was slow as hell, so they contracted us here at Aerospace to build 'em a better navigation system. We got a draft working for them pretty quick- an array of satellites in low- to mid-Earth orbit to track your position- anywhere- and relay it back to home base. We even got a prototype up and running for 'em. The Air Force took over from there, but it was still a fun project to work on."
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