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March 29, 2024

Tag: national aeronautics and space administration

Mars rover designer makes landing at bluegrass festival

Mark Indictor, who was the lead designer for some of the software installed on the Mars Rover Curiosity that successfully landed on the red planet Sunday, will be visiting San Benito County this weekend. But it won’t be a science-related visit, as he will perform at the 19th Annual Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival.

Marty: With space it’s go baby, go

I was watching the terrific series “Moon Machines” on the Science Channel. It’s about the Apollo Program that put man on the Moon July 20, 1969. Much was human interest – vignettes showing who did it and how. They ranged from engineers at MIT designing inertial guidance systems, to the “LOL” system of computer programming. LOL stood for the “Little Old Ladies,” the operators, almost all mature women, who physically wove wires and doughnut-shaped magnets to program computer memory. The show eventually got to the Saturn V, the 6.2-million-pound, 363-foot high, 3 million part, behemoth multi-staged rocket system used to propel Apollo. As they ran the launch films, I found myself talking to the TV – feeling the same feelings and saying the same thing I said during launches more than 40 years ago. “Go baby, go!”

Water Cooler: Are you worried about the space shuttle program ending?

Steve Staloch: “No. Its demise should become the poster child for all such ‘lofty’ federal projects that are essentially pork-barrel and have no justifiable or sustainable return on investment.”

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