I’d like to hear stories of other people who have worked on the great engineering, scientific or construction projects of our time. Even if you or your forebears just drove a truck or stared at a monitor in the middle of the night, I’d like to hear your stories on:
The Manhattan Project
Project Mercury
Project Gemini
Project Apollo
Hoover Dam
World Trade Center Construction
Feel free to add others.
P.S. If you are working on Project Constellation , PLEASE feel free to tell us what you are allowed.
There’s a guy who used to be a member (very sadly, he passed on recently) who was by my estimation the embodiment of the motto of these boards, who worked on Biosphere II.
My Dad worked on the Apollo missions, back during the late sixties, three summers in a row while working on his Ph.D. in structural engineering. We’d get to spend the summer in Huntsville, which we children thought magical 'cause the apartment complex had air conditioning and a swimming pool.
This would be 1965-1697 or so; so I was anywhere from 5 to 8 years old. Mostly what I remember about the young scientists working on the project was their sense of eagerness - lots of energy going on there. On saturdays his buddies might come by and discuss a lot of science (over several beers) which I couldn’t understand at the time. I was certain, however, that they were working on a Great Thing.
To NinetyWt and UncleBeer: Great stuff! Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
To everyone else - c’mon! No one here has stories from working on:
A Star Wars Movie
The Big Dig
Kuwait oil fires
Hurricane Katrina cleanup
The Channel Tunnel
Microsoft Windows
Olympic Construction
Ground Zero cleanup
The Mars Rovers
I built the cooling device used to keep ice cores from Mt Kilimanjao frozen. They were for an expedition led by Lonnie Thompson who is a world famous paleoclimatologist, and my friend’s dad. I worked at the Byrd Polar Research center for a couple years.
If one wants to know how global warming affects glaciers, he is the guy to ask.
[sub]Okay, so the cooling device consisted of tons of blue freezer packet. I still built it damnit.[/sub]
I have a buddy who works for NASA. He has been involved in a LOT of stuff, and IMNSHO, he is one of the reasons we even have a space station at all.
Recently, he was involved with the shuttle Columbia search effort following its breakup over east Texas. I can’t give out any explicit details without contacting him first; suffice to say that the astronauts’ bodies weren’t the only ones recovered during that project.
Anyways… If you are going to expand this to include even MS Windows, then yes, my ex-boss was an ex-Microsoft guy. I believe he did work on Windows itself as he talked about how long a compile took, but the only time he ever really remnisced was talking about some work on Messenger.
As a structural engineer, I worked on Boston’s Big Dig for several years in the late '90s to early '00s.
It was a pretty amazing project. The scope of it was just insane.
Primarily, I worked on the structural design of the Dewey Square Tunnel rehabilitation and the new Air Intake Structure that spans the tunnel. The Air Intake Structure contains three 20’-tall fans that blow fresh air into the tunnel below. Since the entire three-story building is supported by the tunnel walls below, the building sits on five 6’ tall steel box girders which in turn span between the tunnel walls. I saw the girders when they were still at the steel fabricator - they were impressive.
The Air Intake Structure has gained some notoriety recently for the Os Gemeos mural on one side.
I worked on one project that was cancelled. It wasn’t as I expected anyway so I lost interest. The project was to create the inventions of DaVinci that were never built to see how well they worked. Modern tools were used but the materials were supposed to be the same and could theoreticaly be built with primitive tools. My particular job was building whatever componet that used bending wood to store energy.
My husband worked for a contractor at NASA Goddard. He designed a mounting structure for part of a satellite that’s currently in orbit. I can’t remember which one it was now, but I know he was involved in several projects that eventually ended up in space.
I cared for the first kidney transplant in the US from a non-related donor.
I also worked with Dr. E. Donnell Thomas at Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center during the early years of bone marrow transplant research. Dr. Thomas received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bone marrow transplantation in 1990.
One of the biggest break-throughs was the development of Cyclosporin, an anti-rejection drug. We did the early double-blind studies in the US.
One of my primary patients was the first non-related bone marrow transplant in the world.
Does PowerPoint count? I was on the development team for 17 years, and shipped 3 Windows versions and 7 Mac versions. I’d like to think there were some great ones in there.
My maternal grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, but I was 1.) young, and 2.) dumb and short-sighted so I didn’t ask him very much about it.
I know a guy who worked on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) infrastructure, including the trans-bay tube and Embarcadero Station. We recently had a fascinating conversation about how those structures were built back in the mid - late 60’s.
My mom and dad both worked on projects for the military during and after WWII that I don’t know about because they were secret. Dad was a nuclear weapons officer and Mom was a structural engineer with the Army Corps.
My dad was an engineer who worked on the construction of various rail transit projects in Los Angeles. Both the Blue Line and the Green Line, for those who know the area.
(He’s not dead yet, thank goodness, just retired.)
Both my grandfathers worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation during WWII (which produced the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb). One was a pipe fitter and was actually involved in construction of the reactors there. The other was a mechanic in the motor pool. They of course had no idea what was being make at Hanford until the bombs dropped. The overall Manhattan Project was a huge effort by 100s of thousands of people from all walks of life and all professions.
My grand uncle worked on the Gemini program. I’m not quite sure exactly what he did but as a kid we relished in claiming he was a real rocket scientist.
Years ago I worked on development of a vaccine for a rare but serious virus. Somewhat morbidly, there still have not been enough outbreaks to justify treating enough people to find out if our vaccine really works.
I had a miniscule role on the Space Shuttle Support Team, starting with STS 2. The Air Force sent up rawinsonde (actually, they may have been radiosondes that collected the full range of atmospheric information – but we called them rawinsondes) balloons to collect meteorological data for STS mission. The company I worked for received the data from the Air Force and processed it, then sent it over a phone link to Johnson Space Center. I was one of the people who processed and sent the data. The meteorological data was collected and transmitted on a regular schedule throughout the flight, as the local weather conditions may need to be known at any time in case the flight ended early.
Aside from having primo ‘front-row seats’ to watch the Shuttle landings, and the satisfaction of working on the project (and the extra pay for working nights and weekends), there was one incident that was personally exciting. We were preparing the meteorological data for transmission, when the program kept failing. My partner that night (who was also my supervisor) was getting itchy. If we couldn’t send the data through the computer, we’d have to print it off on the ‘slime copier’ (thermo copier) and drive the hardcopies over to NASA and fax them. Fortunately, the program was written in BASIC on that old Tektronix terminal, and I had taken a BASIC class in college just a couple of years before. I was able to debug the program, and we got the data sent just before we would have had to go to use NASA’s fax.
