How the US screwed the engineering profession. Running for spurious sense of national pride, emphasis in the engineering profession was granted. (Remember we are talking about Cold War years.) The Olympic Games happened only every four years, so it was necessary some other sort of 'achievement'.
The space race provided the imagination capture device (look today, 45 years after, Bush Mars and Moon visionn or 30 years later Reagan Star Wars).
But what a scientific endeavour that at normal pace should have taken 30 years had to be done in 10. With ancient transistors, vaccum tubes, sliding rules, expensive and rare computer raw power and pre-historic software.
Because of that lack of technological resources, the engineering profession had to be made up to achieve without the tools. Picture Leonardo da Vicni making a submarine or a helicopter he drew to have an idea of magnitude.
Zero defects. Testing ad nauseam. All that if confined to the space race itself, would have been a great idea. But that spiled out into every field of engineering.
The schools all over the world started doing the aping and for decades we suffered from the after effects of the space race engineering disease.
Yeah, I remember MIL SPEC. I also remember the fact that the electronics industry, optics, motorcycle, shipbuilding etc etc were 'outsourced' and the US lost competitivity in all of them. All industries that the US was top and invented some of them. All burnt in the altar of prestige project.
Thanks God this is all history and later we had Taiwanese, Hong Kong South Korean and today Chinese who destroyed the engineering concepts that underlied the space race.
I will click send, and TCP-IP, connectionless -a concept I love and every engineer should love- will send this message to a server somewhere. I will fire and forget. Don't know how it gest there, but it will. 1.000 defects, and works.
Despite not learning, math, despite taking two decades to discover waht was wrong, both with math and the engineering profession, I helped for the last 30 years build that stuff. |
