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In the early 1960s, the US began setting up deep-space tracking stations in Australia. Doug Rickard found himself tracking missions to Mars and the moon. Friendly scientific rivalry and those small but spectacular mistakes in space exploration made for a rich episode in Doug's life. These are stories from his memoirs.
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Oh, that sound of male ego. You travel halfway across the galaxy and
it's still the same song.
-- Eve McHuron, "Mudd's Women", stardate 1330.1
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gishzida on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:05AM
There was a time [at least in aerospace] that some of the "corporate masters" actually cared about their employees. That was before my time.
There were also people that loved science so much that they'd do it just for the fun of it. My dad was one of those. He actually set up an observation station in L.A. to "record" the EMP of the July 9, 1962 Starfish Prime atmospheric nuclear explosion. The pay off for him was since he was not working for the government he was the only researcher that was able to publish a non-classified paper about his observations.
I can tell you that when I was working on the SSME program and the Atlas Engine tear-down / rebuilt program for the Air Force in the 80's and early 90's I cared about my work and felt I was actually accomplishing something... even if the price was putting up with idiot and/or evil bosses. Yes there were schlemazels, schmucks, and schlemiels who sat in important chairs on "simulated walnut veneer" row. I remember that one of them was quoted as saying that CNC machines could be run by "Trained Monkees"... we were paid fairly well for the time [I started at $11.65 /hr in 1981 and when I was laid off in 1992 was making something like $23.50 an hour].
Modern Multinationals [and your friends the Koch Brothers] are on a campaign to turn the modern American factory workers into totally expendable cogs. So every time you nod your head to talk about foreign workers taking US jobs and how "we" need to close the borders, kill the unions, ignore the idea of a living wage, etc. etc. you can pretty well bet those words are being spoken by people who are being paid by people that make large profits by turning the work places into sweat shops, importing H1B workers to replace "expensive" American labor, and exporting jobs to China, India, Indonesia, and any other place where the labor is really, really cheap.
And then some someone comes along nods their head at all of those lies and and repeats those lies as "facts" and has the gall to tell me my upbringing sucked? EF you need to drink more. There is no such thing as a "good upbringing" unless you were born in the 1%...