Engineers: From The Earth To The Moon And Beyond
BO recently H Earth to the launched Tom Hanks’s miniseries, “From the Moon,” to show the thrill of discovery begun by NASA’s engineers nearly 40 years ago. That’s right, engineers. After all, when Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell uttered those famous words, “Houston, we have a problem,” whom do you think he was talking to? In fact, engineers were on both ends of the line during Apollo 13. The crew (Lovell. Haise, and Swigert) were all engineers. Virtually every astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were engineers. Jack Swigert, the daring young pilot portrayed by Kevin Bacon in the movie dramatization of Apollo 13, was not only an engineer, but the executive director of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in the 1970s. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, now serves in his fourth term as a United States Senator. Clearly, there is more to the image of the engineer than Dilbert would have you believe. Engineering has been called the “stealth profession.” So many of the things that engineers design (water systems, roads and bridges, cars and planes, power plants and refiner. ies, and an ever-growing plethora of electronic gadgets) are taken for granted, except when something goes wrong. Perhaps the engineer goes unnoticed because technology has become so ubiquitous. Yet, the more than two million engineers in the United States encompass a broad diversity. For example, Star Trek creatolGene Roddenberry studied engineering at UCLA. Time Man of the YeadIntel chairman Andrew Grove and General Electric chairman Jack Welch are both chemical engineers. The governors of Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi are all engineers, as; were former U.S. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Perhaps the best explanation of the roles of engineers and scientists was made by Theodore von Karman, an aerospace engineer who was awarded the first National Medal of Science. He said, “Scientists discover the world that exists: Engineerr, create the world that never was.” Another famous engineer who invented dynamite had an award named in his behalf. We call those who receive these prestigious awards today Nobe I Prize winners. In an age where technology helps turn fantasy and fiction into reality, engineers have played a pivotal role in developing the technologies which maintain our nation’s economic, environmental, and national security. They revolutionized medicine