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hunter

(38,240 posts)
15. I said "it would take a huge effort to recreate something like that..."
Sat Aug 31, 2013, 02:11 PM
Aug 2013

Not the more common "urban legend" which I was unaware of.

My grandfather was an engineer on the Apollo project. His specialty was making "impossible" parts from titanium. Of course it wasn't impossible because the parts were made. At the time titanium was considered a notoriously difficult material to work with. We didn't know then what we know now.

There was a lot of intuition, experimentation, and gut-feelings involved in the work, not to mention figuring out what the Nazis and the Soviet Union had accomplished.

My grandfather was an officer in the Army Air Force during World War II, he had a high security clearance, and that's probably where he picked up the art. He never flew a plane, which was his romantic notion when he first enlisted years before the war.

So yeah, I'll stand by what I said. We couldn't build another machine like that, nor would we want to.




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