(no subject)

[pat]

My husband has a really interesting job. (Be sure and read elissaann's comment.)

This week he was paid to go to Vermont and play with Legos and K'nex. No, really. It was with a group beginning to design a lunar lander. Last Sunday, we had to go to Target to buy them -- with a government credit card. The kids are annoyed because they can't get the Legos when the meetings are over -- they're officially government property.

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[wcg.livejournal.com]

Back when Hubble was first deployed, there was a problem with one of the high gain antennas getting stuck. Roger Doxey, the lead engineer for the project, walked from the HST command center at Goddard across the street to K-Mart and bought an Erector Set and a big box of Tinker Toys, then came back and built an ad-hoc model of the spacecraft and its deployable structures so that he and the other engineers could look at it and try to figure out what was wrong. It turned out to be a cable that had gotten wrapped around the antenna mast.

As far as I know, Roger still has that thing, since he paid for the toys out of his own pocket.