On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:59:00 -0700, "Tim Ward"
wrote:

I haven't seen all of "From the Earth to the Moon" episodes,
but I throughly enjoyed the one about the LEM.

Yup. I love it when the camera pulls back and there's all those pink balls
on the roof.
They are (or were) available as a boxed set of VHS tapes.
My wife bought them for me, I've watched them all several times.
They are _all_ very good. Highly recommended.

My in-laws bought the DVD set for me about three years back, and I've
watched 'em through at least twice already...and started a third after
reading _Angle of Attack_. When you own the set, you can't just watch one
episode.

"Spider," the one about the LEM, is my absolute favorite. It illustrates,
better than anything I could say, what it's like to work in the industry
when you get a living, breathing, metal-cutting spacecraft program.

When they showed the sequence where the Program Manager watches the crane
carry off his 'baby' to be shipped away, it looked like he was damn near
crying. Just like I was when I said goodbye to one of my 'babies.'

This was in a clean room atop the launch tower, and they were closing out
the payload fairing. I signed the clipboard (I was the company rep), then
walked away and punched the button for the elevator. The ride down was a
bit rough.

Had more fun several months earlier, when we were getting ready to ship it
from the factory. This was early in the digital photography days, and our
program had a Mk 1 digital...cost $10,000, and had all of a 1 MB array.
Pretty hot stuff at the time, though. Anyway, with a sideline of (film)
photography and a love for goofy hardware, I had ended up with a sideline
of being the program photographer.

On the day before the unit was to be encapsulated, we Team Leaders decided
to get our pictures taken next to the hardware. So we trooped to the clean
room and put on our bunny suits, booties, and mobcaps. I hauled in the
digital camera and tripod. We picked the best spot, and selected where we
were going to stand.

Then I ran into trouble. I'd taken tons of pictures with that digital, but
had never used the self-timer function. As far as I could tell, the darn
thing had only a five-second delay. Not enough for me to join my fellow
team leaders for the group shot. No one else around; and it would take
fifteen minutes to get someone into the room due to the suit-up and
pre-cleaning procedure.

So I shot a couple of the rest of the crew, then told them to wait a
moment. I triggered the timer, ran towards the group, and at the mental
count of four I jumped into the air and clicked my heels.

Turned out pretty good. Got my best side, even.

I got my own picture taken with it by one of the other guys. There was an
interesting post-script, though. When I downloaded the pictures, I found
that I had set myself up so that a certain wall poster was in the
background. It was a full-size portrait of a science fiction character.

So there I stand, next to the hardware, in bunny suit and mobcap, with
Captain Jean-Luc Picard looking disdainfully over my shoulder....


Ron Wanttaja