Browsing: engineers

When Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko landed a top-secret MiG-25 at a Japanese airport in September 1976, American engineers tearing it down expected to find titanium and microchips, and instead they found vacuum tubes, rivets popped by hand, and a stainless steel airframe so heavy it could only fly fast in a straight line.

Saving Tips June 4, 2026

On the morning of September 6, 1976, a Soviet Air Defense Forces lieutenant named Viktor Belenko shoved the throttles forward…

Every Apollo guidance computer that flew to the Moon had its software literally woven by hand at a Raytheon factory outside Boston, where women threaded copper wire through tiny magnetic cores to encode each bit as either a one or a zero, a process the engineers nicknamed LOL memory for Little Old Lady.

Saving Tips June 4, 2026

The Apollo Guidance Computer that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969 ran…

NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

Saving Tips May 30, 2026

The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written…

In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and the electromagnetic pulse knocked out streetlights, burglar alarms, and a telephone company microwave link in Honolulu nearly 900 miles away, on an island most engineers had assumed was safely out of range

Saving Tips May 28, 2026

On July 9, 1962, a Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead detonated roughly 250 miles above Johnston Atoll in…

On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn’s atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour, not because the mission had failed but because they were terrified of where it might fall if they left it in orbit.

Saving Tips May 27, 2026

On 15 September 2017, Cassini stopped talking. The spacecraft had spent its final minutes plunging into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at…

In 2022, NASA engineers in Pasadena watched a new image come down from Perseverance and saw a small heap of broken rocks resting on the Martian surface in a pattern that looked almost intentional, and the explanation they eventually offered involved a vanished river that has not flowed in three billion years.

Saving Tips May 26, 2026

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, in a basin that scientists believe held a lake roughly 3.5…