Then, as chief engineer of space systems, he was responsible for various space projects, including the engineering for the Delta rocket.
However, my experiences as director of the Science Museum from 2007-10, exploring the legacy of technical innovation on public display and held in its reserve collection, and of working with engineers on space projects during the exhilarating era of the 70s and 80s, convinces me that human ingenuity is unbounded and that technological advances can be very rapid.
Older engineers of the space industry have become senior advisers or have taken management roles to help guide the start-ups.
He and his colleagues fell victim to the same weakness that bedeviled the engineers of the Challenger space shuttle, the planners of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and the airline pilots who have made tragic cockpit errors.
The ability to separate liquid and gas phases in the absence of a gravitational acceleration has proven a challenge to engineers since the inception of space exploration.
The deterministic transport code HZETRN was developed for research scientists and design engineers studying the effects of space radiation on astronauts and instrumentation protected by various shielding materials and structures.
Michael J. Neufeld writes in his biography, "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War," that this and similar defenses were based on "uncorroborated, second-hand anecdotes" and were "highly dubious".
Or was he, as Michael J. Neufeld argues in "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War," a modern Faust, in league with the devil?
Michael J. Neufeld, the author of "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" (Knopf; $35), acknowledges that "hardly anyone under age forty" knows his subject's name, even though America's moon shots owed a large measure of their success to him.
Eric Anderson, a software engineer, entrepreneur and chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism pioneer, was recruited to Intentional Software less than two years ago.
