aerospace-engineers-from-the-united-states

"Musk can probably build a giant AI data centre on the Moon. But if it can’t compete with much cheaper alternatives on Earth, it could prove a financial disaster that collapses his credibility, and with it his entire corporate empire"

"We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the Moon. We do not need such a station to go to Mars. We do not need it to go to near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. Nor can we accomplish anything in such a station that we cannot do in the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, except to expose human subjects to irradiation – a form of medical research for which a number of Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg"

"It is very unlikely that we would drive to extinction any native Martian microorganisms in the process of extending the habitability of Mars."

"With my book, most sales are through university book stores with some coming through online sales. I found a self-publisher who would give me the most for these outlets (Ingram Spark). I do not expect any sales through brick and mortar book stores."

"When The Mechanical Design Process was first introduced in 1992, I insisted that it be priced at less than $50. I felt this was a fair price for a university text on the topic. McGraw-Hill, the publisher, agreed and released it at $49. Over the years, McGraw-Hill steadily raised the price over my protests."

"One point I considered was how much I make from each sale. Even though I drastically cut the list price, I actually make more per book than I did when the book was sold through the publisher. I did a lot of research into which self-publishing house to use to find one where the royalty model fit my sales model."

"I always knew that it was possible to buy back rights. When I decided to request the rights back, I did a lot of online reading to be sure I understood the ins and outs."

"The first thing to do is to self-educate. Second, consider hiring a lawyer. I did, but things went so smoothly that I didn’t need one. Third, ask for your rights back. I had expected [McGraw-Hill] to ask for many thousands for the rights based on my calculations of their profits for the next five years."

"It was my privilege to be among those who participated in this event in the 'coming of age' of cybernetics."

"It was amazing beautiful seeing the earth from that vantage point," Epps said. "But for me, one of the big things is that now I want to see trees, I want to see people, I want to touch things and experience things here on Earth more than I did before. And it's just made me appreciate things I think just a little bit more and the simple things, not the big things but the simple things in life that make me happy."

"Even just the weight of your head and trying to hold it up and some of the muscle pains that you'll have because you haven't held your head up in what eight months almost for us"

"It just looks otherworldly to me … like, what you would see if you were on the moon."

"Read, read, read, and learn, learn, learn."

"This downward spiral is especially severe for girls of color, girls with disabilities, girls living in poverty and girls who are learning English as a new language, The United States cannot afford to lose more than half of its talent and the fresh perspective that women and minorities can bring to these critical fields. We must work together across the boundaries of skin color and gender."

"I figured that I’d become a great scientist and then maybe, maybe, maybe in the future I’ll be able to apply, if I establish myself well enough"

"I’m still in awe of seeing the Earth from the vantage point we had from the Dragon vehicle as we were approaching the International Space Station, You can see it in pictures, you can even dream about those pictures, but there’s just something that happens when you see it with your own eyes."

"Communication is paramount to your success, You need to articulate how your great idea is impactful, whether to your community, society or economy. Having strong technical skills is critical, but you must also be able to work with others and communicate effectively to bring those ideas to life."

"I think they need to pursue their dreams," Epps said. "You may not make it to space, but will you make it way further than if you had never pursued that dream."

"My greatest challenge is climbing the ladder of success, and pulling others behind me," she said. "If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, you know he had help getting there"

"In the workplace I was quick to understand that some people might be offended that I was female, that I was African-American, or that I was young, but I had to let that be their problem. The best thing I could do was just focus on doing a good job, and let my work speak for me. If someone said something offensive to me, I just let it be. I refused to pick up the stone and put it in my knapsack."

"I’d like to see the university take the wonderful things that are already happening and make them better. I want us to have that culture of: Yes, we did a good job, but if we work on it — if we try something a little different, if we bring in some other people — we can add another dimension to what we’ve already achieved."

"First, honored, and then, “Oh my God.” (laughs) Obviously I’ve been on the Board of Trustees for a while, and we have been addressing the issues that you would expect in an enterprise of this size: strategically where we are going, what do we need to achieve and what’s important in terms of the investments we need to be making going forward. So, I thought to myself, “If there’s something I can do to help, I’m glad to do it."

"I’ve always liked math."

"The first one is a favorite is because when I was young, I got to see man go to the Moon."

"Yes, there weren’t any African American women studying aerospace/mechanical like me. There weren’t any at my university, which was a historically Black college. I could have said that I felt out of sorts but because I played sports most of my life and I played with boys, I didn’t really feel so out of place."

"We have to do something like this to get them interested in science. Sometimes they are not aware of the number of black scientists, and don't even know of the career opportunities until it is too late."

"I first realized I had an aptitude for Math and Science during my high school years at Marine Park JHS, where I was the only Black student enrolled in the Special Progress program. In my senior year of JHS, I won second place in the Science Fair and scored in the 90s on all my Regents and citywide exams."

"I am a Christian with room to spare and feel that we all need to do our part in times of trouble, we are a reasonable drive from many of the affected areas. I have already reached out to friends of mine in the Raleigh-Durham area. I also have lots of friends in this area who would be willing to help."

"I was used to kind of being the only girl a lot. I probably did better than most in terms of the cultural shock and not having other women around, but I had to deal with some prejudice as people doubted my capabilities. So, there are always challenges and I don’t think it just being about the color of your skin or your gender."

"People just sometimes see what they want. They put their own filters on and choose to like or dislike you based on whatever they think. What I did was just worked really hard and proved them wrong."

"I graduated with high honors and passed the exams for all of New York's Technical High Schools but instead of attending those schools, I moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with my grandparents and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston."

"I hope that moms can see themselves in me and take that as permission to hold onto their own identity, dreams and passions — even after having children."

"The secret to so much success in life is to be okay with failure and have a good, healthy, positive relationship with failure."

"I want you to ask questions, make hypotheses, and test your ideas in the real world. Keep exploring anything and everything around you."

"Long after I’m gone, people will have these paintings with dust and footprints in them. It will be something really special for people to enjoy and remember."

"I think Genesis in the Old Testament has it wrong. I don’t think we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Just look around. We’re still in it, particularly when you compare the earth with the moon. The moon has no plants, no life, no water, no animals, no nothing."

"Everyone is trying to reach for their own stars, and all of those stars aren’t light-years away. They are as close as our job, our family, our children, our next-door neighbors and our good friends."

"The movement of human beings off the planet out into the Universe; first the Moon, and then Mars, and then who knows where, is just beginning and there is nothing that can stop it. None of us know the timetable, none of us know whether it's going to happen rapidly or it's going to happen very slowly. Eventually, as the centuries unfold, human beings will populate all these places and maybe a thousand years from now, or maybe it's two thousand or five thousand, there will be more human beings living off the Earth than live on it. Its just going to happen and we don't need to be anxious about it. We don't need to worry that next year they decide to cut the space station. If they cut the space station next year, I hope they don't, but if they did, it's not the end of the world. We're going to eventually have a wonderful space station. Eventually there are going to be cities in space. If Chicago had been founded a hundred years later, we wouldn't even know that now. I don't know when it was founded, but if it had been a hundred years later or a hundred years earlier, right now it wouldn't make any difference. It would probably look about the same. People would be just as happy doing the same things. That's the same way with space exploration. Maybe we don't go to Mars in my lifetime, maybe we don't even go till my grandkids lifetime. That's okay. Eventually it will happen."

"Apollo is the greatest adventure of all humankind, and it needs to be recorded in every way possible for future generations in books, in movies and on television. … I’m an artist. That’s the way I care about things. Maybe 200 years from now, someone will say, "I’m glad he did that.""

"History has spurts and then is steady, and then maybe even backing up a step, and then forward again."

"Exploring is fundamentally human; we've done it for thousands of years. It's an expression of something that's the best in us."

"If you come up with a big new idea in our world and everyone says "Hey, that's great, definitely go ahead with that," then you know it's not a big new idea at all. Anything really new brings out all the reasons why it can't possibly work, and why it's crazy to even think about it."

"A new concept and a new method were needed. The concept from the engineering standpoint is the evolution of the engineering scientist, i.e., the scientific generalist who maintains a broad outlook. The method is that of the team approach. On large-scale-system problems, teams of scientists and engineers, generalists as well as specialists, exert their joint efforts to find a solution and physically realize it. We are led to the concept of the system-design team, a small group of engineers or scientists, to lead a large project and organize the system effort. Such men have been variously called engineering scientists, system engineers, system analysts, or large-scale-system designers. The technique has been variously called the systems approach or the team development method. It is toward this man and his teammates that these discussions are directed. With the realization that not enough can be learned in all the required fields to make him a specialist, enough is introduced to make him aware of the language and problems of the specialist. This generalist is a new quantity in the engineering world, and his education must be begun."

"The lack of formal definition does not prevent us from noting the characteristics which are frequently present in large scale systems. Each such system has a certain integrity. It may or may not be rigidly controlled from some central point, but in every case, all the parts of the system have some common purpose; in some sense, they all contribute to the production of a single set of optimum outputs from the given set of inputs, with respect to some appropriate measure of effectiveness."

"Sometimes it is more difficult to formulate the criterion for a problem than to state the question itself."

"Bob Machol's life involved a number of strands — aviation, scientific writing, systems engineering, chemistry, research, applying OR to sports, computing and mushrooms — that intertwined over the years. Consider his involvement with aviation. It started in 1940 when, fresh out of Harvard, Bob enlisted in the Marines, intent on becoming an aviator. Although Bob didn't earn his pilot's wings, he did emerge from World War II holding the rank of lieutenant commander. Following the war, Bob became involved with research organizations (the Operations Evaluation Group and the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratories) that were looking for improved ways of defending the United States against air attack. This work led to Bob's groundbreaking book, "Systems Engineering," co-authored with the late Harry H. Goode."

"I recount this as it reminds me of some of the lessons Bob preached and practiced throughout his professional career:"

"The pressure to generate the ideas and methods attributed to Systems Engineering stems directly from the needs of 20th century society. As our frontiers have disappeared, man has turned to technology to furnish the "good life" in a rapidly shrinking, crowded world. Our interdependence upon one another has increased in direct proportion to the population increase. The race to maintain or improve the operating efficiency of society has required that the systems and mechanisms that serve the society also become increasingly complex and interdependent. Goode and Machal have provided statistics to illustrate the above. They note that the world population increased from 800 million in 1750, to 1200 million in 1850, and 2400 million in 1950. Maximum transportation speeds went from 40 mph in 1850, and 100 mph in 1900, to commercial transport speed of 350 mph in 1950 and supersonic transport planes of over 1200 mph in the 1960's. Our communication systems are a good indication of increasing complexity. U.S. telephones jumped from 350,000 in 1900, to 55 million in 1955."

"At an age when many people consider retiring, Robert E. Machol stopped teaching at Northwestern University and started a new career as chief scientist for the Federal Aviation Administration. There, while in his 70s, he predicted "catastrophe" after studying the turbulence created by the jet engines of 757 airplanes--work that predicted fatal crashes and eventually led to a change in federal aviation policy... "I was the first guy within the agency who got up and said, `We're likely to have a catastrophe, a real catastrophe … if we don't do something," Mr. Machol told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. Eventually, the agency ordered landing aircraft to maintain a greater distance behind 757s to avoid the jet's dangerous "wake vortex." But the policy change came only after crashes in Billings, Mont., and Santa Ana, Calif., that killed 13 people."

"I had professor Machol at Kellogg in 1985 for Operations. Professor Machol was intimidating. Rumor around the class was that he had been in charge of logistics for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theatre during WWII. He was teaching EOQ modeling in one early class, leading me to pose a question, ‘Professor Machol, would it not make sense to do … for the sake of consistency’. His reply is oh so memorable almost 40 years ago.. “Mr. Clark, consistency is the bugaboo of small minds” (ouch!). No doubt relative to this giant, my mind was and remains small indeed!"