Quote:
Originally Posted by mjohnson
No joke, we helped support some of the ex-soviet weapons scientists thirty years ago just to keep them on the "good" side. With the USSR in ashes many of them were near poverty. We had some visiting in Los Alamos for a Pu conference in 2001-ish and just laid on the hospitality. Most had never left their country before that and they told many tales of the brainwashing that "americans are mean and evil". And yes, we did take them to Macys on the way to the ABQ airport and they did fill up on Levis...
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During the Apollo program Canada was almost stripped of high tech engineers as was much of the free world. They all came to NASA looking for jobs, and they all worked there. The program invented tons of things we all use everyday and thing nothing about.
Digital photography, integrated chips, LIDAR, and entire processes of making things in use all over the world now. NASA wanted a way to beam back images from space, so digital photography was invented and perfected. There is a tine gismo in your smartphone called a IMU. The Inertial measurement unit tells the phone you just raised it up to use and the screen comes on. When NASA wanted a ship to go to the moon a compass is pretty useless off planet. The IMU let them know where they were, and that is how they were able to get out of sight of the lunar lander with the lunar rover, and get back safely. The IMU was the size of a washing machine and NASA figured out how to make it light enough and fit in the lunar modules. Now an IMU would fit on your fingernail.