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ULA Interns Launch Record-Breaking 50-Foot Rocket (space.com)
schwit1 writes: A team of United Launch Alliance (ULA) interns, working in their spare time, have successfully launched the largest model rocket every built. Space.com reports: "On Sunday (July 24), ULA launched the 50-foot-tall (15.24 meters) Future Heavy rocket out of Fort Carson Army Post, breaking the record for 'the largest sport rocket launched anywhere in the world,' according to a statement from ULA. The Future Heavy is also notable because it was built entirely by company interns and their mentors. 'We like [our interns] to have a very realistic experience,' ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno told Space.com at the Space Symposium meeting in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last April." Calling it a "model rocket" really isn't fair. The thing is big, and really ranks up there with many of the suborbital rockets NASA used to routinely fly out of Wallops Island. [The fact that] ULA has provided support for this effort again suggests that the leadership of Bruno is reshaping the company into a much more innovative and competitive company.
The German V-2 rocket was smaller than this thing, and it's been accurately described as the first successful ballistic missile.
It just goes to show, depending on who builds it, something may be an enlightened amateur rocket or a dangerous enemy weapon.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Actually they meant Avery. A guy called Avery made it, and it's the largest Avery built.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Supposed to be a 1/5 th model of the Shuttle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The SRBs were 150ft tall, so 1/5 would make it only 30 feet. But there are two of them!!
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
It improves mine. If you intern at a company doing X, it's usually because you're interested in X. 95% of the time you end up running errands and making coffee and maybe being exposed to X a little bit, sort of by osmosis. These guys took their interns and actually let them play KSP in real life. That's awesome.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
. [The fact that] ULA has provided support for this effort again suggests that the leadership of Bruno is reshaping the company into a much more innovative and competitive company.
No, what it means is that they are getting their asses beaten so badly by SpaceX that they have moved to desperation and PR tactics.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That could mean anything from the mentors pretty much designed the whole thing and used the interns for unskilled labor to the mentors stood back and watched the interns to make sure nobody got killed. Kind of like like the range in FIRST Robotics.
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Couple of friggin' interns built a working rocket.
Not by themselves they didn't. They got help from experienced engineers and someone else funded it. It's kind of like US First competitions where much of the heavy lifting is actually done by real engineers and the students watch and (hopefully) learn and help out where they can. Now these interns are undoubtedly FAR more capable than a high school student and probably did quite a lot of the actual work but they also undoubtedly had a lot of help.
It's not negativity, it's just that pretending that a bunch of interns did this on their own simply isn't true. From TFA "For the past five years, interns were given the option to work on the Future Heavy rocket as a side project (outside of normal working hours). Approximately 300 people "had a hand in" building the rocket, according to ULA, while 68 interns and 22 mentors from ULA as well as 37 interns and 19 mentors from Ball Aerospace participated this year. Interns at multiple ULA facilities were able to contribute to the project"
Note the non-trivial number of "mentors" (read experienced engineers) involved in the project. I'm pretty sure they did a lot more than sit back and drink beer while the interns did all the work.