Lec 10 MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005
Professor Hoffman asked me to step in today to talk about the Space Shuttle and the military. I'm going to do that. I encourage questions. I may not be able to answer all your questions either because, A, I don't know or, B, I cannot say. I am going to leave it to you to figure out which one is which. [LAUGHTER] I would like to say a few things before I start. One is I'm not a historian so I'm not here to give a history of the military and the Shuttle. I am here to give you my experiences with it which is a very select data slice, I think, as you will see. Second, the things I say here, although we're going to tape them, I have to [NOISE OBSCURES] very carefully. And, third, I really speak from a different era. I speak from an area of the '70s and early '80s when the political situation was a lot different than it is today. When a Cold War was hot. When there was a real threat of a massive land war, plus worse, in Northern Europe. When there we...