By George Leopold Before there was Breaking News, hourly “bombshell” revelations and clickbait, there was Vincent Kiernan’s radioactive subject, the New York Times science writer and propagandist William “Atomic Bill” Laurence. Kiernan chronicles the rise of Laurence as a gumshoe reporter beginning in the 1930s to his vaunted status as an atomic “oracle” among colleagues after a decade of documenting development, testing and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Comfortable with his insider status, Laurence soon resorted to “atomic plagiarism” while covering American tests in the South Pa ..read more

(The following originally appeared in my space blog for EE Times.) NASA is looking for new ways to return humans to the moon via a project called Artemis. In their wisdom, agency management had the good sense recently to invite a talk by a chronicler of the original moon landing program, Project Apollo, and one that efforts’ greatest and most unsung engineering heroes. His name was John Houbolt, and his was a voice in the wilderness. Houbolt, trained as a civil engineer, arrived at NASA at the dawn of the Space Race. That training acquainted him with the central limiting factor in spaceflight ..read more

(Editor’s note: I had the pleasure in mid-March of attending the grand opening of the Gus Grissom Center at Bonne Terre, Missouri, an hour or so south of St. Louis. Here’s my report for EE Times.) Earl Mullins gives new meaning to his home state of Missouri’s motto: Show Me. A few years back the space enthusiast approached Lowell Grissom, the astronaut Gus Grissom’s younger brother, declaring he was going to establish a space museum in middle-of-nowhere Missouri. He wanted Lowell to dedicate it. Lowell was unimpressed. “Good luck with that!” he thought, putting the encounter out of his mind. A ..read more

The cautionary tale that is the Boeing 737 Max saga illustrates once again what happens when technical managers bow to competitive pressures–in this case the Airbus A320neo. Boeing managers reportedly pressured engineers in Renton, Washington, to come up with a design for a longer-range version of Boeing’s workhorse 737 to meet the challenge from Airbus. Along with a faulty airframe design, those engineers added a software autopilot known as MCAS that has so far been implicated in the deaths of 346 people in two 737 Max crashes. To many, this looks and smells like a repeat of the group-think c ..read more