Source: Florida Today
Engineering doesn’t make good on-screen drama.
You can’t tie a bow on a big engineering problem in an hour or two, unless you skip a lot of details, add some overly dramatic dialogue, and only show the “Aha!” moment when the seemingly insurmountable problem is solved.
Ron Howard and Tom Hanks came close in their retelling of the Apollo 13 story, capturing at least some of the behind-the-scenes work, big failures and wing-and-a-prayer risks taken to try to head off disaster. Most TV shows and movies show the problem, the hero solving it and the fix.
Engineering is one of the things a lot of people do here on the Space Coast, whether it’s out at Cape Canaveral, on the grounds of Kennedy Space Center or somewhere in the top-secret research and development vaults at Harris Corp. A lot of those local engineers — they’re everywhere around here — feel the pain of the teams in the Gulf of Mexico trying to stop the gusher of an oil leak from a sunken drilling platform, in real-time, with huge stakes, as millions of armchair-experts watch failure after failure on television.
Real life engineering is not made for TV or the big screen.
Most engineering campaigns are hidden from public view. Yes, we see the big accidents. But we don’t see the years that go into designing some new spacecraft or the tiny chip that can be the difference in a satellite’s ability to beam data to troops around the globe. Trust me, engineers fail all the time. That’s how they succeed. Trial and error paired with determination to try and try again until they get it right or as close to right as is possible with existing technology.
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