Word: shipping
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...well as to Seabiscuit, the Hulk and dozens of other movie projects. Or at least it will, come early September, if a helicopter stunt pilot who sharpened his skills on all those films succeeds in bringing one of NASA's most unusual--and least known--spacecraft home safely. The ship is called Genesis, the helicopter pilot is Cliff Fleming, and together they may help NASA get its best-ever chance to examine a piece of the sun itself...
...then stowing them back inside the body of the spacecraft. What's there could be a cosmic treasure: "A billion billion molecules for us to study," says Don Burnett, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for the Genesis mission. But first the $260 million ship must make it home in one piece...
...hits the atmosphere on Sept. 8, it will be traveling at a searing 24,700 m.p.h. Even after it unfurls its parachute-like parafoil and begins coasting toward the Utah desert, it will be heading for a thudding 22m.p.h. touchdown, enough to damage the collector plates, particularly if the ship has already been dinged by micrometeorites. An ocean splashdown would cause only a marginally smaller bump and would present a further risk of water contamination...
...those reasons, NASA called on Fleming's skills as a helicopter pilot. When the ship returns, he and a two-man crew will be waiting in the air, giving chase at about 9,500 ft. in a Eurocopter A-star chopper. When they reach the falling probe, they will use a 20-ft. catch pole with a latching hook on the end to snag the parafoil. The hook will then detach from the pole, although it will still be connected by a cable. At that point a pyrotechnic blast will fire a pin across the mouth of the hook, sealing...
...also eliminated traditional boundaries between classes of staff to the point where 90% of the remaining core workers have new or substantially changed jobs. Such restructuring does not come easily, as Dublin brewing head David Varian acknowledges. "People had to face up to really major change," he says. "We ship Guinness to Japan. There are a lot of very good Japanese brewers, and they could probably brew Guinness." Varian, an Irishman who previously worked in the U.K. petrochemicals industry, strove to help his staff see the global picture; he dismantled long-standing hierarchies and gave employees challenging new tasks. Frontline...