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Design007-June2021

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98 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2021 during the Cuba Missile Crisis, the nation recaptured its breath and its progress in space travel continued. At that time, my father was working for Lock- heed on the RM-81 Agena Target Vehicle, also known as the Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle, a spacecra without crew used by NASA during its Gemini program to develop and practice orbital space rendezvous and docking. Later, my father also worked on the Space Shuttle's engines at Rocketdyne and it afforded me a 1976 visit to my folks in Canoga Park. We vis- ited the assembly building in Palmdale, Cali- fornia, with my father where the first shuttle, the Enterprise, was being finished and the Colum- bia was in progress. (Members of the Star Trek cast had been there a few months earlier to see the Enterprise). However, turning back a decade to 1966 to when I was in high school in Santa Clara Valley, the area was known as "Valley of the Heart's Delight" and not yet "Silicon Valley." at was the year Star Trek was first broadcast and I was joining my friends in building homemade rockets. is included making the engines and our own rocket fuels, which I cooked on the family stove and which cost my dear mother one of her favorite pans when I decided the easiest way to clean the residue from it was to burn it out (bad idea). My favorite collaborator friend and I used to watch the new series on his family's color TV as he had control of the TV for that hour every week and I didn't. It was a departure from the normal fare and the creativ- ity of the writers was showcased weekly. We marveled at the technical wizardry that would be available in 200 years hence in the year 2265. As it turned out, a number of those futuristic devices made appearances well before that date. Perhaps the most notable was the Motorola flip phone which was reportedly modeled aer the Star Trek "communicator" design. I did not know then that I would one day be making flex cir- cuits for prototype products that would be mimicking what was shown on the screen. e tricorder was another device that has modern parallels such as ultrasound imaging—another technology facilitated by flexible circuits— Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator firing in the 1980s. (Source: Sandia National Laboratory)

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