Thursday, August 20, 2009

Ground Control to Major Tom?

Many of you may want to ask "Who's this Major Tom guy?" or "Why would they name a lunar cargo transport system after a military officer?" Well, we would ask you "Have you ever heard of David Bowie?"

Major Tom was a valiant astronaut who was sent into space and soared "past one hundred thousand miles" according to the hit song Space Oddity from 1969 by who else but David Bowie, an innovative musician with numerous other hits. As for why we would name our transport system after this fictional character from the David Bowie universe, well, it was quite simple. If you think about all the satellite and spacecraft names out there, they all have some sort of "deep" meaning behind them or are some long acronym. We spent many hours trying to think of a name or acronym that fit perfectly and came to the conclusion that this task was harder than anything we had been working on for the design up to that point. Being the brilliant, time managing engineers that we are, we decided to scrap any name/acronym that had any real meaning and simply go with the single greatest space reference in popular culture...Major Tom

this is our favorite version of the music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o

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