Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., descends the House steps in 2016. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Marshall Space Flight Center has a long and storied history when it comes to rocket design and production. It was there that Wernher von Braun and his German compatriots helped NASA design the Saturn line of rockets that took humans into deep space and land on the Moon. There, too, key components of the space shuttle's rockets were designed.

Now, however, US rockets and engines are much more commonly developed outside of northern Alabama, where the NASA center is located in Huntsville. SpaceX has designed and built its Merlin rocket engines in California, and it is doing the same thing with its more powerful Raptor engines. Blue Origin has designed four engines in the state of Washington. Both companies have tested their rocket engines in Texas.

Smaller firms, too, such as Virgin Orbit, Vector, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly, and a host of other firms have developed innovative new rocket engines and boosters outside the walls of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Certainly, these companies have at time drawn on the NASA center for its expertise, but these efforts have largely been privately financed and independently led.

I’m a reasonably “with it” fellow when it comes to tech, but I remember the first technology story I read that made me feel absolutely baffled: it was Buzzfeed’s horrifying, incomprehensible piece on how 15-year old girls use Snapchat. Never before has a piece of tech reporting left me feeling so utterly lost and just...baffled. Like, okay, I get it—teenagers integrate tech into their lives and do whatever with it (I used to do my own incomprehensible stuff when I was a teen) and there’s nothing really to understand about it, but that Snapchat piece hit me like a speeding truck loaded with a cargo of concentrated WTF.

And that's okay. Shaking our fists at the younger generation is just a part of the human condition—as our video today shows. We’ve got a few Millennials and even a representative of “Generation Z” (which much to my disappointment has nothing to do with zombies) opining about what they think about how those senior to them use the Internet and whether or not those seniors “get” what “the Internet” is.

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me

Part of me wants to react to this video with smugness, because I’ve got my own standards about what it means to “get” the Internet—standards that are informed, perhaps unfairly, by more than a decade of tech industry work that by necessity mandated a broad understanding of the connective technologies that make up the networks and endpoints that the Internet is composed of. My instinct is to laugh at people who don’t seem to realize the World Wide Web is only one aspect of the Internet, or who don’t have a working understanding of the OSI model, or whatever—I’ve got a bunch of other arbitrary and esoteric bits of techno-priestly gatekeeping propped up in my head to help me feel superior to those hyperconnected teens.