Friday, March 17, 2006
Spring Break, no I'm not on the sandy beaches of Mexico, in the stereotypical version of college spring break, (rather unfortunately)rather I'm at home typing out my GenEd11 and Biology 102 Essays, yet is has been relaxing and it has be a really needed break. I've gotten to drive around alot - it's been like half a year since I've driven a car - good to know i haven't killed anyone yet lol, at least I'm notthat rusty. I feel really to go back and get back in gear, even with two more tests and a workload of homework. Might as well get some sleep. More excitingly, something I forgot to write about was the engineering "field trip" if you will, to the exciting places of Boeing, Genie, and Aerojet. Ironically the more exciting of the visits was Genie and Aerojet, the two which I had no idea were even in the
northwest.
The Engineering department of Boeing was mind numbingly boring, that single handily discouraged me from wanting to do drafting, while moving to the gigantic assembly building, the on site engineers seemed to have the more fun jobs interacting with
everything. Thus while, what Boeing does is very impressive and the results are spectacular, the every day work of most of the engineers was a bore.
Then after leaving Boeing, we drive around in search of Genie, once we get there we are handed safety gear, the funniest thing ever are the toe caps, that are designed to fit over our shoes, the impact protection was in place of steel toe shoes,
unfortunately I couldn't get a picture in time, along with glasses, we march in and then wait at a ear plug dispenser to get hearing protection. The tour was a loud, machine rattling, cart dodging, alarm sounding, smokey, taste of Genie industry and to be frank a lot of fun.
After breaking at Taco Time - which is a very strange mix of fast food and restaurant style of eating. You order like conventional restaurants but then sit down to get the food delivered. wtf? the food was ok, but expensive. Then our adventure to find Aerojet began - which was filled with getting lost repeatedly. When we finally found the back of no where Redmond Industry we disembark and make our way into the lobby, where we wait for the rest of the group to find us. In the lounge we find we are not allowed to have cameras, so I drop mine off at the counter, in the corner there is a big glass case with a large rocket engine - sweet.
We were in for a treat, Aerojet as we were soon to find out was a maker of rocket engines, in a presentation we learn that they make rocket engines for every major space endeavor besides the Russians and a count few.
(even the vending machines are cool there.) As we make our way through we are taken to the fabrication building and we get to see the machinery used to build the parts, we get to see up close the small to large rockets in production. The technologies there are cutting edge as we get to see an Ionic engine designed for long term use on satellites in space. There are two large clean rooms but no work to see in them. Making our way to the order facility we get to see the vibration testing equipment simulating launch condition vibrations, then we get to the the vacuum test chambers, and a test just finishing, we even get to walk around the back and check our all the cool machinery, by far the coolest tour. That was basicly the coolest part of my spring break.
