• Wren@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    Ever heard of Big Deal Custom Cases? They’re a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba who started out making road cases for musicians before diversifying into laptops, field equipment, basically anything breakable anyone needed to carry from one place to another.

    Imagine what they thought when NASA phoned them up to build giant cases to carry the sails for the James Webb Space Telescope from the manufacturer to their headquarters.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      Probably

      huh, that is right up our alley, but were kinda always felt that there’s a secret echelon of “really professional companies” that gets contracted by NASA

      • Agent641@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        They purposely try to spread it around as much as they can to avoid unbalancing the economic and academic equilibrium of the states.

        They would save a lot of money by just building everything in one place, say, Texas or New Mexico, but the cost of running NASA, and the academic expertise required to do so would pull so much economic activity, companies, jobs, taxes, and all the knock on effects to that state that local businesses, residents, land values would all spin out of balance, and the states who missed out would have a noticeable dip in business and income tax revenue. They didn’t need to build the Saturn 5 first stage in… Wherever, and then ship it all the way down to the Panama canal and back up to Port Canaveral, but they did it to share the load and the economic stimulus.

      • Wren@lemmy.today
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        24 hours ago

        Yeah! I didn’t know until I visited with a friend of Gary Dealy (nicknamed Big Deal.) They have framed photos of the whole process. You should ask about it if you’re in there, Gary told us the whole story. Very nice, cool, hilarious people.